Austal Limited (ASX:ASB) CEO, Andrew Bellamy discusses the company’s latest financial results and outlook at the ASX Spotlight Series 2016, New York Austal Limited
(ASX:ASB) is an amazing story. The company’s been around since 1988, listed in 1999. In that time, we’ve built 255 ships and most of them have been exported out of Australia. We’re the only non-US company that’s ever built a warship for the Americans and we’ve actually built two, two programs thatis. We’ve got about 5,000 employees and we turned over $750 million, or close to in the half. And we’ve got an order book of $2.8 billion.
You measure it in billions clearly. And if you just think about the Australian Government recently announcing the replacement of the Royal Australian Navy Fleet, that’s going to be some $89 billion over 20 years. So that as an example is very sizeable. These US programs, we’ve got two programs contracted that were about $US5 billion when they were awarded. And that was just for 10 ships, or 10ships and 10 ships, and ultimately those programs will run for decades.
The Australian opportunities are really good, example it’s our whole market. If we’d been able to succeed in the US market as an Australian company, I think you’d have to think we were a good show for Australia. There’s a lot of export potential too. As I said before, we’ve exported a number of vessels to the Middle East and to Europe. And with the current low oil price, what we’re seeing is a lot of interest in our commercial ferry business that we’ve really not seen since the GFC. So I think that’s an interesting element.
I think pretty solid is what I’d say. We’ve had three years of really good growth, revenue growth, margin growth. Probably the highlights from the last 12 months are we generated good cash in the half, $50 million of cash. We’ve gone from a strongly leveraged position to actually a net cash position, so we’re sitting on $30 million of net cash. We’ve been able to pay down half of the debt in that three-year period. The revenue was around $750 million and $29 million of EBIT. So it was solid and I think gives a lot of confidence going forward.
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