Tiger Brands Ltd Ord

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, to all of you who have joined us in person here at the JSC, as well as to all of you who have joined us online. My name is Barati Mahuele, Investor Relations at Tiger Brands, and I welcome you to the Tiger Brands interim results presentation for the six-month-ended 31st March 2026. I'd like to acknowledge the presence of the chairman of our board, Mrs. Geraldine Fraser-Muleketi, as well as members of our executive committee who are here with us in person today. Taking us through the presentation this morning will be the CEO of Tiger Brands, Mr. Chart Kruger, as well as CFO Tushen Govinda. But before I hand over to them, I'd like to bring your attention to our forward-looking statement. And with that, I hand over to the CEO of Tiger Brands, Mr. Chartu.

Thank you, Bharati. Good morning, everyone. I can't be as formal as Bharati, so I'll just be normal. We are actually quite pleased with these results that we will share with you in the next hour or so. In relatively difficult circumstances, I think the journey that we started a few years ago in TIGER is actually on track and we're moving on. So let's go through. I'll do the highlights and the strategy update, and then Tushin will do the operational performance, and I'll do the outlook at the end, as we normally do. So just some highlights that we have in the business. So we're really pleased with the way that we've grown volumes in the business to get back our volume market shares and living our promise that we want to make our food more accessible and more affordable. to our consumers. So that 5% volume growth is really something we're very proud of, and we've been doing it for about 12 months, 18 months at the moment. Operating income, you'll see in the different businesses, grains and calories specifically, really uptick in margin management and margin improvement, and we'll cover later on exactly how those businesses are actually run quite well. Cash returns to shareholders, you've seen the special dividends, the share buybacks we've done over the last while. So significant cash return to our shareholders, which also drives the ROE, which is a significant improvement on previous times. If you look at our focus brands, we disclosed that well in this presentation. Our focus brands, you can see how we're driving our focus brands and how the results coming out from that, how the volume growth and how the profitability of our focus brands is growing. Then the balance sheet optimization, really a good story around our ROE improved to 26% and ROE improved to 24%, which is probably close to our median targets that we shared with you before. So very Very pleased with the performance around that. And there it compares to the guidance that we shared with you. So the only one where we're not on track, but that's by design, is the revenue growth, where we're deliberate to getting our pricing down. There's also deflation in some of the products, particularly rice. but we're driving our pricing to affordable levels, and we're very pleased with the volume growth that we're getting as a result of that, and that's not sacrificing margin. Margins are improving as well, so very good performance from that point of view, and there you can see the ROE guidance was to get to 20% in the medium term. We're way above that. Working capital is managed quite well. Gearing, we're not there, but the cash generative nature of the business A very nice problem to have is to struggle to get to this gearing. But that is where we will probably end up being, around that gearing of one times EBITDA. Then the simplification of the business has really tracked well. We're busy with the last few transactions to finalize that. Ran for thin has been done. We're busy with the beacon stuff and the consolidation of the sites in Durban. And the king food business we probably won't sell because it's actually turned around quite nicely and it's probably much more part of our breakfast strategy at the moment. ChocoCam is on track, everything's been submitted, waiting for regulatory approval. So everything on track, where we want it to be, and the business is actually performing quite well. Just a bigger picture in South Africa, if you look at our consumer, it is really under pressure, but you can see the deflation that we've seen in rice, and that's impacting quite heavily on our turnover growth. But I think what's quite important is the South African shopper. They shop more often, buying smaller basket size, which indicate the cash is not so freely available. We also know that in some of our products, the people buy 80% of those products are bought on promotion. So to know how to run promotional activity in the business becomes more and more and more important. And I think our business has actually achieved that quite well, especially the grains business, to know how to promote and when to promote. And you can see it in the results. Unemployment is still a big problem. If you look at our retailers, you can see the general trade is going quite fast. And that's why we've got many programs in the general trade to actually get our presence there. We are there through the independent wholesalers, but we've got specific programs to drive that growth of Tiger in the general trade. E-commerce is expected to grow. We're in there quite heavily involved. And then private label is dwindling a little bit, which is Partly, I think, in our categories because of our pricing strategies, and that's what I've said at every presentation here. I've said that private label is a competitor of ours. It's not something else. If we can't compete against private label, we're in trouble. And most of our business is doing quite a good job in competing with private label from a pricing point of view. So you can see that that's good news for us. Supply chain. The volatility with the geopolitical issues in the world, we haven't experienced too much of that. We haven't really got stuff coming out of the Middle East, and our supply chain out of mostly China, Thailand, those countries, hasn't been interrupted, and we're actually on top of it, but it's going quite well. But we are looking at working capital, where we have to go probably a little bit longer in certain areas that we make sure we don't run out of raw material. So on top of all of that. And Kishen will share with you digital tools and the digitalization of Tiger throughout the whole organization, what we're doing to make the business more efficient. Our strategy remains the same, no changes. We've got those strategic thrusts and we're working on each one of them. Cost leadership has probably been the most work the last couple of years. Portfolio has been sorted out. We think we're very close to having what we want to have in the business. We've really started, maybe two years ago, we focused more on just cost cutting and cost management. And not really looking at big marketing drives, but that has all started in the organization. Now we're really looking at our big brands and how we build those brands and how we position them. Executing our growth platforms, that's health, snackification, lots of work being done in that area. And then superior channels where we need our products. Most of our products, if not all of them, are consumed by our LSM groups. So we need to be in all channels and we need to be available everywhere, and a lot of work being done on that. And then enabled by, and I'm just going to cover one and two, it's igniting our people and driving the operating model. And you could combine that to say driving the right culture in Taiga, where we know what we need to do and we actually execute on that. And that culture in Tiger is really developing very well. And within that comes that we have to innovate digital capabilities, competitive manufacturing, but it's in that whole overarching drive of the culture of the organization, and we're making great progress in that. And then strategic ambitions is what we've spoken about, where we want to come from a profitability point of view, a margin point of view, return on invested capital, and then obviously we want to be an employer of choice, the culture I spoke about. So this strategy is what we've shared with you two years ago and it hasn't really changed, we've just progressed very well in all these areas. And my last slide on this section is really Tiger at a glance. And you can see our five businesses here. And you can see how we have the best brands that you can have in these categories. There's one brand that you can see where we silver with the second equity brand. It's Klassen Blackwell. We've already got back into market leadership, market share. This is equity share. I think we'll get back to number one here soon as well. So in all these categories, we've got the best brands that you could have. And it's our job to manage those brands appropriately so that we can generate the right returns for our shareholders, which is what we're busy doing. So great business, if you look at this slide. In each one of these categories, we've got the brands that we need. And we're very proud of these brands. And I think the comment that I've made previously is these brands actually belong to the consumers. It's not ours. It's just our job to make sure they're relevant to the consumer. With that, I will hand over to...

Thanks, Scott. Morning, everyone.