Adam Watson
Management
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's FY '26 Results Presentation. I'm joined by Garrick Rollason, our CFO, as well as our Investor Relations team. I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, traditional custodians of the land on which I'm speaking. First Nations people have taken care of our lands and waterways for the past 60,000 years. We acknowledge and pay our respects to their elders past and present. I'll start today's presentation with the Safety share on Slide 4. APA is a truly national business with assets and teams operating all over Australia. Most of our frontline workforce operate in remote and regional areas and staying connected via telecommunication and technology platforms is a key part of staying safe, which is why we've undertaken a program of work to enhance connectivity, including the deployment of a range of platforms such as Starlink across 70 of our operational sites. This investment means our employees are better connected with our integrated operations center. They're better connected to their families and colleagues, and they have the tools to better organize and schedule how and when they undertake their day-to-day work on our assets. In isolation, this is an important initiative to strengthen the safety and care of our people, but it's more than that. Enhancing our technology platforms in our remote sites allows our people to get on with the critical work they perform every day in both a safe and efficient way. On Slide 5, we highlight 3 key takeaways from today's result. First, we've delivered a strong financial result. Underlying EBITDA is up an impressive 8.3% and ahead of the midpoint of guidance. EBITDA margins have expanded by 370 basis points, which we are incredibly proud of. Free cash flow was up 3.2%, also stronger than expectations. We've exceeded our FY '26 cost reduction target of $50 million, delivering total enterprise-wide cost reductions of $80 million in the year. And this includes a 20.6% reduction in corporate costs. The annualized savings we've delivered are approximately $100 million. Some of the cost savings reflect the benefits generated from simplifying our business. And this included the divestment of the Networks and GDI operations that were no longer core to our growth strategy. The second key point is that our growth outlook is compelling and is supported by favorable market fundamentals. The role of gas in enabling the energy transition and ensuring energy reliability and affordability is now widely recognized. Over the past year, we've completed the Sturt Plateau pipeline, our first project in the Beetaloo Basin and an important project to bring this significant opportunity to life. We've announced an agreement with CS Energy to deliver the Brigalow Peaking Power Plant, underlying the attractiveness of our GPG strategy. And we've announced further expansion of our East Coast Gas Grid via compression and the Bulloo Interlink. And to complement this, we've also recently announced the expansion of the South West Pipeline in Victoria. The third key point is that APA has a strong balance sheet with the capacity to fund growth, grow distributions and maintain credit metrics. Our FY '27 to '29 organic growth pipeline has increased from $3 billion to $3.5 billion, reflecting the strong growth we see across our target markets. We're taking a disciplined approach to progressing the right opportunities with the highest returns, returns that are well above our cost of capital, and we have the balance sheet capacity to fund this. Slide 6 sets out our financial highlights in more detail. As mentioned, we've delivered 8.3% growth in underlying EBITDA and our EBITDA margins expanded by 370 basis points. This was driven by robust asset operations across the portfolio, along with contributions from new assets, inflation-linked tariff escalation and the enterprise-wide cost reductions. We see earnings growth continuing into FY '27, having announced today FY '27 underlying EBITDA guidance of between $2.26 billion and $2.34 billion. The midpoint of this range would represent a 5.4% increase on FY '26, which would be another excellent result. Our distributions for the full year FY '26 totaled $0.58 per security, marking our 22nd consecutive year of distribution growth. We expect growth to continue into FY '27 announcing today distribution guidance of $0.59 per security for the year ahead. Slide 7 sets out a number of performance highlights across our key non-financial metrics. We recorded 0 actual serious harm incidents. We're incredibly proud of this. Our methane abatement and compressor efficiency work contributed to a 21% reduction in gross emissions across our gas infrastructure portfolio against our FY '21 baseline. Notably, this was achieved without the surrender of any carbon credits in FY '26 to meet our safeguard mechanism requirements. Our Employee Experience score was a solid 68% during a period of significant change for our people. I'd like to thank all APA employees for their perseverance and resilience over the past 12 months and for their continued uplift in our focus on customer experience and service delivery. We continue to improve gender representation, increasing our representation of women to 34.2%, which is well ahead of industry benchmarks. And we continued to deliver against our reconciliation action plan commitments with ongoing progress on cultural awareness and First Nations supplier engagement. Moving now to our strategy and market dynamics on Slide 9. Our strategy remains unchanged. We're focused on building networks through the development of assets under long-term capacity-based inflation-linked contracts. We continue to strengthen our capabilities in our core growth markets of gas transmission and storage and contracted power generation. This includes