Hi @tomsmithidg - the company best seen in context of couple of chapters - and has been steadily digging its way out of too much debt taken on during a period of several woeful years of chronic underperformance and disappointments under former leadership of David Maxwell. Its Orbost gas plant was plagued by fouling problems & falling short of production while owned by APA - and I guess Amplitude thought they could fix all their problems if they could just take control of the plant back & self- remedy the issues.

So they compounded their problems by borrownig big to purchase the Orbost Gas plant from APA, but the problems continued and were far more technically challenging to resolve than anticipated. The under-production of gas from their major Sole gas field through the plant meant the debt got away from them a bit, and any free cash flow was being channelled into fixing the production & fouling issues.

Under Jane's stewardship they have steadily got on top of these issues, and the plant is now humming & they are even experimenting with taking it over nameplate capacity of 68 TJ/day (recently averaging 71 TJ/day). All additional gas volumes above their contracted volumes go straight into the more lucrative Victorian spot market, as well as meeting gas peaker plant demand during cold winters & power spikes.

In answer to your question - all the focus has been (rightly in my opinion) on A) Debt Reduction, and B) Growth - as I believe the return on equity/capital will be far higher investing in additional gas production volumes (the East Coast Supply Project) to backfill & utilise the substantial latest capacity at their 2nd gas plant at Otway (using something like only 20 TJ/day out of 150 TJ/day capacity by memory).

They even tapped the market for a little additional capital recently at 24.5c ($2.695 post 1:11 consolidation) to fund a 4th prospective well over and above the planned 3, for the ECSP drilling campaign that got underway this year & ongoing.

If you take a look at the huge boost to FCF over past 12-15 months you can see the game changing financials that are underway, helping bring this company back from purgatory with formerly burned insto investors. The strong free cash flows have been used for a combination of debt reduction & pre-funding some of the long-lead time items for the ECSP project (i.e. sub-sea trees & other parts), as well as getting their big decommissioning liabiilty (removing subsea infrastructure from old BMG field) off the balance sheet - so now a lot cleaner balance sheet & outlook (that liability weighed heavily on the company). There is also still a chance they may eventually recover the 10% share that the big Indo company Pertamina ran away from & left in Amplitude's lap (still slowly going through the Courts).

Anyways, dividends will probably flow (plenty of FCF to fund them) once the investment in future growth by backfilling Orbost has been completed & additional gas sales revenue on the horizon. I would think Board might feel confident enough to start unlocking the purse strings in FY27 - once have de-risked the ECSP enough. If ECSP successful - then divies from FY28 on could be solid.

Thanks @Randy , I agree putting money into debt reduction and growth is good at this stage, but I like companies that have a clearly stated policy regarding payout ranges for dividends. Sounds like they don't have that at the moment, but I think it will go on my watchlist.