Bid Corp Ltd Ord

Good morning everyone. Welcome to BitCorp's annual results presentation. We're very pleased to report another year of positive growth in a very volatile and difficult macro environment. Our results continue to be enabled by our entrepreneurial culture and district centralised structure, enabling leadership to react quickly to volatile and changing conditions. Bernard and Dave will unpack results when I hand over to them. But before I do, I'd like to thank a few people. Firstly, our founder, Brown Joffrey, who continues to provide wisdom and support. To our senior independent director, Nigel Payne. To the head of our Audit and Risk Committee, Helen Wiseman. The chair of our Social Ethics and Governance Committee, Tasneem Abdul-Samad. And our other non-execs, Paul Bolloy, Cliff Rosenberg, and Kanilwe Maloka, who are always available and work very hard whenever they need it. We also welcome Trevor Brown and Cathy Austin as new board members, who I'm sure will play a significant role in governance and guidance going forward. Finally, a special thanks to Bernard, David, the head office teams Ashley and Lee, and the leadership and people around the world whose dedication and commitment enable BitCorp to deliver a positive growth story year in, year out. I will now hand you over to Bernard and Dave to take you through the results. Thank you.

Thank you very much Stephen. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everybody. It's a privilege to be talking to you again and going through our results for the year just ended. In addition to the thanks that Stephen has given and thank you to Stephen for your continued guidance, support and wisdom and inspiration in enabling us to do what we do. I want to extend my thanks first and foremost to our 31,000 team members around the world We operate in 31 countries We really do have an amazing team of people, an amazing management team who lead us in these countries and enable us to achieve the results we do. We're in the fortunate position that we get to talk about it and seemingly take the credit but it really is their hard work, dedication and more importantly ability that brings us to where we are and allows us to talk about what we're doing. So I will move around the shop a little bit here, as is my style, try to give you a feel for what happened in the year, but I think more importantly I'd like to spend more time at the end talking about the future. What's past is past, and I think what's more important and certainly more exciting is what the road ahead looks.

So once again, overall, I think this was a very successful year.

We don't need to overplay the volatility, the macro geopolitical problems, the economic headwinds, all that new stuff we can talk to and we can make excuses for. That's just reality. Get used to it. Probably not going to change. and we operate in the world we operate in and it's up to people like us and our teams to make the most of that situation. And I'm really proud of the way our business has stood up and reacted to the circumstances. And it's another year of growth. And I think it's a year of very, very solid growth. Now, obviously, on a very high level, when you look at the numbers, they're impacted by the strength of the RAND, which has about a 1.5% impact on the numbers. But we tend to focus on constant currency. We actually manage our businesses in local currencies. So the Polish business, we only talk about it in Zloty. And in Chile, we talk about the business in Chilean pesos. And whatever they add up to at the end of the day, they add up to. We have no control over currencies. It is what it is, and it adds up to what it adds up to. Over 95% of our revenue is not in rands. It's in various different currencies. So we talk about cost and currency, which is the best measure we can find of measuring things on a consistent basis from year to year, but we absolutely look at our businesses in their local currency, and they have to perform according to their local conditions.

So we've carried on doing what we do.

Yeah, that's a story of consistency. And I think the results are consistently good. We've seen another very, very solid year in challenging circumstances. And once again, I'm not making apologies for it. It is what it is. And we've got revenue up 5% in cost and currency terms. Bearing in mind it's very minor GDP growth, the weighted average GDP growth Corp Ltd Corp Ltd Ord Corp Ltd But governments are passing the burden onto business. And that's taxing business for the inefficiency of government. Once again, no good crime about it. It's reality. We've got to do what we've got to do. We have to seek out the efficiency gains to offset both imposts that are unilaterally imposed on business to various different degrees throughout the world. So we've got very many increasing by 5% which maybe is a little bit shy of where we think the ideal level would be or our aspirational level. There's also very little acquisitive growth in that 5% in the current year. We made five small acquisitions in the year Corp Ltd Ltd of developing house brand, of moving into more vertical integration like manufacturing and conversion process. Our expense base has been relatively well managed, bearing in mind the bulk of our cost is labour. We were impacted by high fuel prices from launch onwards. We've started coming down again in late May and June. And most of our businesses, we make the election not to panic, not to be jerk, and not to pass on the increases by way of surcharges to our customers. And I think that will stand us in good stead going forward, and we'll talk about that in the prospect. So, you know, we did take a little bit of a knock to the cost base as a result of the fuel price increase, but we managed that relatively well. The result of all that is our trading profit in constant currency by 8.2% in the year. And we don't like to play this game. But if we did play the game of normalising this, on an underlying basis we believe our operating profit was closer to 10% better than the prior year. And the normalisations we talk about there are very simply the direct impact to our Middle East business as a result of the war from late February onwards. Clearly that would have had a direct impact. were down substantially for a period of time, costs were elevated, supply chains were in disarray, so there were significant challenges which obviously did cost us both top line and bottom line in the Middle East, and also if we adjust for the raw impact of the fuel price increase. which, once again, we're not going to do because it's just reality and it's just part of the game. But if we did like others and did that normalisation, we think there's a very healthy 10% increase in trading profitability for the year. What is exceptionally interesting about that is in the first six months, our trading profit was at 6.9%. In the second half, our trading profit was up 9.5% year on year, compared to those six months, six months. So, notwithstanding the impact of the war and the higher fuel prices, etc., and that's on an unadjusted basis. On an unadjusted basis, our operating profit was 9.5% higher in the second six months, compared to the same period the year before. So that obviously tells you there's an underlying sequential improvement or a sequential increase in our profitability. Like I said, five acquisitions completed in various jurisdictions. That's not a year of huge acquisitions. We are alert for acquisitions. We are very responsible in what we buy. It's not acquisition at any price. On that front, we were relatively quiet this year. They've all been better done and are contributing. As we look forward, the runway of acquisitions is a little bit fuller. We have made four small acquisitions, or three small and one relatively small acquisition so far this year in two months, and we'll unpack those a little bit later.

