EPE Capital Partners Ltd (EPE.JO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Ethos Capital Full Year 2022 Results. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Peter Hayward-Butt. Please go ahead, sir.

Many thanks, and thank you very much to all our stakeholders for taking the time to join us today. Just so that you know, we are subject to have load shedding at 12. Hopefully, everything is in order. But if you do lose us, we will endeavor to get back. But hopefully, that won't be the case. In terms of the performance for -- I mean, the presentation for today, I thought we would touch briefly on the performance review over the last 12 months, how the portfolio has performed on the absolute and relative basis and spend a bit of time under Section 2, talking about some of the specific companies we focused on the top 90% by value. So the top 10-odd portfolio companies, which we can touch on, briefly talk about the liquidity analysis, as we've done historically, and then briefly cut at the end on the outlook. I'll endeavor to do that within the first hour, but we're very happy to take questions that at the end of it. In terms of the overall executive summary, very pleasingly in terms of the results. Our NAV per share was up somewhere between 27% and 16%, depending whether the Brait share price or the Brait NAV. Using the Brait NAV per share, net asset value per share increased from ZAR 9.19 up to ZAR 10.66. So a 16% increase. And then using the Brait share price, NAV per share increased from ZAR 6.67 up to ZAR 8.49, which was a 27% increase year-on-year. So a pretty pleasing performance in the context of a relatively difficult economic environment. We can touch a bit on that later. I think pleasingly, most of the portfolio companies have found ways to continue to grow profits, change their strategies, relook at how they do business and ensure that they came out better on the other side of the COVID collapse. And many of our companies, in fact, all but 2 or 3 of our companies now have profitability relatively significantly in excess of what they had pre-COVID. In terms of the carrying value of invested capital, around about ZAR 2.7 billion. Effectively, that's 100% of total assets. And very pleasing, the EBITDA growth for the year of [indiscernible] in revenue and 34% growth in effectively the average EBITDA growth shows how quickly some of the companies have come back from and bounced back from COVID to better than pre-COVID levels. And I think importantly, what was nice to see is it was very broadly done across just about all of the 23 portfolio companies so not situated in a few, but pretty much across the board. And again, we can talk a bit about that later. From an investment perspective, the investments for the year for Ethos Capital is ZAR 437 million. And again, we'll go into in a bit more detail. The 2 key ones is the Crossfin transaction, which is a new FinTech investment next to the mid-market fund and the Brait exchangeable bonds. From a trading perspective, obviously, the Ethos Capital share price continues to trade at a pretty significant discount to NAV per share. And I've no doubt we'll get questions around capital allocation at the back of the presentation, which we can touch on. And to give you some idea, and we'll go into a bit more detail on this portfolio company by portfolio company, but the understood portfolio company has valued by the market is valued at about 5.4x LTM. The 7.7 LTM EBITDA, which is effectively the multiple -- average multiple of the portfolio increased slightly, but that was more a reflection of the fact that we added the Crossfin transaction to the portfolio. Just about every investment was kept flat from a multiple perspective. Just talk a bit about the strategy. We've talked a bit about this before. We put a bit of this into the annual report. But there's 5 key phases, as you know, to the private equity lifespan. The first is a commitment phase, which we start by making commitments to various funds, et cetera. And we've got cumulatively ZAR 3.4 billion of cumulative commitments made to the various funds with net outstanding commitments of only ZAR 148 billion. So we effectively fully invested other than ZAR 448 million. In terms of the investment phase, as I mentioned, we invested ZAR 417 million throughout the year in new investments, plus ZAR 20 million of add-on investments as investments into existing portfolio companies and that totaled ZAR 437 million I referred to on the previous slide. So pretty significant investments throughout the year. And very pleasingly, if you look at the asset growth for the year, assets grew by ZAR 552 million in terms of portfolio growth achieved. And just about all of that came through profitability growth and obviously some share price increases in terms of the listed portfolio. On a perspective of realizations, we got -- we had proceeds of ZAR 43 million. A large component part of that is Optasia, the old Channel VAS business, but obviously, some realizations from other assets as well. And then the final part of that is, once we do have the ability to do capital -- to make