having built competitive advantages through initiatives such as our strategic partnerships with the likes of Siemens Energy, GE Vernova and solar turbines for the procurement of turbines and associated power generation equipment. We remain confident that we have the business focused on the right key markets and that our diversification enables us to create value within a dynamic energy market. This is all in the pursuit of providing opportunities for our people, strengthening our communities, creating value for our customers and capturing value for you, our security holders. Our organic growth pipeline for FY '27 to FY '29 is now $3.5 billion as outlined on Slide 10. The bulk of this is made up of projects already announced to the market, such as the East Coast Gas Grid expansion, the South West Pipeline expansion, the Brigalow Peaking Power Plant and Lateral Pipeline and the Sybella Solar and Battery Project we announced today. Looking beyond the $3.5 billion pipeline, we also continue to progress a number of attractive longer-term opportunities. Of particular focus are the opportunities in the Beetaloo Basin, gas power generation to support the ongoing introduction of renewables into our power grids and behind-the-meter solutions for our remote mining customers and our emerging AI and data center customers. I'll now quickly step you through an update on some of our larger projects in the coming slides, starting with the East Coast Gas Grid expansion on Slide 11. In February 2026, we announced Stage 3 of our East Coast Gas Grid expansion plan to increase the capacity of the East Coast network by around 30%. This builds on the 25% increase in North to South capacity that we've already delivered since 2023. Our announcement in February included a final investment decision of $260 million on Stage 3A to deliver 3 new compressors to increase North to South capacity for winter 2029. We're also investing $220 million in Stage 3B to continue early works and procurement of long lead items for the Bulloo Interlink. The environmental assessments are now underway. The market need for our Stage 3 expansion plan has always been very clear. It represents a timely and cost competitive solution to predicted southern market supply shortfalls and also supports the ongoing role that gas will play to firm renewables over time. With the Federal Government's proposed domestic gas reservation requirements now progressing, we're seeing a positive shift in sentiment and appetite for this increased capacity. We have great confidence in APA's expansion plan and that it will deliver benefits for our customers and security holders, just as our previous expansions along this corridor have done. The AER's recent decision to approve APA's South West Pipeline expansion is further evidence that the demand for expansion is there. Moving now to Slide 12. We have significantly progressed our work to help bring the Beetaloo Basin to life. Phase 1 of our development in the Beetaloo is complete with construction of the Sturt Plateau pipeline. First gas is due to flow shortly for the benefit of our communities and industry in Darwin. Phase 2 is progressing as we move forward with work related to the potential expansion of the SPP via additional compression. This is designed to support the ongoing commercialization of the basin for our upstream customers and provide further energy security for Darwin. Phase 3 of our work in the Beetaloo is focused on connecting the basin to domestic and regional LNG markets. This is a significant multibillion-dollar opportunity for APA. APA's proposed North to East Australian pipeline would deliver gas to Australia's East Coast Gas Grid and underwrite the extension of Australia's Gladstone LNG export facilities beyond the 2030s. As it's known, has progressed to the formal Environmental Assessment stage. Similarly, we're also progressing pipeline routes for APA's proposed Darwin to Beetaloo pipeline, which would bring additional gas from the Beetaloo up to Darwin alongside APA's existing Amadeus Pipeline. Moving to Slide 13, investment in GPG capacity is essential to ensure Australia's energy system is cost effective and reliable as we transition from baseload coal to intermittent renewables. While batteries continue to play an important role to firm renewables, unlike GPG, batteries are unable to provide system strength to deal with the inertia of multiple intermittent renewable systems. In December 2025, APA was pleased to announce a partnership with CS Energy in Queensland to develop the 400-megawatt Brigalow Peaking Power Plant. We're in the process of finalizing that agreement, and we're making great progress with delivery, including civil and bulk earthworks, turbine procurement and awarding major construction contracts. The project will connect into APA's Roma Brisbane Pipeline via a new lateral transport and storage pipeline, which is also being delivered by APA. Moving to Slide 14; we've progressed our development pipeline for remote contracted power generation in multiple locations. We're pleased to announce today an agreement with Evolution Mining to develop the Sybella Solar and Battery Project in Mt Isa. The $259 million project will deliver low-cost, low-emissions energy to support Evolution's Ernest Henry operations and be firmed by APA's Diamantina Power Station. Sybella is a great example of how we've leveraged the skills and experience of the Pilbara Energy team to bring this important project to life in Mt Isa. Our Pilbara business continues to perform strongly. We're progressing with planning and approvals for our strategic sites in the region, including the Newman Renewable Energy Hub to support our customers who are committed to the decarbonization of their operations. I'll now hand you to Garrick to take you through detail of our financial performance.