Technology is a huge component of what we do.

We don't talk about it a lot and that's for strategic reasons. We understand that others look at what we do. We are seen as the benchmark Food service operator around the world. Our margins are at the top of the scale. And obviously technology plays an important part of that. And we continue to evolve our technology. And there's no one solution in technology. And AI is proving that theory. It's micro solutions through various different streams of the business. and there's incremental improvements in the multiplicity of areas. There's not one thing that's going to fundamentally change the business. There's a whole lot of things that are going to change the business to a micro degree which all added up are going to have a significant impact. So we're an exceptionally data rich business. We have half a million customers. We sell 400,000 different products. Every customer gets their product. Almost every customer gets their product at a different price to everybody else in every different market. So there's a huge amount of data out there. We have a huge amount of understanding. We've got a huge amount of historical data. And it's amazing what we can do with this in terms of looking at potential in terms of sales, in terms of margins, There's just a lot that's going on, and I think our decentralized culture is actually encouraging this, because the best results we're getting are where our people have the ability to do this very, very quickly. So the cost of doing it is becoming incrementally cheaper. As long as you can get your data and you understand what you're doing, you can derive benefits incredibly quickly. and we've got a multiplicity of these projects going on simultaneously around the world. And when we do get on something that looks like it's got potential, it obviously gets rolled out to whoever wants to take advantage of it, which generally is everybody who can. And we find we're able to get very speedy execution and take up of technological improvements and enhancements. Our teams around the world remain relatively stable. We've got a few transitionary situations which have been very well managed and our preference is always to have a strong bench to build the talent from within so you've got the correct cultural fit, the correct understanding and we can continue the growth trajectory in those businesses. So we've got a few of those going on at the moment. We are a team that's been together for a substantial number of years. We've still got a substantial number of years to go, but we are very cognizant of the fact that there are a whole lot of younger, probably far more energetic and far more capable people than us who are chomping at the bit and who are getting into positions of leadership in the group, and that's really exciting for us because they are pushing us, they're challenging us, and they no doubt are part of the reason for our success moving forward. So I think just moving through it, what are we doing? This story remains fundamentally the same. We don't come to you every year and tell you we've got a strategic refresh and we're changing things and we're getting consultants in and we're We're having to change our strategic path. We're on the path. We know where we're going. We know we can improve the scale of the business. We can increase the scale of the business. We know we can improve the margins in the business. There are various different components. Some have less, some have more upside, but they've all got some upside. And the challenge for us is to achieve that in some type of way. of harmonious, speedy way. We do what we do, and we don't plan to be good at everything. We're a reasonably competent food service distributor, and that's what we do. We do understand that we're also a relatively good manufacturer of product, and we're extending our capability in that. There's no doubt that that is giving us enhanced margins and benefit through the group, so we'll continue to drive that. we have a substantial number of manufacturing operations in the world around the world now doing lots of different cool stuff and that no doubt is pretty exciting about future prospects I've always said that there's organic growth within our business we've not reliant on acquisitions to grow this business there's plenty of organic growth in every market we operate in for sustained continued Corp Ltd And by having that strength, the acquisitions really do give you a much larger boost because you can get the synergies out of them relatively quickly. Our cash generation has been, I think, excellent in the year. We spoke about the fact in previous years that we had a bit of a catch up on CapEx. We haven't deliberately held back on CapEx, but we have gone through the peak of our spending which was catching up on some of the COVID delays so that should flatten out over a period of time we will continue to invest in capital because that provides the organic growth and that growth is a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot less risky than acquisitive growth we know we can put new distribution centres in we can put incremental capacity in and we get a relatively quick payback and they're long term assets So we're very proud of the strong underlying cash generation of the business and the continued generation. That's actually going to get stronger. The balance sheet is exceptionally strong. David will talk to that. We've spoken about the investment that we continue to invest as required. We've got state-of-the-art infrastructure. We continue to invest in further infrastructure. Our returns are all improving, so all the metrics are going the correct way. The Rothies, the Rakes, the ROEs, and all of you have got a different way of measuring things. All of you think you're right. I don't know what the right answer is, but I think the fact that they're all heading upwards and are all at, I think, very acceptable levels speaks to the success of what our people have delivered. From a sustainability point of view, I know that the urgency of that has sort of left the investment but it's actually an important part of what we do we do need to do the right thing and by doing the right thing not only are we doing the right thing for the planet we're doing the right thing for our people we're doing the right thing for our business as well so by having modern infrastructure by having energy efficient refrigeration by having an electric vehicle fleet where the charging infrastructure allows for it and the metrics allow for it all has a financial benefit as well and we have seen a substantial reduction in our emissions in the current year and we are well on track to achieve our targets that we set our 10 year target that we set a year or so ago. Moving on to the regional analysis, we started with Australasia. Now you all recall that for many years the Australia and New Zealand business were the poster child of the group. And I guess for the last year or two they've had a little bit of a breather. There was some growth out of Australasia this year, 2% in constant currency, which is both out of Australia and New Zealand there was some growth. Obviously it's not at the levels we were expecting. who were hoping for, all that we'd come to expect in previous years. Like we say, this is nothing fundamental. This is purely just a breathing space while we're back to reality. The New Zealand business has rebounded very, very strongly from about October last year onwards, and the Australian business has rebounded in this calendar year. We've seen quite a sizable improvement. The trading margins are still very, very healthy in the 8%. I'm comfortable that we'll see that improve. We will see revenue growth. It's not going to be at the 10%. We'd love it to be at the 10%, but it is going to be in the higher single digits, not the lower single digits. So both the Australian and New Zealand businesses are in very, very good shape. They did achieve all-time record results, notwithstanding difficult economies, difficult macros, whatever else might exist. The future continues to look bright there. They continue to innovate in terms of products, manufacture, vertical integration, house brand strategy. All of those issues are very well implemented as well as technology. There's a lot of technology that does come out of that part of the world that then gets adopted in our other businesses. So Australasia continues to be a very sizeable part of our business and performing at very, very strong levels. The UK had a very pleasing year. I told you we'd improve the margins and we've taken them from 3.7% to 4%. Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a lot. That's a 10%, almost a 10% improvement in trading margin, which is reflected in a 12% increase in trading profit. We have 7% revenue growth. That business is doing well on most fronts, notwithstanding the fact that the UK isn't in great shape. for the UK macro picture. The economy isn't really doing anything. The mood is negative. Consumer sentiment is negative. It's not a totally happy place. Once again, we ignore what we can't control and we focus on what we can control and our team in the UK have done that exceptionally well. So, yeah, it's a great story. They're well on the road to where we want them to get to. Not going to happen in one year, but it will happen over a few year period. The one spot that we are seeing a little bit of challenge in the UK market is in the leisure, the hospitality market. And that's just purely related to consumer spend. The consumer just isn't spending in that segment as much as Thank you for the UKQ they've delivered according to plan we're well on the road that Europe, once again, was the first child. Good on them. You can see margins have improved from 5.5% to 6%. There's still some more to go there. Almost every business in the European cluster showed improvements and performed well, some to a lesser degree, some to a stronger degree. Italy had a great year, and they've executed well with growth in the infrastructure that we put in a year ago. to enable us to move pieces around and get far more efficient logistical coverage through the country. We have to go through that process again. So the challenge story is not going to be a linear line, it's going to be a little bit lumpy, but we have to put in the investment to continue that growth for Nigeria. But as you get larger, as the base becomes larger, the disruption from those investments becomes much less. which, going back to the UK, we actually put in some capacity last year which came on at almost no cost to the overall P&L. So once you start scaling, the ability to add that additional infrastructure becomes far more diluted and non-impactful and then you start getting the benefit in the years that follow. So Anthony had a great year. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and our small business in Hungary had an awesome year. The start was a little bit slow. The summer last year wasn't all that great, but we picked up that slack as the year went on and it was strong. Thailand, doing amazingly well. Brilliant business there. Great margins, great revenue growth. Fantastic young team. Corp Ltd Corp Ltd Corp Ltd I know there has been some narrative from others that the market is disastrous and terrible. The market's not great. The consumer's not overly joyous and spending easily. But we continue to work hard at it, to grow our share, to grow our revenue base, and to grow our profitability. So both of them saw an increase in profitability and are are doing fine. We're certainly not where we were all that many years ago. There's still some improvement that can come out of the Dutch business and that will happen in the next few years. The Belgian business is operating at the correct levels of profitability and that will scale up on the revenue line which needs to drop down into the profit line. Spain and Portugal are our future www.corp.gov.au And it's no different in Spain and Portugal. We're on the right track. The businesses are profitable. We're doing the right thing. We're investing. We're putting infrastructure in. We're putting people in. We're putting the correct building blocks in place. We've got excellent teams. We've got good businesses. And now we need to scale them up, which will happen over a period of time. It won't happen in one year, but it will happen in a period of time. So overall the European cluster had a 13% increase in profitability and trading at 6%. Emerging markets was a challenge, which is a tale of two different stories. There's some very strong performers. in the basket and there's one or two that have held us back in terms of the ones that have held performance back Greater China continues to be challenging I think the year was a decline on the previous year not a material decline but it was a decline and we are taking steps to address that to simplify the business to get out of some areas that don't make sense But it's not easy doing business in China in particular, where you're selling Western product. It's not an overly generous market in terms of margins you can achieve at the gross level, highly competitive, customers highly price sensitive. So it does create challenges. The Hong Kong and Southern China business is actually remarkably resilient. So we've seen an improvement in in tourism and throughput numbers in that part of the world. And I think what's happening in that region is Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are becoming a Silicon Valley, if you like, of China. And that's going to be a region going forward. So I definitely think that's something we'll focus more on as opposed to the whole of China and trying to be everything to everybody in China. The other business that we had some challenges with, that had challenges, was our Middle East business. Everything was hunky-dory up until February, making very reasonable progress and then obviously the war came along and very quickly that changed. We are still profitable in the UAE and in Saudi, but not to the extent we were. We're hoping for a relatively quick recovery. We look at volumes. Corp Ltd and achievements through a very difficult time. Not only was the demand hit, but the supply chains were taking root. Shipping couldn't happen. Most of our product has to arrive by ship. It doesn't arrive by plane or road. And almost all the product in that part of the world is inbound. It's not domestic. So there were huge disruptions in logistics. They had to move things around. Things had to be air freighted in when they could be air freighted in. Shipments were delayed, shipments came in at the same time, ships were cancelled. Then you have date issues on product where you don't have demand but you've got the clock ticking on the date of the product. So they had to really contend with a lot of issues. They did it great but overall obviously it has an impact on profitability. In Turkey, we saw an improvement in the business. It still remains a developmental issue. We are still too small. We need to grow into our skin there and we're working very hard at that. South America had a much improved year and we're well on track there. Chile, we're starting to see some benefits of our labour. Brazil had a very reasonable year in a disruptive Corp Ltd Ord Corp Ltd The market's not special, the economy's not special, the environment's not special, our business is. And our operators have done an excellent job. And South Africa, once again, started the form of 15%. Moving back into Asia, Singapore had an overall black year, but it was a very important year in terms of repossessioning that business. and the fact that we got through the repositioning and managed to maintain our profitability sets us up for a very exciting future in Singapore where the business is now correctly structured. We've got a distribution business and we've got a manufacturing business. Simple. Do what they do, they'll do it well. Malaysia, we had an acquisition there in July or August last year of a local driver's business which added a whole lot of product to our portfolio which is very important and agency based products which is which is the right thing to do there's no doubt that we do not want to build our business on third party agencies because they are fickle and they they yeah They're good time, well I don't know what they're saying, but they're good time friends and in fact in Malaysia we're accessing one of our larger suppliers, now no longer larger because they've been diluted, in quite an important category which has been replaced by some other brands including house brands. But we certainly understand that our sustainability is built on our ability to control the product that goes through our system, not other people's product.