capital allocation decisions, those really would form the basis of making a decision between returning capital to investors through buybacks or dividends or reinvesting in new investment opportunities. In terms of the market benchmarking performance, we've showed this chart before. Very importantly, the next 12 year performance. What we do as I mentioned to investors before, we've got an Ethos Capital mandate. So that's the effectively the JSE all share excluding any penny stocks, excluding international stocks, Naspers and mining and real estate because we don't invest in those. That gives you a portfolio of about 182 listed companies on the JSE. And over the last year, that Ethos mandate, those shares grew by 5% throughout the year. If you look below that, you can see the various funds that capital is invested in from Fund VI, the mid-market fund, Ethos Fund VII, the AI fund and then the Brait ordinary shares effectively at NAV. And you could see how those have grown relative to the Ethos mandate. And on the right-hand side, as I mentioned, our NAV per share has increased between 16% to 27%, depending what whether to use the Brait per share with the share price, and that compares with the 5% increase that we've seen in the market. So a very significant outperformance throughout the last 12 months. And again, broadly, that's been driven by earnings growth as opposed to any multiple accretion just about all the [ multiples ] kept flat year-on-year. As I mentioned, we added Crossfin to the portfolio, which has increased the average slightly. And you can see that below we've kept probably for the last 3 years, to be honest, the EV/EBITDA multiples remained relatively flat by new assets that have come on to the book. And as we can see over the last 24 months -- sorry, last 12 months, the market's EV/EBITDA came down by 12%, and there was a slight increase in our multiple from 7.5 to 7.7 largely due to the Crossfin transaction. In terms of value accretion, where did the value come from? We started the year with a 16% increase. We started the year with ZAR 2.1 billion in terms of NAV. That grew over the period to [ ZAR 2.71 billion ] using the share price of Brait and MTN Zakhele. And most of that, as you can see, ZAR 208 million of that increase came from earnings growth across the portfolio. A very small amount came from multiple accretion. FX movement, that largely relates to Optasia. We'll touch a bit on that in the valuation later. It's a U.S. dollar-based business, obviously, translating that back into rand. When you've had rand depreciation, it increases the value of that asset. That increased the value by ZAR 100 million. And ZAR 200 million of the value increase came through the listed portfolio share price increases over that period of time. In terms of liquidity, as I mentioned, we are now fully invested at ZAR 2.7 billion. We have undrawn facilities with the RMB facility that we have. We reset the facility and the covenant levels back in the back end of last year in November. And the current undrawn commitments, as I mentioned earlier, is about ZAR 148 million. So that's a net site so we would need to make to any funds that we've already made commitments to. In terms of investments, Ethos itself as investments of about ZAR 831 million for the year. Our share of that is Ethos Capital was ZAR 437 million. And of that ZAR 437 million, ZAR 122 million was actually funded through the Fund VII debt facility. So we didn't put any capital in for that. So our net was effectively the difference between the ZAR 437 million and the ZAR 122 million. As I mentioned, proceeds of ZAR 43 million largely from dividends from Optasia, Gammatek and the coupons on the Brait exchangeable bond. And 2 assets have been exited over the last 6 months or so. The first was Neopak where we agreed to sale as at December 2021. That remains subject to competition [ by banal ] which we would hope at the end of the next couple of months to get some tights on, but that resulted about a 21% premium to the 30th of June valuation, which is when the deal was done. The console sale in November against an international party. The proceeds for that for Brait was about ZAR 400 million at a 37% premium to the prevailing NAV as at March 2021, which is when the deal was struck. From a strategic perspective, I think very similar to what we said historically. We continue to focus on as Ethos are looking at potential optimization of the portfolio, but also exits. There are a number of assets in the exit lounge. And we've undertaken as a Board to continue to focus on maximizing value and return of capital, not only return on capital to shareholders. And that would form the basis going forward of any potential, whether it be dividends, buybacks. No new fund commitments will be made until we started to see some of those funds flow back from the various funds, which is hopefully relatively imminent. Moving on to some of the portfolio companies. We'll go into this in a bit more detail company by company, but to give you a very high-level view, Optasia, which is the old Channel VAS business, it was rebranded, had