Hello everyone, and welcome to Xaar's half year interim results for 2026. Captions are enabled on Zoom, however these are automatic and can sometimes contain errors.

If you would like to ask a question as part of our Q&A later, you can submit a question on Zoom by using the Q&A function. You can also use the raised hand function, and we will invite you through to ask your question in person.

I'll now hand over to John Mills, Chief Executive Officer, and Paul James, Chief Financial Officer.

Good morning. Thank you all for coming along to Xaar's 2026 interim results.

As you said, my name is John Mills, CEO, and I'm joined by Paul James, who's our CFO. Today we want to take you through our half year results.

We're really pleased presenting that the group revenue is up 9.2% like-for-like. I think we started the year hopeful that this was going to be a year without any major economic crisis around the world, but unfortunately, as that's not been the case.

Despite that, the growth has been pretty good. Printhead revenue up by 5%, 5.5%.

This has really been driven by progress in new applications, which we'll talk about in the next few slides. Gross margins have improved just over two basis points, and that really is a sort of function of better financial management and also stronger pricing as we move into some of these new markets where pricing is a little stronger.

Today we were all hoping and expecting to have been talking about the launch of the Desktop 3D. Unfortunately, there has been a few additional delays, all of which we understand, all of which we're involved with, and it's really about making sure when the product is launched, it actually is launched and works and gives the right customer experience.

However, we are in the pre-launch phase, we have received orders for the first production batches, and so we're confident that will happen in the next short while. The basis of the business is that we compete with other major international companies, and so the unique capabilities of Xaar and the differentiated architecture that we have in our printheads is really the thing that drives the value proposition at Xaar.

The way that our printheads work enable us to have a wider operating window, which means that we can deliver products and applications that use a wider range of fluids, give better industrial performance, and that is actually protected by not only a significant patent portfolio, but the fact that actually we've got over 30 years of manufacturing experience. Even if you had access to the patents, you still have to know how to make one of these printheads.

There's quite a bit of production know-how that goes into these things. Also over recent years we've developed more and more application expertise, actually using the printheads in industrial applications, there's knowledge and experience that we've gained in those areas.

These unique benefits on which we base our value proposition and our expertise deliver the ability for our customers to do more, you can have fluids with higher pigment loading in there that are much thicker, higher viscosity. Ultimately what that means is the customer can do more with the fluid, and it's ultimately the fluid that wins.

This generally results in higher levels of efficiency, higher levels of performance of the fluid, which ultimately leads to less waste, reduced cost, and overall operational efficiencies, which is why we're seeing much more of the new applications moving into industrial manufacturing environments. The challenge for us is actually moving into these new markets requires multiple steps of qualification.

If you're moving into an industry, for instance the semiconductor industry, the first stage is actually them identifying that you need to have a printhead to do some of the things that move their processes forward. You then develop a fluid, work with them on that process, but then you have to go through a development process where that process needs to be tested, and then it needs to be accepted within a broader manufacturing process.

That whole thing can take years to deliver. The frustration for us is that we don't really have control over any of those time frames.

We get very excited when we engage with an industry like solar panels or semiconductor or these things, and we can see the size of the application, but once we've actually got the printhead working within that application, how it's commercialized is really not within our control. As we talk about a lot of these applications, many of them have been running for years, and we can see the progress that's been made, but one of the things that I think everybody finds slightly frustrating is that these can take longer than we really really hope.

The good news is that once you're in, all of those barriers to adoption work in your favor because once you're in and you're qualified in that process, then actually to be changed out and swapped out with somebody else's product, then all of those factors really start working in your favor. It's an incredibly sticky technology.

Once we're in, we're going to be in for a substantial period of time. That means that any new product that's actually made requires new printheads.

Once you build an installed base of printheads, then any printhead replacement is incremental revenue. That effectively acts as an annuity revenue.

If you have an installed base of 10,000 machines and there's a printhead in each one, 10% replacement of printheads per year would give you another 1,000 printheads per year revenue. Building the installed base gives you that ongoing annuity, and we're seeing more and more as we engage into more industrial applications that we're actually taking a share of the fluid revenue as we work with companies to develop these fluids.