Very important.

So overall, that's where we ended up. We had all of that together. You get the number. I'm going to hand over to David to take you through all the exciting numbers, and then we'll come back and talk about the future. Thank you.

Thanks, Peter, and good morning to you all. Thank you for taking the time to listen to us. Listening to Bernard talk about the people reminded me of our founder's quote, Brian, where he said, people create growth and companies report it. So a special thanks to all, from certainly my perspective, all the people, our nation's health staff out there in terms of having generated this growth. We've basically thrown a challenge at us to deliver a reporting suite by the time we put the numbers out. And that has happened. The team sort of rose to the challenge and have delivered. So a special shout out to our finance team at the centre, or actually our business finance team at the centre, I think, to deliver on that. That reporting suite contains a huge amount of information. It's in terms of every acronym you can think of, Hire4Rest, Companies Act, King 4, King 5 and many other regulations. So that's all been achieved. I just remind you or encourage you to go through the information because I think it tells everyone a lot about the group and gives you a lot of granular information about the businesses. We've got new auditors this year with NPMG so thanks to them that delivers an unmodified opinion and also I guess a special thank you to TWC who were the auditors over the past 10 years for their contribution to the group. And now to the numbers. I think if you had to pick up one sort of comment, I'd say it's all about the cash. I think that was something that was fantastically generated, both cash in from the businesses and obviously out, and I'll talk a little bit about that. Many of you guys have spoken about gross profits, which I think was is a great testament to the execution of the strategy. Trend Profit is up 8.2% and Bert has spoken a little bit about the normalisations. HEPs are up nearly 7% in constant currency and I want to repeat what Bert has said about the constant currency but it is the methodology and the true reflection of the group's performance. Our dividend also for the year is up nearly 7% which is ahead of Normalised Earnings and we are rewarding shareholders. I think also a very encouraging stat which we expected was that we've got increases in returns and that's absolutely something that we are focused on particularly following I guess the snarky elevated capital investment programme over the past years and we can see that now starting to deliver. Free cash flow, as I said, was excellent at $7 billion, up significantly in the previous year. And all our metrics in terms of customers and the like, they tend to be very conservative at 0.2 times. In terms of P&L, I'm not going to go through each of the lines. A lot of it is already there. I think, as I said, the gross profit at 30 base points really is just the businesses executing on the strategic requirements, the strategic focus. Particularly as one of the businesses was to maintain market share and having done that there was some sacrifice of margins to continue with that particularly in economies where it is particularly competitive Corp Ltd Ord And I'm also, I think, of the cost of doing business, which rose very slightly. And that's really in the context of, as we've indicated, you know, higher cost inflation and elevators and remaining elevators. I think just as an example, I think the UK, because of these government imposts, absorbed about seven and a half million pounds of additional costs alone, of which they had to, you know, get more efficiencies. I think the cost of doing business in a slight increase from 19 to 90.1% is an excellent result. So, obviously, in the latter part of the year, the impact of fuel costs, although it's not necessarily a big number in the scheme of the group, you know, we're still seeing across most of the divisions somewhere between 40 to 50% increases, which basically were absorbed as could be indicated. Trade Profit is up 6.5% or 8.2% in currency and feasingly all that translated through to increased trading profit margins and I think that's even more impressive considering that effectively the emerging markets were flat and Australasia went back slightly so a really amazing result from a margin perspective. Looking below at Trading Profit Interest Our first interest was up a little bit in constant currency. That probably was our expectation that that would come down a little bit, but I think you wouldn't bear in mind that we did refinance some debt at higher rates. They're not necessarily higher rates, they're listed to the market. I think our credit margins are particularly competitive and in fact are excellent. It's really that base rate Corp Ltd Ltd Ltd is the tax rate, which is tied to somewhere between 26% and 27% and that's exactly where it's come out. But it is up versus the previous year, but we think probably stable from here on out. Yeah, HEMSA, each year it's up 9.4%. That's really a function of we had fairly large capital outings in the prior period, so that's reduced the base. That's the reason why it's south of the above where HEFs are. It indicated currency volatility which we had