an extremely strong operational performance, and that's despite some increased FX losses across the businesses. So for example, the Nigerian business, the Nile River grew hot throughout the year, so it may obviously reduce the dollar component of our earnings, but still continues to have an extremely strong performance, 27% up in dollars year-on-year despite that those FX losses. And that's been relatively broadly through advances growth, high services penetration and continued cost control and default management, which has been very positive. The business development pipeline remains very robust, and we continue to see good growth, not just by geography but by new products, particularly on the mobile financial services business. So a great performance from Optasia. And Echo, really a tale of 2 halves. The South African business performed extremely well, very significant year-on-year growth in EBITDA and revenue, very good focus on cost, but also driven by some new products and new clients, which has been very pleasing. On the left pleasing side is the international business really has continued to underperform. And I think what probably underestimated is just how long those sales cycles take. We have 1 or 2 very big contracts, which is pleasing, but it does take a lot longer than in the South African business to convert sales and pipeline actually into revenue in the fill. The Vertice business was obviously a business significantly impacted by COVID, particularly related to elective procedures. We are seeing that normalize. But as I said the last time we spoke, it's probably slow than most people expected. But the traditional businesses are growing, which has been very pleasing, and management are very much focused on ensuring that we get the requisite synergies between the 8-odd businesses that we've put together. Synerlytic has recovered to pre-COVID levels, which is positive, but it has taken longer than we expected. It was hampered a bit by the July civil unrest. Those businesses are down in KZN. The WearCheck business is slightly behind budget due to soft recovery in oil sampling. And that business has invested in the sales force probably ahead of Perth. But very pleasingly, the AMIS business and particularly some of the businesses that the sport, particularly a Canadian business that is bolted on, really has benefited from buoyant commodity price. So overall, probably relatively flat, but good business, good performance from AMIS and probably start the underperformance from WearCheck. Gammatek, very robust recovery has continued. We'll show it in the numbers they an EBITDA growth up 60-odd percent. And that's come through market share gains, new products and expanding the brand and portfolio. So that's been very pleasingly pleasing and the cash generation in that business remains strong. The most recent business, it's mid-market fund is acquired Crossfin, very strong business go throughout the year, EBITDA of 34%. And again, driven pretty much across the board, and you will have seen that the business that we invested in call Retail Capital has received an offer from TymeBank at a very significant premium to where we valued. And that business looks like it will be sold to TymeBank, as I mentioned, at a very significant premium more than 100% what we value that business on the way in. Moving on to the Brait portfolio. Brait released a SENS a couple of weeks ago around Premier. Premier has continued to perform very strongly. We had a very strong -- has had a strong 6 months to September. We mentioned double-digit increase in EBITDA has continued, and that's been driven probably 50-50 by volume growth and price inflation. So very pleasing to see that volumes have continued to grow despite some of the cost increases that have had to be passed through to the market. Also, nice to see is that it's not just the MillBake business that has performed well. It really was across the board. And Mister Sweet business has realized, I think it's more than 100% of the synergies that had targeted pre the acquisition. So that's been good, and the combined business has continued to perform above budget. And the groceries in international business has also continued to perform well. So pleasing performance at Premier continued, and those results will be reflected in the 30th of September, 6 months for the year. Virgin Active, again, we've mentioned this before, slow progress. But every single month, we grind ahead. There hasn't been a month where we've gone backwards very pleasingly. August and September were actually very good sales months, literally across all of our territories, which has been pleasing. The South African business continues to show good traction. We've reinvested in the portfolio as we said we would do 6 months ago, and I think that's having a good impact on both terminations and sales. Italy, as we mentioned, restrictions were lifted as of probably end of March, so not that long ago. But the last couple of months have seen very good traction around sales. The key issue there remains very similar to the U.K. is that some subdued performance in the inner