The key thing for us is all about broadening the breadth of the application base. We now have 21 applications across different market sectors, and if you compare that to maybe a decade ago where Xaar was pretty much in ceramics and maybe a bit of coding and marking, today it's a very, very different business.

It's much more geographically diverse, it's much more application diverse, and that's going to give us much more resilience going forward. I think it's that resilience that's actually allowed us to deliver a result that we've made today despite the challenges that we've seen in the Middle East and the impact that's had on the global economy.

With that, I'll hand over to Paul to take you through the financials.

All right. Thank you, John.

Good morning, everyone. I'm very pleased to present the results for the first half of 2026, which has year-on-year growth in every part of our business, in all parts of our business.

Group revenue is up by almost a third driven by growth in all parts of the business. Up by 9% driven by growth in all parts of the business.

I'm particularly pleased about EPS's recovery under new leadership, which comes with an ever-expanding pipeline. The core of our business is printhead, and being up 5.5% prior to the launch of Flashforge's Desktop 3D offering is impressive.

This revenue performance translates to a profitable first half for the first time in at least three years, and we are in line to achieve consensus. The balance sheet is almost net neutral with a net debt position of £100,000 and an adjusted free cash flow outflow of £4.3 million, but more about that later.

This is primarily driven by the need to build inventory to support the launch of Flashforge's Desktop 3D product. Now let's take a look at divisional performance.

I'm pleased with the growth in printhead, and with the expected launch of Flashforge's Desktop 3D in the second half, year-on-year revenue performance for the second half is expected to be much stronger. This growth has been driven by new business, new applications, and uses for our unique technology.

Within all of this, we have seen the legacy ceramics market stabilize after many years of decline helped by the development of new so-called ceramic glaze technology. As such, this decline that we have experienced for a long time now no longer represents a headwind going forward.

There is a wider and important point here: Xaar today has a broadened appeal to many different sectors that continues to expand, and as such there is now a derisked portfolio effect compared to the Xaar of old. Operational gearing effects show enhanced adjusted profit before tax profitability improving by some 100 basis points year-on-year.

Now, as for Megnajet, gross margin is up 120 basis points built on a revenue increase of 27% year-on-year. The Megnajet business underlies the importance of supporting systems or system components to our core offering, supporting our customer base.

This growth both comes from new customers as well as increased demand from that existing customer base. Now, as for EPS in the United States, much hard work has been done to rebuild a durable pipeline, address the cost base, and solve long-term intractable problems.

I expect EPS's recovery path to continue into next year. Let's take a look at the adjusted income statement as a whole.

The group grew 9.2%, a performance that would be the envy of many companies in the current global climate, and growing gross margin performance by 220 basis points. The element of operational expenditure is worthy of particular mention: it is up 5.7%, but this increase is driven by building, some would say rebuilding, capability in the front end, sales and marketing, and the sharp end, research and development, to drive growth in the innovation pipeline, which is our lifeblood.

General and admin expenses have actually declined by 1.6% note, a contraction in the cost of back-office roles. Now putting all that together, you now see a business that grew profitability substantially in the first half to achieve an adjusted profit before tax of £0.2 million compared to a loss of £0.7 million last year, and similar losses for the first halves of the years before that.

Turning our attention to cash flow: the group's adjusted free cash flow was an outflow of £4.3 million. This was primarily driven by temporarily building inventory to support the launch of Desktop 3D by Flashforge, and once this launch has happened, we expect this to sharply reverse.

In addition, the group has upped capital expenditure in the first half compared to last year, again driven by building out capability to support anticipated higher volume levels in the future, particularly with our new manufacturing facility in Dongguan, China, and this is enhancing supply chain resilience. Now, I want to emphasize, as I have done many times already since I joined Xaar, the days of storing large amounts of cash on what is essentially a current account are over.

We have entered into an expanded revolving credit facility, increasing it from £5 to £10 million, with an EBITDA covenant of three times, whereas previously it was two times. In addition, we have an uncommitted accordion facility and an increased invoice discounting facility.

At the moment, liquidity is substantial. With that, I'd like to hand back to John.

Thanks, Paul. I think the key thing for Xaar is really about the strategy of how we're actually going to exploit the opportunities in the market.