noted in all the updates going through the year. It did impact the results by 1.4%. We did buybacks on shares in the period post, I guess, March and that was really allowed because we had massive or excellent free cash flow generation and today we've basically brought back to the end of August and we did have a program in place through the first period about 1% of the shares in issue. So we'll see the benefits of that buyback. F27 Final Dividends up 6.25 cents per share but for the year up nearly 7% which is a little bit higher than what the policy is but in line with what we did in the first half. On the cash flow, I mean, as we've indicated, very pleasing results almost on every loan. Cash flow after working capital was up about nearly 18%, so fantastic results. Working capital was very well managed broadly. We measured over three different types of metrics, obviously the absolute impact, and we had a generation of Corp Ltd Ltd and that tightened from 8 days previously to around 5 and then the last area really is the working capital to revenue percentage which gives us an idea of the amount of working capital absolute amount of working capital invested to generate the revenue and that was also well managed and can be pretty tight at 2.8% versus 2.5% in the previous period. Just a reminder, obviously, the period ends are the best managed from our perspective. So that during the year, it does track around about 45%. So we see some work in capital release, you know, through the year, but for the, you know, period ends, period ends, it is actually the correct and genuine. Investing activities, yeah, basically 6 billion, of which about 1.2 billion was into acquisitions, not a huge chunk, and we're just talking about the 5 oz that were done. The maintenance complex is probably a little bit elevated, but I think one's got to just understand that in that maintenance complex there's a number of depots that were actually categorised as replacements. Although they've added additional capacity, there were replacements of all the depots. And net debt, if you look at the cash flow net debt, it is down at 2.8 billion, which is as expected after the freezing operating cash flows and the like as it flows through. Energy is in very good shape. I'm not going to spend too much time here. Obviously, it's from our perspective competitive advantage and we'll use it judiciously as we see fit. In terms of liquidity, we have a one-way maturation going forward. USDP, it's hard to believe it's five years since Russia invaded Ukraine but that was when we took out our first USPP debt and that's due for a repayment in March next year. We're looking at options but we'll deal with that most of the time. Our weighted average interest rates on foreign borrowers is 3.4% and as I said earlier I think that's normal and that's our expectation of where interest rates are going to be and you know in the short to medium term and even in the medium to long term. Our RCM was renewed this year. It is optionality from our perspective and we're obviously grateful to the banks, all six or seven of them that obviously supported us through that process and continue to support us in terms of affording us funding. Our funding long term is principally long term and from my perspective I think we've got it very easily right. I'm even going to get it right over you know three or five or seven year period but we think we are obviously borrowing at very very competitive rates particularly in the world we live in at the moment. So I'm just going to quickly all those ratios basically reflect a very very strong financial position. Going forward, just to give you some idea of food inflation and core inflation, but we certainly are no economists, and we could be doing wrong there, but that's our sort of expectation. Our working capital cycle will normalise, and our expectation, once again, as we trade into the festive season, in the first half of the year there will be some absorption, but we should get that back into the second half. I was talking about the maturity of the DSPT and we will look at the options for that. Our capital investments have been indicated for some time now are moderating and are likely to be in the 1.5% to 2% range where we've got it. We're not going to stop spending, but that's what we think is the normalised range. We obviously, and we've said this before, are conscious of balancing reinvestment with, obviously, shareholder returns. I think, just to note that we returned, including the shareholder, 5.2 billion of the 7 billion in cash flow to shareholders, and where the opportunity Exist will continue to supplement investments either in obviously Balsam Acquisitions or Shared Vibex to the extent that they're appreciative both to the group and to shareholders. No changes in the way we're managing the group from a financial perspective. As I said, returns have picked up and that remains an area of focus and our expectation is we should continue to see us being able to generate best-in-class returns. The year has started off well, so the results for both revenue and trade profit growth in July have been good, and we look forward to those continuing. So from my perspective, we'll just keep budgeting for continued growth into 2027, and on that I'll head back to Bert. Thank you David.