city clubs. And that, as I mentioned on the next bullet point, is very similar in the U.K, the provincial clubs and even some of the London residential clubs are back to very close to COVID levels. Sales at very good rates in those 2. However, that's offset by the London corporate clubs, which do remain slow due to changing work-from-home protocols. The APAC business has continued up to probably 2 months ago to be impacted by on-off COVID regulations there, but they are now all open and just about across the board, there are very few restrictions in those markets. And whilst it's relatively small in the context of Virgin Active, we would hope that those businesses relatively quickly come back to contribute to the group. From a New Look perspective, I mean, obviously, I think everyone knows how difficult the U.K. retail environment has been for that end of last year, the third quarter, which was the December quarter last year, was very disappointing. But actually, the business has performed well and in line with budget since then. So for the last 9 months or so has been relatively good. And that's despite some of the supply side constraints and Omnicom issues that we faced in that last quarter. So some of those are hopefully behind us. The management continues to look at ways to recalibrate costs and optimize the business, which we'll hopefully continue to have benefits going forward. In terms of Brait in terms of what has been done on the portfolio over the last 2 or 3 years, to be used, reminding everyone that the strategy there was to maximize value and realize value from the portfolio over 5 years. Ethos has now been in the saddle, I think, just over 2.5 years. And if you look at the bottom left-hand chart, Premier currently sits at times money back, i.e., twice what the value was when Ethos took over the Brait portfolio. Obviously, that's an unrealized number, but that's where it is in our books. Virgin Active is still marked at 0.8%, so less than the value that it was when we took it over. Iceland has been realized at 1.7x the value that Ethos took over. New Look remains in our books at currently 0.8x. And then both DGB & Consol have been sold and realized full value. And on the right-hand side, obviously, we mentioned the realizations pretty significantly gearing through the rights issue and the exchangeable bond issuance in December last year. And around the operations, just under ZAR 0.5 billion of costs that have been taken out per annum from the great operating cost model. And from a portfolio perspective, is huge amount of work has been done around restructuring the Virgin Active Europe and APAC business and obviously, the New Look business, which has been through 2 CBAs. And Premier, as we mentioned, remains ready for a listing and that business has been prepared for that. I won't dwell on the key investment sectors of this, but I think it talks a bit, and we talked about this in our annual report. What has been pleasing over the last couple of years is to see the fact that the tailwind sectors we even invested behind really have started to pay dividends. I think it's shown itself in sustainable recovery of the businesses that we've been invested in, but also the significant growth that we've seen both on an absolute and relative basis. We continue to focus on those 6 key themes to ensure that when we're putting money investors now need to work that one of those -- at least one of and you can see, in most cases, more than one of those tailwinds themes are affected in the businesses that we buy. And then I think one thing that's important, I think, in private equity, private equity is a business that's about realized returns. It's not about unrealized returns. It's about putting ZAR 100 to work and ended up with what is your realized return? Is that ZAR 200 million, ZAR 300 million, ZAR 400 million in cash proceeds? And I stress that it's not about unrealized returns. The most important thing for us is to turn the portfolio companies that we have in to realize value and return that to our investors. If you look at Ethos as a history over many, many years, going back to 1997, III, for example, had a return IRR of 26%, 3x money back. Fund IV was 29 and 3.9x money back. Fund V, which happened to have on Nigerian asset, which didn't go particularly well, still had a TMB of 2x. And if you look at the new funds since 2016, and really it's since 2020, the exits that have been made, we look at those on average, there's a TMB of 1.9x money back, and IRR 20% realized return and very importantly, a value uplift. That means what value accretion was over the last marked unrealized value marker, and that was 35%. So for example, if we held the asset at ZAR 100 million, that asset had been sold at ZAR 135 million. So if you look at that on average, over the last 2 years, we sold 7 assets, very significant accretion to where we held it in the books and continue to realize returns certainly north of 20% despite the very difficult environment that we find ourselves in. And very importantly, when we go to analyze our returns, and this comes back to the point I say by private