The key thing for us is that we are not going to try and compete with big companies like Epson and Ricoh and Fuji on the basis of their core capabilities. What we have is the ability to print fluids that no one else can, and what we found is that as if by exploiting that, we're discovering new applications where we are the effectively only company that can actually deliver the performance with these new types of fluids, and this is opening up new markets.

Therefore the competitive advantage that we have is really the thing that we need to drive. As I said earlier, we're looking to get into more and more applications across the broad range of market sectors to actually eliminate as much as possible any volatility that we see through any changes in global economic conditions.

Really what does that mean? Core Product development continues to be a core of our strength.

We are engaged actively in looking at the next generation of products. What we have today is not the end; there are other things that are coming down the pipeline.

The key thing is actually providing the customers with the solutions that make it as easy as possible to get to market. We'll talk a little bit about semiconductor.

In that market, actually what we're providing to the semiconductor company is actually a completed module, not just a printhead, because for them, time to market is much more important than actually the price of the unit. We're seeing that in these new market sectors where we can move to be slightly more vertically integrated and providing modules into applications, which not only increases our revenue stream, but also reduces the time to market.

Also making sure that we respond to market dynamics by growing the presence in countries as they're required, and we've done that recently by opening the facility in Dongguan. We now have some back-end manufacturing of printheads and manufacturing of ink systems, and that's completely changed the cost base for some of those products.

We expect to do more of that over the coming years, which should help drive margins, but also means that we can actually respond more quickly to customers in those regions. The route to market is really the same.

We have OEMs. These are people who build equipment and sell equipment into a given application, but increasingly we're actually seeing what we would call user develop integrators, companies like semiconductor companies who actually will take the product and develop a piece of equipment for their own use with inside their manufacturing.

What we typically try to do is to pick two or three customers in a particular market sector and give them the focus of the support to be successful and bring them to market. As I said earlier, the process of actually moving from initial contact with an end user to actually volume, we've got applications now that are maturing and actually starting to deliver volume that are five years in the making.

As we move forward now, I think we've got a much clearer understanding of how long these things take. The good thing is, is that a number of things actually coming through and delivering revenue today that were started several years ago.

If I point to PC conformal coating, if you look closely at the picture on the bottom left, you'll see some little blue coating there. If you have a PCB that needs to be waterproofed, then we can actually put a coating over the top of that that makes it waterproof.

This is much quicker and cheaper than the previous manufacturing. As you can imagine, that fluid is quite a special fluid and it's very difficult to inkjet print.

That's an area that we've been working on now for about three years, and this is the first year that we've actually seen any revenue coming from that application. Ceramic glaze Paul mentioned before, this is a new application area in ceramics where we have a unique capability with the Aquinox printhead to put down glaze that gives you texture on the tile.

Then semiconductors: we now have five semiconductor companies that are engaging with us to do trials, they are investigating our processes. You can imagine the timescale, this is not something we expect to deliver revenue in the short term, but I think it's a very good sign about how the technology can be adopted in these new sectors.

Then solar panels: we are replacing some of the processes within that with inkjet, and again, that's a market that will take a few years to actually adopt and deploy fully. They're all generating revenue in relatively small numbers at the moment, but they're exciting opportunities for future growth.

This is becoming increasingly important, not just providing the printheads to customers, but increasingly people asking for print bars and print engines that actually then integrate all of the components together that reduces their risk, reduces their time to market, and that's something we're seeing more of across the business. The support is really important as well.

We have gaining a reputation for being one of the best support organizations, and that brand recognition now is building in these new market sectors. If you then look at the details by market sector, and these numbers are kind of quite big, and some of them look particularly the -53.8%, but it's a relatively small number.

The 53.8% negative, that's one particular customer who's had some structural changes going on in there. I expect that to continue in the second half before returning to growth next year.

I really would focus on the 3D and advanced manufacturing, which has grown really positively. That's where the wax market is, it's where we'll see the 3D, the semiconductor.

That's the area we see the biggest growth coming in the coming years. It's really pleasing that for the first time in about six, seven years, we're actually seeing that level of growth within the ceramics, and I see that continuing with the digital glaze.

The coding and marking, that's really down to timing in H1. We see that being back on track by the end of the year.

