ASA International Group PLC

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ASA International 2024 interim results. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session through the phone lines, and instructions will follow at that time. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to Jonathan Berger, Head of Investor Relations, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining ASHA International's 2024 interim results webcast. As you no doubt have already seen, we released our results first thing this morning, UK time. I'm joined here on the call by our CEO, Karen Kirsten, and CFO, Tamue Rahman, and also here is Chief Accountant, Misha Asing. Karen and Tamue will run through this results presentation and afterwards, as the operator said, we will be happy to take any questions you may have. Before we begin, let me draw your attention to the disclaimer that's right at the end of the presentation. Please be advised if you continue to listen to the presentation, you are bound by this disclaimer. Also, please note the interim results in this presentation are unaudited. With the formalities out of the way, I would now like to hand over to Karin for her opening remarks.

Thank you, Jonathan. Good afternoon or good evening or good morning if you are in other time zones. Welcome to this presentation of the interim results for 2024 of ASHA International. I'm here in the room with Tanvir, our CFO, to present, and also would like to wish a warm welcome to our new Head of Investor Relations, Jonathan Berger. As a brief introduction, ASHA International is one of the largest international microfinance institutions, and we provide socially responsible financial services to low income, primarily female entrepreneurs in Asia and Africa. Our vision is just and financially inclusive societies. And our purpose is to reduce poverty and especially to enable female empowerment. That's why the majority of our clients is female. Our mission is we want to do this by enhancing socioeconomic progress, by giving a loan the financial position of our female entrepreneurs increases and by that also their social position. Our values are professionalism, integrity as a financial institution and teamwork. And the teamwork is not only referring to teamwork amongst our colleagues, but also our clients have typical roles in the teamwork as client leader or client treasurer in our typical client groups. Let's have a look at our footprint. And this sheet shows how we are spread across the regions. So the central offices are located in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Netherlands, Amsterdam, and we are operating in 13 countries. And this diversification helps our risk profile. If there is an emerging market with some setbacks, then we can offset that by results in other markets. Our branches are around 2,000, and we deliver the value with nearly 13,500 employees to nearly 2.5 million clients. Our outstanding loan portfolio in dollars is 385 million, and our PAR 30, a key metric in microfinance portfolio at risk, which indicates which percentage of the clients are more overdue in a payment of more than 30 days is 2.3%. Before going into the highlights of the first half year, we would like to give an overview of the improvements in the longer run. If you look to last year, our 23 financial performance was dissatisfying over the whole year. Then we indicated that the second half was far better. We see that pattern now continuing in the first half of 24, If you look to liquidity, it has improved. If you look to profitability, it has improved and more than tripled. If you look to our asset volume, we have crossed the $500 million asset volume since before COVID. If you look to the power levels as a risk indicator, we are at levels between 2% and 2.5%, which is at pre-COVID levels. So all in all, The short story on our results is that we continue the positive trend of the second half of 23 into the first half of 24. Let's have a look at the different key elements in there. The first key note on the results is sustained improvement. We do see sustained improvement on financial performance and on the healthy business performance. The number of branches has grown to 2,091. The largest growth took place in Pakistan. If you look to another footprint metric, the number of clients has grown to 2.4 million. And especially in East Africa, the contribution to the growth of number of clients is there in East Africa, plus 22% in number of clients. If you look to the gross OLP, you see steep growth plus 14%. And mind that this is in dollars because the local currencies devaluate in a lot of geographies. And so that has grown by plus 14% if you look on a year-on-year basis. The profit before tax shows a healthy growth, as well as the net profit, which more than tripled from 3.7 million in the first half of 23 to 13.5 million in the first half of 24. And notice that in the first half year figure for 23, the hyperinflation accounting effect was not in, because it was not known at that moment, and that in the 13.5 million, that effect already is in. The par 30 went down, if you look on a year-on-year basis, with 1.5 percentage point. So overall, we do see a healthy improvement on both business and financial performance indicators. Well, back to that well diversified portfolio, but now in terms of numbers, you can see that we are well spread across the regions. And if you look to the countries with the largest portfolio in dollar, they're also well spread. So our four largest countries, they derive from each from one of the four regions. In South Asia, it is Pakistan. In West Africa, it's Ghana. In Southeast Asia, it's Philippines, and in East Africa, it's Tanzania. If you look to the year-to-date change in constant currency, so that doesn't take into account devaluation or revaluation of the currency, then I would like to highlight that the region of East Africa is showing the strongest growth in terms of OLP, plus 13% for the region. And within that region, Kenya is showing the highest growth, with 27% growth in the OLP in their constant currency in a year-to-date change. Well, let me hand over to Tanvir to dive more into the financial performance over the first half of 2014.