Take one second just to look backward for 10 years and being listed as Dip Corp for 10 years. And it's often good just to take a moment to reflect and say, have we done a reasonable job or not? I guess you need to be the judge of that, not us. We can only present the facts. Very mild two years were impacted by COVID, significantly impacted by COVID. But over the 10 years, TSR, including share growth and capital returns, has been about an 8% compound growth rate. Our HEPs have grown by 10% compound. Our dividends have grown by about 18%. It's probably a little bit higher than that when you get the final dividend compound over the 10 years. Our returns have improved. Corp Ltd Ltd Ltd That's been the 10 years so far and I think more importantly we need to just look at what the future looks like and I think there's a little bit of a maybe a disconnect as to what the future looks like from your point of view and from our point of view and we're most probably a whole lot more optimistic than maybe some of you are and where we are at the moment we understand that we're strongly cash Exceptionally strong balance sheet. We have a firepower to make acquisitions as they become available, at the correct price, at the correct metrics, with the correct strategic rationales within them. There's no imperative that we have to do an acquisition because that's the only way we grow. We've got enough underlying organic growth within our business to continue growing very, very admirably. So, the buzzword now is the algorithm. What's your algorithm? And our algorithm is actually relatively simple. Forget about acquisitions, because acquisitions we'll talk about separately. If we can see real revenue growth of around about 5% or 6%, we'd love more than that. We're aiming for more than that in the current economic environment. If we can achieve revenue growth of around 5% or 6% in a low-inflation, low-economic growth market, that's a good starting point. We will improve our gross margins. There's no doubt they will improve by 0.1%, 0.2%, 0.3%. As we continue to implement our strategy, our strategy of house brand, of vertical integration, of mix, of customer mix, we will control our cost base. Yes, there's high labour inflation of 3% to 4%. We can manage that. We are getting efficiency gains. So we can manage the... The cost base, we don't have to put substantial investments into this business. We're well structured, we're well capitalised, we've got fantastic facilities in great locations being able to offer a very high level of service to our customers. So the cost base isn't going to grow at the same rate as the revenue growth. and the margin improvement. So there's no doubt we'll see an uptick of about 6% in operating profit if those other metrics are in place. But on top of that, a little bit of efficiency gain as a result of AI, tech, and any other things that might come our way, but they're generally related to tech. A truck is fundamentally the same as a truck was 30 years ago. They use a little bit less fuel, But there are loads that are more congested. So until drones become a delivery methodology, we're stuck with trucks and there's not a whole lot you can do. Yes, you can maybe route them or route them a little bit more efficiently, but it's a small marginal improvement. It's not a huge uptick. But technology will play a role. Add on to that some acquisition and put on another 1% or 2% for acquisition in a normal year, which is quite a lot of acquisition based on the size of the base, but that's absolutely available up there. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out what the algorithm looks like. And that might not be achieved every single year, but that's absolutely the way I'm thinking it, as to what this business should be able to do. Which I guess brings us to where we're tracking. And we're eight weeks into the new year. The Northern Hemisphere summer has been exceptionally hot. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I actually can't tell you. I think it's a good thing and a bad thing. We certainly sell more ice cream, but has it impacted tourism? Has it impacted spend? I'm not really sure. The Football World Cup, was that a positive or a negative? I'm not really sure. Yes, people went out for it, but maybe they drank more beer and didn't eat so much food. Or maybe they didn't go on holiday because they went to America to watch the football, or they stayed at home to watch the football. All of these things are subjective. You can put whatever narrative you like out of them. But notwithstanding whatever's going on, our revenues are up about 6% for the eight weeks. And the other components of the algo that we spoke about are in place. So we've seen the continuation of the trend I spoke about, of the second six months being stronger than the first six months, we've seen that trend continue. So where we're sitting at the moment, eight weeks in, is we're very satisfied that we're on the right path. Yes, it's an uncertain world, yes there's volatility, but we seem to be managing that and heading in the right direction. Just going on to a few other things on technology. And we're putting this in because it seems to be the flavour of the day. You all want to know about AI. Whatever. You know way more about it than we do. We just know how to use the power of AI to get into the data to give us these micro-efficiencies. Many of them across many different aspects. One of the important things that is happening, we're putting quite a substantial investment into replatforming Our B2B solution has served us exceptionally well since we first implemented it in the year 2000, which is quite a few years ago, and it's grown and it's been developed. Unfortunately, the architecture, the under-the-bonnet stuff, has moved from an internal combustion engine to electric cars out there. We need to re-engineer the total influx. to enable us to give a much slicker, better, more comprehensive, outwardly facing product to our customers which will drive penetration, search availability, product availability suggestive, upselling, all those other things, menu planning, historical issues, which we've got all of that anyway. It just makes it that much more efficient, easier to implement, and give our customers the benefit of this technology, which enables them to transact with us easier, which hopefully means they transact with us more. On the rest of the business there's multiple streams of where technology is heading. Multiple, I've spoken about them, micro projects into lots of different areas of the business and some of the stuff that our teams have developed are absolutely phenomenal. We give them a task, a week later they come back with a solution That's absolutely mind-blowing. You get an app that does something that before would have taken weeks and weeks of analysis and would have been 80% correct, suddenly now it's 99% correct and it's instantaneous in life. So there's a lot of that that's going on. We are implementing agentic AI into certain aspects of the business. It is being trialled, it is being developed, it's being used quite extensively in terms of selling opportunity, health opportunity, where's my order, can I add to my order, can I place an order, do you have this, what's the price of that, etc. And a lot of that can be, is being developed with a genetic AI and obviously has quite a lot of along the path ahead of it and it's very exciting it's very difficult for an old bloke to understand all this stuff and that's why we've got young people in our business who are teaching us and taking us into the future and it absolutely is amazing and it's inspirational and it will be a game changer it's not going to totally unlock huge amounts of value but it is a game changer that will unlock it The other important part is what we call our continuum. This is our strategy. There's nothing new in here. We're just doing what we said we're going to do and do a little bit more of it. And you do all of these bits and you'll move up. You'll improve your margins by 0.1%, 0.2%, 0.3%. So looking forward, we're very confident of where we're at. We're strongly cash generative. We've got a very strong balance sheet. We've got a lot of firepower for when the right acquisition comes along. Our eyes aren't closed to the opportunities out there, but neither are we falling over ourselves to make an acquisition for acquisition's sake. I've got quite a few questions here. Some of them I think we've answered. I'll run through them relatively quickly. What is the typical payback here in the new distribution centre? It's a very difficult question to answer because you're building real estate primarily. So you're building a 30 year asset that's going to be worth more than you pay for it up front. So on the asset you've got no downside. When you do have a cost, if it's additional infrastructure, you're going to start with low volumes, you're going to not be profitable. We're generally finding within a year or two, a new greenfield site will be at least break even or profitable. So it's only a one or two year payback and then you start getting very quick incremental returns on that. What gives you confidence in Australasia and balance the high single digit revenue growth in FY27 given the economy has remained relatively weak? Maybe it's naivety, stupidity or maybe it's just the reality and we can see where we're tracking. We know where we are 8 weeks in. We understand why that's happened. We understand the customer mix. We can see some of the customer wins that we're achieving in both Australia and New Zealand. There's a pendulum, and the pendulum has swung, and we can see that that pendulum has swung. You're right, the economy's not great. The consumer's not great, and most of what you read is negative. The big retailers in Australia have reported their results today and yesterday, and they're both showing solid growth. Now, that could tell you, in an economy that's not growing, if the retailers are growing, that's coming out of the food service spend. But we're getting our share, and we're very comfortable with how business is tracking, We must be doing something reasonably right. Well done, strong cash generation. What sense of ecoduct do you think cash generation will be over time? I'll let David answer that. It's about 110, 120% by now. It's 110, 120%.