equity being about realized returns and not unrealized returns. If we go back over 15 years, so this is not in 15 years, just happened to be Fund III was done. So to give you some idea, 75% of value accretion in private equity occurs in the last 3 years of a portfolio company's life. So if we own it for 7 years, the last 3 years of that contributes 75% of the value uplift and 42% of that comes actually in the last year. So very similar to that 35% number I talked to just now, a very significant amount of that talks to the last year. And that talks to running good sales processes, setting businesses up for sale, ensuring that you've got good credible buyers for the businesses and ensuring you put those assets into the market at a time when those potential trade buyers can actually execute. So the current Ethos capital portfolio is only 3.3 years old. So it isn't yet into the realization phase. But just to look at history, and I can't say histories going to necessarily repeat itself. But over a very significant period of time, what this graph does show is most of the value realization comes, as I mentioned, in the last 3 years or last 1 year of portfolio companies live. Moving into the portfolio overview. The first, just to give you an NAV overview, the NAV as 30th of June 2021 was ZAR 9.19. The increase over the period of time was ZAR 1.47 giving you an NAV of ZAR 10.66. The constituent parts in terms of growth there are rates increased its NAV by ZAR 61 million. Optasia a very significant increase in value of ZAR 228 million, and we'll touch on that later. Other investments constituted ZAR 76 million of value uplift. The rate exchangeable bond, ZAR 200 million. We invested in that in the last 6 months, and similarly Crossfin, which was invested in the last 6 months. So the increase in borrowings of ZAR 292 million that you see reflected there was to fund the increase in the -- sorry, the cost on transaction as a great exchangeable bond. So that has led to either a 27% increase or a 16% increase in the NAV per share over the last 12 months. In terms of the portfolio construction, we show the numbers in 2 different bases, one using the Brait NAV per share, the other using the Brait share price. Using the Brait NAV per share, Optasia still a very large part of the group, constitute 24% of the group. Premier is 17% and 15%, respectively. And then you can see the other portfolio companies below that from rates exchangeable bond through to Primedia. And what it shows, as we say at the top is the top 10 assets constitute about, call it, 90-odd percent of the value. And those are the companies we will focus on today and looking at the valuation. If you look at the top left, quickly, in terms of the split, in terms of NAV contribution, 56% of that comes from South Africa, pleasing the 37%, which is largely Optasia be honest to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. And then obviously, we have some contribution, particularly through Virgin and New Look in international, is predominantly in the U.K. In terms of growth throughout the year, very pleasingly and just looking at the bottom left-hand chart, what you can see is there was very broad growth, 34% EBITDA on average growth across the portfolio this year. And very pleasingly, 70% of our portfolio companies by value increased EBITDA at 25% or more. So it wasn't highlighted in 1 or 2 portfolio companies, but pretty broadly across the board, which, as I mentioned, 70% of our portfolio companies by value increased EBITDA by more than 25%. The biggest contributors, as I mentioned before, Optasia, a 47% year-on-year increase. We'll touch a bit on that later. And more than -- most of that came through profit growth, but a part of that came through exchange rate depreciation in the rand versus the dollar. The Brait share price was up 42% year-on-year to ZAR 4.06, I think, or ZAR 4.03, I can't remember, as of the 30th of June. And you can see as you go down the pretty good in terms of the change or growth year-on-year from Gammatek, the exchangeable bond in TymeBank, and we'll touch on all of those later. There were a couple of detractors from AU, a relatively small one. Kevro being another one. And again, we will touch on that when we talk about the portfolio company. From a valuation perspective, what we've shown before, and we show again is what are the market implied enterprise value over LTM EBITDA multiples. Or in the case of that box at the top there, the effective P/E ratios that the market is implying on our portfolio companies. But to give you some idea of the Optasia business is being valued by the market effectively at 5.5x EBITDA or an 8x P/E. And you can read across if you would like to look at to see how the market is valuing those portfolio companies. In terms of contribution to NAV, obviously, Optasia continues to be a very significant part of that, ZAR 765 million valuation as of the 30th of June 2022. And if you add the 2 listed value plus the exchangeable bond, that's another ZAR 723 million. The combination of those 2 is more than our current market cap of the business. So as we said before, the