Overall, I think a good set of results, but I think the backdrop of this is that when there is volatility in the market, people tend to push back their capital purchases. Capital purchases typically include printers.

If they don't buy printers, OEMs don't buy printheads. We have seen some sluggishness in certain markets, and so hopefully if the world stabilizes and returns back to some level of normality, we'd hope to see slightly stronger results going forward.

In summary, it's really pleasing that there's demand for the products across a really broader set of applications and new applications as we've just talked about. It's frustrating for everybody, including us and Flashforge, about the launch of the Desktop 3D.

We understand what's happening. We're very confident that together we will fix what are relatively minor issues, but the product has to be right when it launches.

We're confident that that will happen in due course. There's three other companies that are developing the similar product that will follow over the next 12 months.

That broadening of revenue stream, also as we build our installed base of machines, then the annuity revenue of replacement printheads, and also increasingly revenue coming from fluids as well. With all of that, despite the difficult challenges in the market, I think we in the board look forward with confidence for the next six months and future of Xaar.

With that, I thank you very much and happy to take any questions.

Thanks. Morning.

It's Henry Carver from Singers. I just wonder if we could cover off some of the other target markets that we've been talking about, just progress in the sort of automotive coating and the EV battery, they're the two, and the hot wax, just those I think that the three

that then completes

the five

if we could. Yeah.

Batteries, I've visited a battery line about three or four months ago. The application, we now have I think something like 13 or 14 new lines that have been installed with our technology.

The big challenge for these machines is that the machines themselves cost about £3 million. There's 1,000 lines, to actually replace all of the lines is around about £3 billion investment.

It's a huge amount of investment for those machines. What we're seeing now is a shift towards bigger batteries for storage and cylindrical batteries for cars, so that's where we see the growth from.

I think this year has been steady, it's broadly in line with what we expected. We are expecting next year for there to be a slight increase, but I think that the broader adoption across all sort of 1,000 lines, I think will happen over more years purely because of the investment required from the car companies.

I think the things which are clear is the industry is clear that digital printing of the insulation coating is the future. New lines, we're increasingly seeing new lines having the digital solution, and that's what we're seeing in terms of the revenue.

The replacement lines, I think the barrier is really the cost of the investment from the car companies right at a time where electric vehicles have in and out of favor. One of the small benefits of the gas price going up is people are more interested in electric cars.

We see it's a really interesting market probably taking a little longer than we expected.

Is it just the car batteries, or a lot of people now installing batteries in their homes or in another, does it apply to those type of batteries as well, or just?

Most of the lines that are going in are for the storage batteries, these are much bigger. For the car batteries, they're smaller, they're easier to wrap, the yield on the wrapping of small batteries is actually higher.

When you get to a big battery, they're very heavy, very difficult to wrap, and so the yield on the wrap is much lower. What we're seeing now is that most large battery lines that are going in are going in with our technology.

Also the cylindrical batteries are becoming more popular as well. Some of the big European manufacturers, Tesla and BMW, are moving towards cylindrical batteries.

We see new lines as being the area. Next year, this year we saw about four, we say 14 lines going in.

Next year, that might double next year. Then

the automotive coating?

I think the targets have been in Europe. I think if you look at the European auto industry, I think that it's a really challenging time for them, and investment in Europe is actually quite challenging, and I think this project has suffered from that.

I think that it's moving forward, there's progress being made. The enthusiasm for the technology is still there.

Again, it's the investment, and all of this uncertainty stops people making those investments. Hopefully we'll see a bit of stability returning and a bit more confidence, and then that hopefully trigger the investment needed.

Brilliant. Thanks.

Then just the hot wax?

Hot wax: the good news, the head works. We're able to jet at high temperatures.

We've been running that quite successfully. As a prototype, I think we've demonstrated that.

We'll be starting to share samples with customers so they can start testing it. It will take 12 to 18 months to actually get the product to market, but that opens up, as we've talked about, depending on who you talk to, anywhere between 3 and 10 times the size of the existing market.

Brilliant. Thanks.

Andy Edmond, Equity Development. Paul, can we dig into gross margins a little bit?

Nice move and some very big moves, particularly Megnajet. Can you give a little more steer on how important pricing if the newer products is to that, and therefore how much can it extend going forward?