So it's strong. Yes, I think on page 25 of the presentation, or at the back, you can see what's done over time. in the last six or ten years.

And then working capital, what do you expect for F27? What do working capital days stand for? Probably five days is as good as it gets. And probably as we move on the continuum and get more into manufacturing, into the house brand, into import, you actually see the working capital go up slightly because your supply chains become extended. So, you know, hopefully we can keep it five, six, seven days somewhere in that trend. I don't think it actually gets better than that. I mean, I think 5 days is pretty good. Please give us more details on the ground level with food inflation or that there have been any knock-on effects from either fertiliser prices and or albino effects. We're not seeing food price inflation. It's just not there. I don't know what El Nino is going to do and I don't know what Fertilizer is going to do. It hasn't done it yet. Nobody's really on the ground telling us that there's huge inflation coming. So I can't answer that question other than to tell you that we're not in that inflation at the moment. Well done on the results. That's a very good question. Thank you. Last time we met you said that attractive acquisition opportunities were few and far between. Is this more the case and so what can we expect? Capital allocation wise going forward, more aggressive buybacks and more generous dividend. Yes, yes and yes. So our acquisition strategy is the same. We'll look at acquisition. There are a few that we're looking at. They may come off, they may not come off. I don't think we're going to look at something that bets for farm and is going to be totally Corp Ltd Ltd The business seems to be holding up remarkably well in all types of economic cycles. What do you view as the biggest risk to it over the near-medium term? Yeah, we're actually very comfortable with the fundamentals of the out-of-home market and that the food service market will grow over a period of time and people will eat more out-of-home than in-home and you look at the American graph of in-home and out-of-home that shows that and generally around the world over the longer term you get that as well. I think the biggest risk to our business, which is the same risk to most businesses, is one of complacency and one of resting on your morals. We constantly need to reinvent the business, reinvent ourselves, challenge ourselves, look for new opportunities, question what we're doing and stay engaged in the business. Nothing goes forever and you have to keep on top of your game. You can't let that arrogance and... And I honestly believe that the biggest risk to our business would be self-inflicted, not external inflicted, which means it's very controlled at opening, and we are aware of it. You've mentioned that food inflation hasn't come through as expected. If food inflation were to accelerate, would you view that primarily as an input cost headwind, or do you think the business would be able to pass through those increases sufficiently to make it a net positive for revenue and margins? We've always said that the sweet spot of food inflation for us is 2-3%, where we get a little bit of leverage because you can pass that type of increase on relatively easily. A few years ago when we had food inflation of 15-20%, that's very, very difficult. But we don't see that food inflation of 15-20% happening. We see it more in the lower area and maybe it will tick up. And generally, because of the diversification of our customer base, Because of the customer criteria that we trade with, generally there's a pass-through. You mentioned that, Jelima, was to continue the positive momentum seeding Q4, 26, hard system momentum transating to underlying constant currency sales growth, and what level of growth are you currently seeing? We've answered that, 6% sales growth, and obviously we're getting the leverage below that. If the current oil price remains at these levels, does this shift the economics of using EVs in your seat positively? Yeah, it does. There's however a big issue with EVs, and that's most companies don't have grids that are capable of charging the EVs. So, not only do you have to be able to afford the truck, but you have to be able to put infrastructure in that enables you to charge the truck. And because these are heavy vehicles, you need significant power, and in many jurisdictions, the grid actually can't cope with that. Now, the next solution to that, very technically, is solar. The issue with solar is that happens during the day. Our trucks are out delivering during the day, which means then you have to go to a battery solution, so you're charging the batteries during the day from solar and charging the trucks at night. It becomes very costly, very difficult. But I have no doubt that in five to ten years time, EVs will be a far greater proportion of the fleet than they are now. These issues will be overcome with technology and it's amazing to see the technological improvements that are happening over a period of time. With the elevated fuel price on a comparable basis, when diesel was at its high. We actually found that EVs were cost beneficial compared to IT vehicles. Once again, there's a little bit of an unknown because we actually don't know how long an electric vehicle is going to last for. Is the battery going to last for five years, seven years, ten years? Is there going to be any life left on the rest of the vehicle and the componentry after that period of time? That's all a little bit unknown at the moment. But we're really excited about what EVs Well done on the improved UK margin trajectory. You've indicated that the business remains on track towards its medium-term margin and profitability ambitions. Given the continued pressure on consumer spending, particularly across the more discretionary leisure and hospitality segments, what are the key problems that would enable you to deliver further margin expansion? Well, yeah, once again, it's the same... It's what we've spoken about all the time. It's the house brand, it's the manufacturing, it's the simplicity of the operation, it's the streamlining, it's all of those things. And we're doing a little bit of everything that's giving us the benefits. Our team is executing very well and we are seeing sales growth and sales... net sales acquisition of customers in the UK. So that is... That is going well. Sorry, I just needed it. Good morning. Congratulations. Very