current market cap currently trades at about a 46% or 50-odd percent discount to the Brait -- sorry, to the attribute NAV, as you assume the Brait NAV per share. And a key part of the Board's mandate is looking at ways to close that discount going forward. Moving on to the portfolio companies themselves. We're starting off with the largest one of Optasia. Optasia had a great performance year-on-year. This is a business that really has become the leading. And I'd say it says, a leading out question whether it's not the leading Emerging Market FinTech and Data Analytics platform. It really has shown growth, not just on the continent here, but now across the Middle East, Latin America and Southeast Asia, so showing that you can leverage the product and what we've learned, not just on the continent, but across other continents as well. And it really talks to its market-leading capabilities around credit scoring, it's present in over 30 countries, across 4 different continents. It's got a captive user base of more than 530 million customers, and it really has continued to grow. If you look at the right-hand side, we show scaling everything back to 100. You can see the growth since June 2020, the 100 went up 18% to '21 and significantly more than that, 33% in U.S. dollars in terms of revenue growth this year. In terms of LTM EBITDA growth, it grew by 27% year-on-year. And that was a function of 2 things. Firstly, the airtime credit services business, which grew both in the existing businesses markets we're in, but also the newer geographies. But also very importantly, the mobile financial services business has continued to contribute very strongly to the overall growth and significantly exceeded some of our profit expectations in the budget. So the equity value for this business is up 47% year-on-year. As I mentioned, 27% of that comes through EBITDA growth. And the rest comes through a devaluation in the rand. The rand went from ZAR 14.27 as at June '21 to ZAR 16.37 as of June '22. Obviously, today, it sits north of ZAR 18. So some of that trend has continued. And so the valuation -- the equity valuation is up 47% year-on-year. And that's in addition to the very strong cash flows. The business is currently ungeared. And we've had ZAR 172 million of distributions to date since our investment started in that business. So again, a very strong performance. It results in the business being up at 2.5x money compared to what we put in. So we put in 100, it's now worth 250. And the business has continued over the last couple of months to show significant profit growth. I won't dwell on all of that on this slide, I'll let investors read it themselves. And moving on to Vertice. Vertice has also had a decent performance. It has continued to be impacted by COVID. As we mentioned, this is a business we started in 2018. It was set up as a buy-and-build platform in a highly fragmented industry, 8 acquisitions since we set the business up across a number of different products and services, medical services, is now really one of the largest medical service providers the most diversified in South Africa, 10% of the revenue is outside of South Africa, but it still remains predominantly an SA business. It's got highly differentiated products and services. And I think very importantly now as a platform that is scaled, we believe we've got a uniquely qualified sales force that differentiates us from other people in the market. And healthcare, I mean even, I don't need to tell everyone else this, but healthcare is fundamentally a business that is going to be changed and transformed by AI, and that really has been the thesis that we've invested behind in the Vertice business. So on the right-hand side, in terms of financial performance, as we mentioned, the elective procedures have started to normalize. It's taken longer than we thought. And Vertice had a pretty good start to the financial year, a decent start. But definitely, in the year to June, it was impacted by COVID and obviously a relatively slow start once we came out of COVID in February, March last year. In terms of revenues, revenues were up about 4%, EBITDA, up about 5% year-on-year. And the large specialized businesses in that -- we talk to the oncology business. We talk to the cardiovascular business and some of the other bigger businesses. Surgery have performed very above budget. There are a couple of underperforming business units and particularly around getting those integrated into the Vertice platform. And then we made one notably sizable acquisition in terms of Endo Vision, and that really has been value accretive to shareholders and remains on track to achieving its budget. So the equity value of this business is largely flat, slightly up 3% given the EBITDA growth year-on-year. Again, I won't spend a huge amount of time on the strategy platform other than say Vertice still has less than we think 20% by value of all claims in the categories it plays in. So that talks to being able to grow market share where it does play. But even more importantly, on the right-hand side, there's another 50% of products and categories