In terms of the much greater cost efficiencies, cost of capital, taking out back-office, etc., have you done the low-hanging fruit or do you think there's a little bit more to go for there?

Okay. Pricing: our pricing strategy is pretty straightforward, okay?

John's talked about this many times before. When we go into a new market segment developing new technology, then we tend to charge a bit of a keener price for that particular customer because they're taking a lot of risk on board in developing a product and launching that product.

Once we move into the other OEMs in that same segment, then we tend to be able to get better pricing. I think that's a natural sort of thing to do.

Pricing is something we really focus on. There's a lot of discipline around the strategy to try and get the best possible price for what is a very unique piece of technology.

I think in terms of the broader question around what do we want to get to in gross margin, I think our ambition is pretty clear, and I've looked back over history about what was the high point, where did Xaar get to? I think there's no reason why we shouldn't set an ambition going well into the sort of 40, high 40% and even ultimately trying to get to 50.

There are many levers to pull to get there. We obviously have a huge benefit from operational gearing, overall for the operating margin at least, that's an important factor.

We're doing a lot of work in the background around supply chain, getting better costs efficiency in terms of the materials that we use and how we use them and where we manufacture stuff, so that's all important, too. Gross margin is very much an important thing.

In terms of is there any other low-hanging fruit, there's still plenty to do. No CFO would say we've ticked every box, we've done everything.

There's still things to do. I think there is more progress to be made in things like procurement and on the supply chain.

I think we've done some great things over the past 12 months on that, but there's definitely more things to do there. That'll all feed into the ambition of that higher gross margin and higher operating margin, too.

Great. Thank you.

Just in terms of competition, you've explained and demonstrated your IP moat, the long-term development. Is there anybody else in any of your core areas that you can see trying to catch you up or you're still two, three years ahead of the competition?

That's probably a question John better answer. I'm a newcomer relatively.

I've been in the business 18 months, and personally, for me, the sort of penny-drop moment was this whole piece of technology around viscosity, which we've talked about many, many times. It's very difficult with our competitors' form of technology to replicate what we can do in terms of viscous fluids.

I think that for me was a penny drop, like, wow, and that opens up a whole world in terms of industrial applications and fluid deposition in those applications. That for me was an important factor.

John?

It's really interesting. There was a major inkjet conference, and some of the big Japanese competitors Seiko and Kyocera and Ricoh were all there and presenting their technology roadmaps.

It was incredibly flattering that the number one topic was jetting high viscosity fluids. All of them announced their programs to develop high viscosity printheads.

The analogy I would use is this, that for years they've all been working on the best Formula One car, and so that's been the race, who can have the best Formula One car. We've come along with a Volvo estate that'll do all sorts of other things.

It'll still go around the track, but it will take the kids to school and take the stuff down the recycling center. If you want to develop a Volvo estate, you don't start with a Formula One car.

You can't just migrate from one to the other, and that's really the issue with all of the competitors. You can't just say, "I'm going to do this to this printhead and it suddenly will print high viscosity."

It just won't work like that. You have to start again and you have to develop something with a completely different architecture.

In order to do that, you then come into our patents and our protection. I think that it's great that everybody is recognizing that high viscosity is the future of digital inkjet.

I think we have a significant advantage. I think we can't be complacent because these are big companies with huge budget, they will do something, but we currently have a big advantage and we're going to run fast to make sure we keep it.

Sounds good. Volvo's much more reliable than Ferraris anyway.

Absolutely,

that's right.

Thank you. Good

morning, it's Andrew Simms from Berenberg. Just a couple of questions.

Firstly, just on the inventory that increased in H1, can you just give us a feel for what is Flashforge-related versus maybe some of the other OEM launches that I think you referenced in the statement?

I can answer that very simply. It's predominantly Flashforge.

We've taken the view that we want to support this launch fully. We think that the projections that are out there that we've talked to Flashforge about in terms of the share of the market and what can be achieved in volume terms, I think supports that decision.

When this thing does launch, and as John said, it's not in a too distant future, we want to come at this running and get a really strong launch for that product, because we believe that it will take on a substantial market share relatively quickly. Then

I suppose how does that reverse, I suppose, under some of those assumptions? Do you see a lot of that flow out through this year, or is this sort of a multi-year sort of inventory build that we've had?