strong results. Could you please elaborate on the slower revenue growth in the Euro region for the second half? The first half of points in the FX revenue growth was 7.5%, with 40.5%, which in Clive's second half was only two and a half. What were the reasons for the slowdown in top line? I don't know that that number's right and we'll come back to you. That doesn't sound correct. So I wouldn't have expected that in constant currency there was any slowdown in the... But we talk about growth on a year-on-year basis. So we'll come back to you on that. I'm not sure I agree with that number. Where do you see the most attractive acquisition opportunities currently? In-country acquisitions are everywhere. Because like I say, we have relatively small market shares. We have the ability for this vertical integration. We're enthused about what we're doing. Just going back one step on the UK, one of the acquisitions we did make this year has been in the UK in this current year that we're in now, which is a small bakery, patisserie type of business, which tells you where our thinking is. where we see some of that margin enhancement. Please provide constant currency revenue and trade and profit growth trend in July and August 2026. Thanks for asking, but no, we've told you, 6% revenue growth and profitability is the end of that. Does investment in vehicle integration to manufacturing yield returns on capital commensurate with what the business has delivered historically? No, it doesn't, but it gives you returns that are higher than that. These aren't exceptionally high capital-hungry opportunities. Manufacturing isn't what people think it is. You only have the hugest factories in the world. Technology is bringing the cost of equipment down quite substantially. So, they're actually very attractive opportunities for us. Well, there are a lot of questions going to be out the whole day, David. Congratulations on the results of giving essentially negligible through FY27. The shares derated to 15 pounds with the board and surveyor accelerating the repurchase well beyond the 1% done in FY26. And what's the constraint? We're not going to go through the details, but obviously at these prices we see share buyback as a very attractive option and we'll continue to look at that. We need to balance that out with some potential acquisitions that may or may not be in the pipeline. We don't want to also put an underpin in the market and drive the share price up, so we're taking advice from that. Could you please elaborate on the acquisitions done post year-end, region, sizes? The last one is in New Zealand. It's an export-based business in the Pacific Islands and a Fijian distribution business. Revenues of about $80 million. The other three, one is in South Africa, a manufacturing business of food, specialist food manufacturing business. One of them is in Poland, a specialist food manufacturing business, and one of them is in the UK. Like I said, a bakery. The three of those are incredibly small. They're not going to shift the needle upfront in any way other than give us avenues of growth in the future. These updates on the UK Margin Target and when we hope to achieve this target. You know what that's about. Targets after moving fees. And it needs to be. Because maybe 6% is correct and maybe 6% is not correct. Maybe it should be 7%. So we're at 4%. If we got to 5% within a few years, I think we'd be doing well. If we got to 6% within a few years after that, I think we'd be doing well. Given that Europe delivered the strongest trading margin expansion this year at 46 pips, or Spain and Portugal are still in the integration and investment phase, how should we think about contribution from these markets to further European margin expansion of the benefits of structural investments, systems, integration, network and consolidation in food scale in the country? Look, we're at 6% and fundamentally we believe 6% can move to 7% over the next few years. When it's going to get there, I don't know. 6% is not utopia. And we continue to drive the business forward. I actually don't know what the answer is. There isn't an answer. Because when you get to 7%, then you say, why shouldn't we be at 8%? When you get to 8%, you say, why shouldn't we be at 9%? So there actually isn't an end to this. It's a continuum. We get to somewhere, so we can challenge ourselves to get somewhere further. Weighted average shares outstanding have increased despite barbacks. Can you explain why? Yes, I can. Because I went to university about 50 years ago, and they taught me about weighted averages. And we only brought them back in May and June, primarily, which means you've only got a two-month waiting on that. So for 10, 11 months of the year, they were an issue. And that's why it's a weighted average. Where am I? Oh. How many acquisitions have been made in the year? 27 we have today. What is the annual revenue? Like we said, 4 annual revenues was probably in the region of about, I'm going to guess, 500 million ROCs. Can you give us an indication of how large labour and fuel costs are in your cost base? I'm told that labour is 12% of our revenue. Once again, that's on average, and you've just got to be a little bit careful of averages, 12% of revenue sits in labour fuel is about half a percent of revenue so it's not the hugest number but when it does move about 50% or 100% obviously it has an implication but it is only half a percent of revenue it's not immaterial but 100% or 50% movement is quite a big number Given the strong balance sheet, will you raise the dividend payout ratio? That's a definite maybe. Obviously, it's under consideration. The Board does consider the questions of capital efficiency, and we look at the dividend, we look at internal uses of capital, acquisition, buybacks, all the rest of these things. So, yeah, there are a lot of moving parts. Those are all the questions. Thank you. I know this has gone on longer. Corp Ltd And it reminds me of a saying that I saw somewhere once from Henry Ford, who said, whether you believe you can or you believe you can't, either way you're correct. And we believe we can. We manage our business that way. We drive our business that way. We've got small market share. There's growth in every single one of our businesses. There's opportunity for improvement in every one of our businesses. And we're enthused and excited about the future. We'll see you all in November, I suppose. Thank you very much. Take care and good luck. Thank you.