that we don't actually currently play in. So potential, therefore, product expansion either organically or through acquisition. In terms of Echo, as I mentioned, at the front, Echo really has been a tale of 2 halves. The South African business has done fantastically well. It's grown revenue by 21% year-on-year. EBITDA is up 54%, lower churn and increased cross-sell to existing customers has played a role. Gross margins are from 24% to 29%. And the EBITDA year-to-date since its year-end is materially up and ahead of budget. So the South African business continues to perform strongly, which I could say the same for the international business. The international business has struggled to be honest. I mentioned beginning the long sales cycles and slow conversion rates on this pipeline have continued. But we have won a very significant retail contract that isn't in the revenues yet. It will be realized once the contract is rolled out. But for now, we kept the equity values largely flat despite the strong performance in South African LTM, as you can see, went from 100 down to 86 this time last year, has catapulted up to 133. So the South African business continued to perform well, but we need to wait and see that the international business can turn the corner and management are working hard to ensure that does happen. Moving on to Synerlytic. Synerlytic has really got a few businesses really. It operates as we know in the testing, inspection and certification business. The WearCheck business really revolves around condition monitoring and fluid analysis throughout Africa, and we're trying to grow the business into Africa. And the second is the AMIS business, which provides certified reference materials to the mining labs, et cetera, and is one of the few in the world that does that. And again, relatively a tale of 2 halves. WearCheck underperformed slightly relative to budget were AMIS business, and particularly with the acquisition of the Canadian business, it outperformed both budget and our expectations. So if you look on the right-hand side, in terms of LTM revenue, there has been growth in revenue, 6-odd percent year-on-year. So it's significantly above when we took the business over, which is about June 2020. So revenue is up. And very pleasingly EBITDA is also up since we acquired the business very significantly up 66% up on when we bought it. But in terms of maintaining EBITDA throughout the year, it was relatively flat. So from an equity value perspective, we've kept the valuation [ checked ] year-end. The multiple remains the same, as does EBITDA. There was a slight element of de-gearing in the business. Moving to Crossfin. Crossfin was the deal that we closed out at the back end of last calendar year, so I think it was November, to remind people. Crossfin is a fintech platform that we believe is very scalable. It's been able to grow and leverage the products, services that it offers across its platform. We think it's a tailwind space. We think there's lots of white space still to continue to grow in. And we think the major thesis here is to close the gap between issuance of cards and the acceptance infrastructure in the retail markets, particularly in the lower tiers. So if you look on the right-hand side, how has the business performed very significantly up over the last 2 years. So from ZAR 100 million to ZAR 129 million, that's gone up to ZAR 162 million. So a very strong growth of 26% in EBITDA. As you can see, over the last 2 years, EBITDA has gone from ZAR 100 million to ZAR 237 million. I caveat some of that being through the Cyber transaction that we acquired. So not all of that is organic growth, most of that significant amount is, but the large component of that was 5 as well. So over the last 12 months, and that is a like-for-like basis, EBITDA growth of 36%. The Adumo business, the acquiring businesses have shown very, very robust growth, which has been very pleasing specifically as some of their clients come out of COVID. But very importantly, iKhokha, which is probably a significant component part of the value, has delivered really record merchant sign-ups. We've invested heavily in marketing in that business. That's where some of the capital has gone, and we're starting to see the benefits of that in the record side house. The Crossgate business, which is the card business, is slightly slower than we would have expected. But Retail Capital, which is the business that continues to drive record advances and its profits are up 100% year-on-year, that is the business that TymeBank has offered to buy from us. As I mentioned, it will deliver very strong investment return for us. We'll get more than 27% of the capital back that we invested into the whole custom business. So the value of that business was probably more than 100% of what we value the business at as of November. So the equity value up 11%, we kept all of the businesses flat because it's still relatively new in our life cycle. But obviously, we reflected the slightly higher retail capital valuation in that. So that 11% value increase doesn't reflect the increased EBITDA in the