ASA International Group PLC

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to ASA International 2026 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 IR, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining ASRA International's 2026 interim results webcast. As you no doubt have already seen, we released our 2026 interim results first thing this morning. I'm joined here on the call by ASRA International CEO Rob Keijsers and CFO Geert Embrechts. Rob and Geert will run through this results presentation and afterwards we'll be happy to take any questions you may have. Before we begin, let me draw your attention to a disclaimer at the end of the presentation. Please be advised if you continue to listen to this presentation, you will be banned by this disclaimer. With the formalities out of the way, I would now like to hand over to Rob for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Jonathan. And of course, also from my side, a warm welcome to today's webcast. Let's move to the performance of the first half of 2016. Let me start with expressing my pride and gratitude towards our clients and staff. It's clear that AS International has delivered a robust performance in the first half of this year, with strong profit growth and a resilient portfolio expansion. And with the enhanced profitability, we also see a strengthened balance sheet. We've seen continued commercial success, with our client base growing by 11% in the first half of this year, first at the same period in 2025. This means that our client base now stands at over 2.7 million, and alongside its client growth, the outstanding loan portfolio or OLP increased to $600 million and represents an 18% growth first at the end of June 25. The first half of this year saw adverse currency movements which affects the dollar reporting of OLP. On a constant currency basis, the year-on-year OLP growth amounts to 24%. I did watch a flag that we now show client, branch and OLP data Excluding India, so as to better demonstrate the performance of our continuing operations. Power 30 has staked up slightly to 2.4%, but this remains at an industry-leading level and is a testament to the strength of the ASA model. From a productivity perspective, on average, individual loan officers are serving more clients than last year, with clients per loan officer increasing to 290 in the first half of this year compared to 285 in the first half of last year. This strong operational performance has translated into significantly improved financial performance, with reported net profit growing by 70% to $45.6 million in the first half of this year. This reported net profit includes the favourable impact of one-off items relating to India. If one excludes these items, underlying net profit amounts to $34.3 million, which still represents a 42% increase compared to the same period last year. and this profitability of course has boosted our return on average equity on a reported basis from 49% to 55% year-on-year. Again, mainly due to the in-year data one-offs. The strong level of profitability also further strengthened our equity base, which increased by 41% year-on-year. Accordingly, total comprehensive income of US$39.9 was generated in the first half of this year. which is 8% lower than the first half of last year. This of course reflects the continued growth in net profit which I just spoke about. Offset slightly by an adverse movement in the FX Translation Reserve as we saw currency depreciation across a number of our markets. It is this financial performance which means we can continue returning capital to our shareholders in line with our dividend policy. This morning we declared an interim dividend of $6.9 per share on underlying net profit, which is also 43% higher than last year's interim dividend. Of course, Geert sitting next to me will dive into the financials in much greater detail later in this presentation. And lastly, we were delighted to have been admitted to the FTSE All Shares Index in June, which is clearly a recognition of the hard work being undertaken by colleagues to transform the business over the last couple of years. Then to the next slide, we first showed and many more, as it was important to highlight the operational leverage that is inherent in our business. It is great to see that this trend has continued into 2026. As you can see on the slide, yet again we can see the scaling impact of the various KPIs, starting with client growth and moving through to net profit. Clients have grown 17% since 2023, which is 27% when you exclude India. When this is combined with immediately evolving working capital needs of our clients through larger ticket sizes, evidenced by OOP, outstanding loan per client, growing by 36%. We can see that gross OOP has grown by 60%. The strong growth in the loan portfolio creates a compounding revenue base, which in turn drives scale and efficiency. And ultimately, of course, the strong growth in the net profit. We simply put more load on the system. Then using the traditional operating jobs metric, we can see that revenue growth has outpaced costs by 34% points as operational leverage continues. Let me take you through our portfolio with the different regions. Here you can see that our well-diversified portfolio is driving OOP growth with the portfolio effects helping to drive the improved operational performance we are reporting today. In particular, we can see that our African regions are now the two largest regions by OOP. East Africa continues to be the largest segment with a 29% year-on-year growth, being driven by Kenya and Uganda. Tanzania, of course, remains a large market for us internationally. In West Africa, the 7% year-on-year growth was driven by a strong client demand in Nigeria. Ghana remains one of our top countries, but the OOP performance in dollar terms year-on-year was affected by the depreciating CDI. Moving to our Asian segments, in South Asia we can clearly see the impact of the deliberate strategic decision to exit India. OOP is now reduced significantly to $4.3 million, that is per the end of June. If you look further into early September, the balance sheet is basically empty. And excluding India, South Asia's OOP grew by 42% year-on-year. This was predominantly due to Pakistan, which is our largest operating country. and lastly in Southeast Asia it's more useful to look at the constant currency growth of 13%. Decline on an actual basis reflects the fact that we now have to use the market rate for the Kyat in Myanmar versus the central bank rate as was used in mid-25, rather than any underlying operational issues. Let me touch on our loan portfolio policy, which remains truly industry-leading despite the slight uptick seen in the first half of 26. This reinforces the fact that we are not sacrificing asset quality in the pursuit of growth. Of course, one of the benefits of the AASA model is that it consistently delivers high portfolio quality, as evidenced by the low Group R30 of 2.4%. From a regional standpoint, East Africa saw an increase in PARP, mainly due to the new trade regulations in Uganda, which affected many of our client businesses. and overdues in Ghana due to the rainy season and subsequent flooding drove the higher power in West Africa. It's worth mentioning again that despite these increases, the overall portfolio quality in those regions remains very high. South Asia's materially lower power reflects the contribution of the growing and high-quality Pakistan portfolio, as well as the wind-down of the loan book in India I just talked about. And lastly, Southeast Asia's higher power is driven by the Philippines, where the business is being restructured, and where we see encouraging signs now for the near future. I'll now happily hand over to Geert to review our financial performance in greater detail. Geert, over to you. Yes, thanks, Rob.