I've said in my little speech that we do expect that to reverse quite quickly. We want to create a sort of bow wave for the launch, and then get them onto a reasonable sort of lead time and move on quite quickly to business as usual.

It's really about establishing that strong initial bow wave, and then as I said, we do expect that position to reverse quite quickly.

Great. Thank you.

Then just on the China facility, you obviously talked about there being sort of a future growth there as well. What would you see as the sort of the CapEx requirements of that facility to sort of aid that growth going forward from where we are now?

Shall I start? The one thing I've learned about China is it's it's much more cost-effective to do things in China than than than in the UK, if I'm honest.

It's not going to be the requirements going forward, then it's not it's it's six digits, not seven digits, that we can see. I was out in China a couple of weeks back with John, three weeks ago I think.

We visited the facility and it is truly impressive what they've done in in a very short space of time. I I went there last October and it was a bare concrete shell building.

I went back three weeks ago and it's a fully functioning, set up, ready to run facility. It it's it's not just that it's much more cost-efficient, it's much faster as well to build build these capabilities.

I don't see the capital requirement for that particular buildout in the near term being millions, but, we'll have to see how things develop. It could we could come back at it a year from now and say, "You know what, it's been so successful, we'd like to double it."

I don't know, but initially, an initial period, I don't see, overly substantial amounts.

Great. Thank you.

Any more questions?

We have a question online from Sanjay Jha. Sanjay, if you could please unmute, go ahead, and ask your question.

Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking my question.

Two questions, if I may. Do you have some idea of Flashforge, are they kind of Q4, strong Q4 type business, or are 3D printers kind of very sort of equal across the year?

How does that affect your shipments to them and your inventory levels?

Hi, Sanjay. It's been a while.

I think it's interesting. We've been working with Flashforge on this project now for four years.

When we started, there was approximately 3 million desktop 3D printers shipped per year, and that figure has grown every year to the point that last year there was 8.8 million desktop 3D printers shipped, and Flashforge shipped 700,000 themselves. The estimates are that the full-color digital print will take 10% of that market.

That's 880,000 machines. That's a huge number.

That clearly becomes the biggest opportunity that we have. The applications are really as broad as the 8.8 million people, because if you said to me, "What do people do with 8.8 million desktop?"

I have no idea. They'll do similar things to what they do with the other 8.8 million, they'll just do it in higher resolution and full color.

Their expectation is over time it will get to 10%. Just to give you a scale, 880,000 machines, revenue for us per machine is about £500.

You can quickly do the numbers and realize that's a huge opportunity. So 1% is still a huge opportunity, 0.1% is still significant.

The reason why we have inventory is we're trying to plan for success. You build up inventory, and then if it doesn't launch, you find yourself standing here explaining lots of inventory.

I hope that we get to a point where I'm standing here explaining why we can't deliver enough printheads. It really depends on the quality of the product and whether consumers buy it.

The projections are that this is a new category, and if the projections are right, it was going to be a very exciting market over the next number of years.

Thanks, John. Just another question.

I know we have been talking about technology, viscosity for quite a few years now, and I think do you think the main problem is that these rest of the supply chain is not moving fast enough, or is it the fact that maybe you have such a strong technology lead, they're not there are not enough competing products out there, the customers, the OEMs, are reluctant to really get into digital inkjet printing? Because we've been talking about staying a very small market share for a long time now, and looks like it's very difficult to break through that barrier.

Is it do you think that's what's happening, people are reluctant to move to new technologies in in printing?

Absolutely, Sanjay, and we've had different layers of that. If I go back when I first started and we started thinking about high viscosity, the first challenge was the ink companies, because there were no high viscosity fluids.

We'd go to talk to an ink company and say, "We'd like you to develop a high viscosity fluid for this application." They would say, "Well, that's great, but what's your installed base of machines?"

We'd say, "Well, it's zero. You kind of need to believe in high viscosity."

It probably took us two or three years just to get one or two ink companies to try and develop one or two fluids. That has taken a long time.

Now we have pretty much all of the ink manufacturers all talking to us and developing a range of fluids for high viscosity because they recognize the benefits. The chemists have now understood it, the management have now understood it, and engaging with ink companies is now no longer an issue.

