Unfortunately (and as much as I would love to be proven wrong),...

Unfortunately (and as much as I would love to be proven wrong), I don't think we will see a dividend announcement off the back of FY23 for a couple of reasons:

1. This is likely to be a break-even NPAT result. On my modelling (based on the 6 months trading and more recent announcements), I am expecting a NPAT figure of circa $0.5m. They are likely to be reporting FY23 revenue which is about 5% lower than FY22 in my opinion (circa $205m vs $216m in FY22). Hope I am too pessimistic, but that is my reading of the announcement tea leaves.

2. Whilst they will generate good cashflows (my estimate is about $35m of net cash from operations), this will likely be consumed by the fleet upgrade program that they are in the final stages of completing. I expect to see very little surplus free cash flows in the FY23 accounts.

However, provided that there are no surprises in the FY24 outlook, I do expect to see an outlook that would culminate in a resumption of dividends in FY24 (maybe in the 31/12/23 half year announcement) - if they are not gobbled up by a PE takeover before then.

FY24 should be materially better in terms of NPAT and free cash flow as they would have completed their fleet program (still will see some fleet turnover - but not to an extent that consumes 100% of operating cash flows). And we should see a material increase in revenues for FY24 by virtue of their order pipeline and the delayed start to some contracts from Q4 FY23 into Q1 FY24.