Amal Holdings: How Much Cash Really Remains After the Dividend and Debt Rollover
Amal ended 2025 with strong operating cash flow, but once reported capex, capitalized development, interest, lease principal, dividends, and debt repayments are included, very little real room was left. 2025 looks less like a covenant-pressure year and more like a rollover year designed to preserve a cash cushion.
The main article already framed the core issue correctly: Amal's business mix widened, but the real test was still cash. This follow-up isolates only that question, after all actual cash uses, how much flexibility was left at the group level and at the parent company.
The key point is that 2025 was not about covenant pressure, it was about what remained after distribution. The business generated operating cash, but the combination of cash dividends, lease principal, interest, capex, capitalized development, and debt repayments pushed the cushion close to zero. That makes 2025 look less like a year of expanding freedom and more like a debt-rollover year that bought time.
The Framework: How Much Cash Really Remains
The framework here is all-in cash flexibility. In other words, not how much the business can generate before management decisions, but how much cash remains after the actual uses of cash. That is why the bridge relies only on reported lines: cash from operations, reported capex, capitalized development costs, interest paid, lease principal, dividends, and debt repayments. There is no maintenance-capex estimate here, so this is not a normalized / maintenance cash generation view. Also, on the lease side, the bridge uses lease principal only, because that is the line explicitly disclosed in the cash-flow statement.
That framework produces a sharp result. The group generated NIS 222.8 million of operating cash flow in 2025, but in the same year it paid NIS 145 million of dividends, NIS 25.4 million of interest, NIS 35.5 million of lease principal, NIS 28.5 million of reported capex, and another NIS 10.9 million of capitalized development costs. At that stage, even before scheduled long-term bank amortization, the gap was already about NIS 22.5 million. Once NIS 31.9 million of long-term debt repayment is added, the deficit widens to about NIS 54.4 million. Operating cash flow was not enough to carry both the distribution and the rest of the year's obligations without fresh debt.
What really matters is the gap between operating quality and residual cash. There is no dramatic operating weakness in that bridge. There is balance-sheet strain at the end of it. Group cash and cash equivalents fell to just NIS 18.6 million, from NIS 20.5 million at the end of 2024. So even a year with NIS 222.8 million of operating cash ended with a very small cash balance because too many layers sat above it.
Debt Rollover Improved Timing, Not Flexibility
That same story is hiding inside the working-capital improvement. The working-capital deficit narrowed to NIS 103.9 million from NIS 177.5 million at the end of 2024. On a first read that looks like a genuine liquidity improvement. That is only a partial reading. The company itself explains that the change mainly came from moving credit lines from short term to long term: long-term credit utilization, including current maturities, rose to NIS 231 million from NIS 119 million, while short-term credit utilization fell to NIS 9 million from NIS 104 million.
In other words, the pressure did not disappear. It was largely pushed out. That also explains why unused lines jumped to NIS 172 million at the end of 2025 from NIS 37 million at the end of 2024, yet this still cannot be treated as a full liquidity cushion. The table defines those lines explicitly as unused lines without commitment. That matters. This is not a ring-fenced cash reserve waiting for the company. It is bank capacity that still has to stay open.
The immediate follow-through shows that the buffer was already being consumed. By March 29, 2026, utilized lines had risen to NIS 289 million and unused lines had fallen to NIS 124 million. In just three months, roughly NIS 48 million of the available cushion had already disappeared. That does not look like a company entering 2026 with surplus cash. It looks like a company that is still managing room through its banks.
At the same time, this is still not a covenant-stress story. Net financial debt to EBITDA stood at 0.96 at the parent level and 1.20 at Amal U'Maavar, against a ceiling of 5. In other words, the banks do not look close to pulling the brake. That is why the right question is not whether Amal is within covenants, but how much real freedom remains after the actual cash uses are taken out of the system. The collateral picture is not especially comfortable either: the group pledged fixed and floating charges over essentially all of its equity and assets in favor of the banks. That is another sign that the margin here is bank-managed capacity, not clean balance-sheet flexibility.
At the Parent Company, the Dividend Consumed the Margin
In a holding company, the real picture does not stop at the consolidated level. It has to be tested at the parent company layer. That is where the real question appears, not only how much the group produces, but how much cash can actually move up the chain and stay there.
At the parent level, cash from operations was NIS 98.8 million. In addition, dividends received from investees reached NIS 64.0 million. Against that, the parent paid NIS 145 million of dividends in 2025, NIS 15.7 million of interest, NIS 24.9 million of lease principal, and NIS 21.0 million of long-term debt repayment. Even after combining operating cash and the dividends that came up from subsidiaries, the parent still shows a gap of about NIS 43.8 million before new borrowing. That is the heart of the issue: the parent did not rely only on internal cash generation, it also relied on debt rollover to close the loop.
| Solo 2025 item | NIS m | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Cash from operations | 98.8 | The cash base generated directly at the parent level |
| Dividends from investees | 64.0 | The main upstream cash source into the holding-company layer |
| Dividends paid to shareholders | (145.0) | The heaviest cash use of the year |
| Interest paid | (15.7) | A reminder that refinancing is not free |
| Lease principal | (24.9) | A recurring cash use that does not disappear in a strong year |
| Long-term debt repayment | (21.0) | Debt service at the parent-company layer |
| New long-term loans | 45.0 | The bank support that closed part of the gap |
| Year-end cash | 7.3 | A very narrow finishing cushion at the parent level |
That lands next to a much more aggressive distribution year. Cash dividends rose from NIS 79.85 million in 2024 to NIS 145 million in 2025, across four distributions in March, June, September, and November. In that same November, the company also adopted a policy under which it intends to distribute at least 50% of net profit attributable to shareholders, excluding revaluation gains, subject to board discretion and the legal distribution tests. The policy is not a hard obligation, but it does create an internal expectation floor. After a year in which the actual payout was already aggressive, the market will need to ask whether 2026 is a year of rebuilding cash or another payout year that remains bank-supported.
What Needs Watching Now
There is also a post-balance-sheet layer here. In March 2026 the company completed a Binyamina real-estate transaction for NIS 33.7 million plus VAT, for an asset used in the special-needs activity and leased to a third party for seven years. The transaction may make strategic sense, but from a cash perspective it means the question does not stop at December 31, 2025. If anything, the small year-end cash cushion entered 2026 with another capital call already attached to it.
That is why the next test is not whether Amal can produce EBITDA, and not whether covenants still look comfortable on paper. The test is much simpler: over the next 2 to 4 quarters, will the group and the parent company start retaining more cash after distributions, leases, interest, and investments, or will flexibility continue to come mainly through another bank rollover.
Bottom line: Amal does not look like a company facing an immediate wall. It does look like a company where every aggressive distribution can compress the real margin very quickly. As long as operating cash remains strong and the banks keep extending the debt stack, the story holds. But once dividends, investments, or funding needs rise faster than the cash left after everything else, flexibility can contract much faster than the accounting profit suggests.
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