The opportunity for Abano is significant with projected demand for quality private healthcare services increasing. Our consistent long term strategy is to invest into scalable businesses, in the private, fee for service healthcare market. This year, we have refocused our investment into private payment sectors where we believe we can add value and deliver attractive returns for our shareholders.
In particular, dental and audiology operate in very large fragmented market places where we see real opportunities to consolidate and generate long term returns. Each of these markets is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with proven long term and growing demand from private paying customers.
We have the opportunity to increase our share of these lucrative markets by building scale, investing into infrastructure, expanding our resources and realising the benefits of our size over time.
We are expanding our businesses in three ways. Through acquisitions in dental, the opening of new greenfield stores in audiology and through organic growth in all three of our business groups including radiology. Our organic growth is coming from extending our existing facilities, expanding the services we offer, improving efficiencies and focusing on driving growth at our existing clinics, practices and stores. As our businesses mature, this is an increasingly important part of our strategy.
Our primary investment focus continues to be into the acquisition growth of our trans-Tasman dental networks, which generated 70% of Abano’s gross revenue in FY15. We are also investing into our audiology joint venture business in Australia with three new greenfield stores opened in 2015, and into an improved customer experience and offer for our radiology group in Auckland.
In FY15, the Board made a decision to divest our pathology and orthotics businesses, both of which fell outside of Abano’s investment criteria due to their high reliance on Government funding and limited scale opportunities.
Our capital structure is efficient and our acquisition growth is predominantly funded by debt. We have strong, long term relationships with our banking partner and during 2015, we extended our bank facilities and improved pricing. At year end we had over $50 million in undrawn facilities, providing headroom for continued investment.
The continuing year on year improvement in Abano’s underlying performance is attributable to the long term investment that we have made into creating a strong platform to support the expansion of our group.
As our businesses mature, we are realising the benefits of our size. Our dental businesses now have in excess of $240 million in annualised gross revenues and are generating margins that we expect will improve over the next few years, as scale advantages and benefits from the new Australian dental brand are realised. Bay International achieved a positive EBITDA result in 2015, with Bay Australia delivering a maiden net profit after tax. Meanwhile, demand for our high end radiology services continues to grow.
At the heart of our strategy is putting in place the best people, resources, information systems and infrastructure needed to support the increasing scale of each business. Central to this isa clear picture of where we are going and what the future looks like and we are committed to building an enduring and sustainable business.