Lycopodium Limited

Good morning everyone and welcome to the Lycopodium First Half FY26 results call. I'm Sam Wells from NWR Communications and joining me from the company today is Managing Director and CEO Peter DeLeo as well as CFO Justine Campbell. Following a brief summary of the results released to the market this morning, investors and research analysts will have an opportunity to ask questions. There will be the choice of two options. First, analysts and investors can either raise your hand should you wish to ask a verbal question of the management team, and you can also submit a written question via the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom screen. We'll endeavor to get to the majority of questions asked, in some cases combining submitted questions on the same or similar topic. And for those analysts asking verbal questions, we kindly ask that you keep your questions to no more than two or three live questions on today's call. Thank you, and over to you.

Thank you, Sam, and welcome. Thank you for your attendance at our full presentation for the first half of FY26. As Sam said, I'm joined this morning by Justine, our CFO, and Bron Lennon, our Chair. This morning I'll be, or we've done for many of you, I'll be just running through our typical just a presentation covering off a little bit about the company, providing an update on the financial highlights for the period, touching on operational highlights for the period, then addressing outlook and guidance. And we also provide as part of the presentation, although I won't be running through any detail this morning, an appendix which contains a lot of Lycopodium remains a leading global engineering and project delivery group working across mineral resources, industrial processes and infrastructure industries with an extensive book of quality clientele and 18 offices across the world. I speak to our clientele. We have an amazing bunch of clients across all those industries I mentioned. through very large clients, mid-tiers and junior explorers and miners. And we're very grateful for that client level. As a project-focused organisation, it's of significant importance and to our benefit to have involvement with projects from a very early stage, hence our involvement in scoping, and feasibility studies in the evaluation phase of projects, through to the full engineering and project delivery as a full service provider in that space, and then also onto optimisation and expansion phase works, enables Lycopodium to benefit from a project's full life cycle. It's been something we've focused on over the years, both in broadening the services which we provide, but also in broadening the time in which we're involved projects. We maintain a high workload with a strong current order book of studies and delivery phase activities on a broad range of quality projects. Committed contracts are valued at $415 million, that's up on last period, and also revenue opportunity pipeline is $1.3 billion, also up on last period, which really indicates, and I'll talk more about it obviously later, the outlook for the business, but indicates that we're continuing to see a busy market, enjoy a busy market, see a busy market. By the way, our financial highlights, Lycopodium did $174.5 million worth of revenue for the period, and $18.3 5% impact margin, which is in line with our expectations for impact, so achieving our impact target. The board, the directors declared 22 cent per share fully franked dividend for the half year. Again, returning to our traditional sort of dividend policy or dividend expectation. Cashit Bank at the heart here. The company enjoys excellent diversification across a broad range of commodities, clientele, and geographies. Those of you that have seen the slide previously may note that we continue to achieve more balance in support of this diversification across these metrics, and we are striving to continue to do this In particular, it provides a surety and strength moving forward. From an operational perspective, we've recently awarded a number of FEED, or Front End Engineering and Design briefs. These include the Winnu Copper Project for Rio Tinto, the Acetro-Dibibango Gold Project for Endeavour Mine, which is their next development project, the Doropano Gold Project for Resley, and a number of others, including, most recently, the Kilgoura Plant Expansion Lithium Project here in Western Australia. We've also started initial work on two material prospects, being to be able to transition onto a larger project at Blackwater, an expansion project, and await news on that, which we believe may be imminent. I'll note, however, there has been a shift to the right on these projects, particularly sort of coping on Blackwater from a timing perspective, probably about a three to four minute shift from what we previously expected and forecast, and it has impacted our financials and forecasts. However, we continue to invest in building capacity in anticipation of these and a swathe of other material opportunities. And this is really important. We are in a competitive labour market across the world for our people and we've retained our people and continue to grow our people count and also our capacity in terms of office space and just general corporate capacity from what we'll see is strong. And those that have been on our calls previously have seen this slide in particular, which tries to demonstrate our early phase work, our work which is midstream and in the middle of its delivery and then that stuff that's been completed in recent times. And you can see there's quite a number of new opportunities We've also got a really strong portfolio on projects which are called heavy delivery, including Kone, in fact, the wire and the cool copper in Oman, and a number of other projects which are listed there, of course, and the projects which are already included. So, you know, we're very, very happy with the number of studies that we've got, and that's traditionally the key metric for the businesses we're working on. of what we'll be doing next. Our focus on people continues as we seek to maintain and enhance our status as an employer of choice and a place where people can develop excellent careers, advance themselves personally and professionally and enjoy growing with the company. Our approach to keeping our people and those on our managed sites safe is demonstrated in our exceptional safety track record. So on to outlook. Demand for our services remains very high based on our excellent track record and performance on all of our most recent projects, as well as market conditions, which generally sees commodity prices at strong, if not high levels, obviously gold being very, very strong. also across the Americas. Silver being another commodity which we've seen a number of projects we've started to work on the PFS or Unico silver in Argentina supported obviously with our investment in Saxon. We're also seeing on the basis of our expansion across the Americas lots But we also continue to invest in building capacity and capabilities globally with the last 12 months. We have planned for the next 12 months to increase the capacity in Perth, Toronto and Cape Town, in Lima and Manila, and that's in preparation for the work and the prospects which we continue to see, and we see that this will bear fruit in such We've revised guidance, primarily due to the shift right of a number of those major prospects. I spoke about the two main ones, which are expected to contribute particularly to our forecasts. We have provided guidance of group revenue between $370 and $410 million, an impact between $37 and $41 million, along with our target impact expectation of around 10%. We'll obviously continue material changes or any material awards, but we consider that the second half will be strong to achieve those, that guidance that we provide. We remain as a secure, stable and sustainable business, doing great work globally. This is based on the deep engineering expertise you know, growing teams and keeping teams of exceptional high-calendar personnel. And we provide lots of what I call value in the services which we provide globally. We have a long track record And, you know, again, leveraging experiences we've owned over the years. We have a very strong history of execution of projects and execution of business generally. We have a strong alignment with management and our shareholders. We still have around 30% of the company's ownership held by board and management. We have a very capital-like approach, so we're not an organisation that requires to spend a huge amount of capital to generate our returns, and we continue to pursue business in that fashion. I've touched on, I mean, the appendices which you can go through your ledger, The quantity of work that we do is in the form of big business for clients, new projects for existing clients and the like. Strong commodity diversification. I spoke around that earlier. I think we're continuing to strike a good balance there. Even in the light of a very strong gold price, we're still busy in lithium, we're still busy in uranium, copper and a bunch of other commodities. And the geographic diversification, I think, for us is key. We continue to expand geographically. The Americas has been, you know, a fantastic geographic expansion for us. The acquisition of Saxon, you know, the polymer office, the hamburger office, et cetera. We're seeing tremendous number of opportunities coming through. Again, it's fairly early days. America in particular, but also in North American corporations that continue to see a level of inquiry which is unprecedented. So I think certainly the word is out about lycopodium As I said, we also provide some additional informative content as an appendix to the presentation to further explain and illustrate the strength and quality of our business. So I'm not going to go through that this morning. I welcome you to walk through it. If, as ever, after this presentation, if any of you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us with those questions and we can answer them on the appendices. But thank you for attending our webinar and I welcome any questions you may have.

Thanks very much, Peter. As a reminder, you may ask questions by submitting a written question via the Q&A function or covering research analysts are invited to raise their hand via Zoom and I'll endeavour to get to you shortly. First question comes from Oliver Porter at Euros. Ollie, please go ahead.