We also now have actual OEMs who've seen the benefit of high viscosity and are now looking at second and third applications of high viscosity. For instance the PCB is actually being done by the same companies that have done the battery.

We're not having to go and sell the virtues of high viscosity into the OEMs that recognize it. The success of those applications becomes visible to other people.

When you go and talk to somebody about, "Well, you could use high viscosity fluids or high pigment fluids in this application," we can now point to real-world scenarios. There's momentum building, and it's really difficult to try and convey the momentum, but the fascinating thing is it's just the number of inquiries that we get.

I would say over the last six months, the number of companies that have called us to be interested in our technology for their industrial application has grown significantly. All of those will take four or five years to get to a point where there's substantial revenue, but that momentum is there.

I think what I hope to see is that once we see the Desktop 3D launch, then hopefully that will deliver some of the success that we've been looking at. I think behind that, if you strip out those numbers, we need to be looking at the other applications and how they're growing and the breadth of the application.

I think the business is really all about the momentum and the industry understanding that you can now do these things with high viscosity. It has been, Sanjay, breaking down barriers across multiple sort of areas of the business, and I think we're getting there now.

Can I just add I always have my new-guy perspective. Again, I've only been in the business 18 months, I haven't experienced some of the history that John talks about, some of the difficulties that Xaar has been through.

I've only ever known momentum, and that's why this business is actually currently a very exciting place to be. New applications, new ideas about how to deploy our technology, it seems like they're coming almost monthly.

As John says, they will take time to exploit those opportunities, but there's no shortage of enthusiasm coming from the customer base. That is genuinely quite an exciting place to be.

Any other questions?

Yes, we have another couple of typed questions online. The first one of those is: What are the revenue opportunities like outside of China, for example, in the US and in Europe?

I think in the US, the number one opportunity at the moment is semiconductor printing. For those of you who are familiar with some of the processes, spin coating of the semiconductor wafers is actually an incredibly common process step in all semiconductor processes.

You basically take the wafer, you spin it, you put material fluid in the middle of it, and the forces basically force the fluid out and you end up with a nice even layer over the surface. A lot of it gets wasted, a lot of it flies off the edge and it can end up being challenging to keep that clean and you actually waste a lot of expensive fluids, whereas if you actually inkjet print it over the area, you don't have any wastage and it's much cleaner.

We've actually seen quite significant success in applications. I can't talk about the companies because we have confidentiality with these companies, but there are products out there today that are starting to use our technology within side consumer products.

That's an interesting area, and that's the main area is in the US. We also see the US market's being much more a systems market, companies who are interested in using our technology, they're much more interested in buying a solution rather than a printhead.

In Asia, in China, they really just want to buy a printhead because they believe they can do the rest of it cheaper than themselves. I think they can ultimately, but it takes them a long time to get there because they make the same mistakes.

In the West, increasingly we'll see much more of the Western companies selling them a fully integrated solution rather than just the printhead.

Our next question is: Do you foresee the 3D wax market going into a growth phase again once global economic issues settle?

This year has actually been quite challenging for wax. Wax has actually grown over last year.

However, the Middle Eastern market has really been taken out in terms of jewelry sales. Just think of the number of people who would fly to Dubai on holiday and buy some jewelry while they're on holiday.

The wax market has been affected by that. It's also the price of gold and silver, because if the price in gold and silver goes up, then people buy less jewelry because it becomes more expensive.

That's been a negative effect as well. The things that will really drive the wax market is going to be price of gold and silver and stability in the market, people feel like they want to spend their money on expensive jewelry.

Nevertheless, it's still grown over last year. I don't see it growing substantially within the jewelry market.

I think most of that growth has already occurred. I think the next growth area is really going to be for the hot head, because as I've said previously, the wax for jewelry is really expensive.

If we can actually develop a head that can print wax that's much lower cost, which means we have to operate at much higher temperature, then that opens up casting of different metals, and the market for that is substantially bigger than just the jewelry market.

Thank you very much. That was the last question from online.

To you.

Great. Thank you very much for your attention today.

As I say, we're pleased with the results. We're very excited about going forward and hope to see you again in March next year.

Thank you.