businesses. What it does reflect is effectively a higher value for the retail capital business. Moving to Gammatek. Gammatek for those of you who don't know, is a leading distributor of mobile accessories, just about every store, [ Vodacom ], now MTN that you go into has got its products. And if you look on the right-hand side, the very pleasing performance from a low in June 2020 is continued revenue up very significantly year-on-year from ZAR 125 million equivalent to ZAR 151 million. So just over 20%. But very pleasingly, the EBITDA growth, if we start back at June 2020 at ZAR 100 million, grew to ZAR 149 million. That growth has continued to be up by 16% to ZAR 170 million. And importantly, the cash generation in this business has been very significant, and it started to pay dividends to its investors. The equity valuation up 34% year-on-year, largely reflective of the 14% growth in EBITDA and the de-gearing in the business. So the multiple remain constant. In fact, if anything, I think the multiple may have come down slightly, but good strong growth in profitability and de-gearing, $31 million paid in terms of the dividend has ensured that business valuation is up 34%. Moving to Primedia. This is a business that we set at the time last year saying it was under significant pressure. We appointed a new CEO in that business. He's done a fantastic job in the last 8 to 9 months turning the business around. As you know, it's got 2 key parts to the business. The first is the broadcasting or the radio side of the business, 947 KFM and the talk radio stations. And then you've got the out-of-home business, effectively, the outdoor billboards. Both of those businesses have contributed very, very significantly to the rebound. LTM revenue up 17%, but probably more importantly, LTM EBITDA growth of 32% year-on-year. And if you look at that compared to where it was pre-COVID at 100, it's getting back to the profitability levels it was just before COVID. So a very positive turnaround in this business, good trading momentum. We haven't changed the multiple. There's been some de-gearing. And so the equity value is up 14%. We've kept the EBITDA maintainable, EBITDA largely flat year-on-year. So all of that is reflective of the strong cash flow year-on-year. Moving to the last portfolio company, TymeBank that we'll discuss today. TymeBank, as you know, is a digital retail bank, had started off with South African roots. It looks at providing digital technology to make banking both simple and affordable. It's been a phenomenal journey for this business. If you look on the right-hand side, it's growing its customer base to north of 4 million customers. Its current active customer base is north of 1.5 million as its line that's continued into August and September. And as you know, as I mentioned, this business recently made a bid for Retail Capital, which sits in our Custom business and that's a subject to regulatory approval. There were 2 capital raisings, 2 separate capital raisings with third-party capital investors coming in throughout the last 12 months. And both of those at very significant premiums to our in cost, but the last one is a double the cost that we put in our capital to the business. So we were required to write the valuation up on this business. It effectively doubled from 1x TMB to 2x TMB throughout the year. So a strong performance. It has continued. Very pleasingly, we were -- TymeBank got a banking license and started operating in the Philippines and is hoping to roll out a very similar model with all the lessons that it's had in the South African business in the Philippines. In terms of the other assets, as I mentioned, no talking about the ones that have done okay. Kevro was a detractor in terms of valuation throughout the year. The negative performance from COVID lockdowns and the supply chain issues have been sorted. The new management team have done a pretty good job of doing that, to be honest. But -- it's a bit like when I talk about Virgin Active, I think it's got a long way back for this business. Volumes have increased significantly, but remains to be honest, slightly below our expectations in terms of the recovery. Importantly, in the last 3 months, we completed a very significant capital restructuring in this business, and we're very appreciative of the support from the banks in that. And that really has now provided the business of both the capital and strategic flexibility to grow. And the early signs are positive, very strong year-on-year growth, albeit off a relatively low base. But it's a business we probably have slightly more confidence in [ MA ] than we certainly had 12 months ago. So I'd say the worst is behind us, but it's still a long way back. And as I mentioned, we hold this asset at, I think, 25% of costs, a long way back for us. Autozone, which is a leading supplier of automotive parts, both in the retail and wholesale market, had a very strong 2021, both COVID and probably more the civil unrest and global supply chain issues put a bit of pressure on the '22 results. They went down dramatically, but they were probably certainly behind budget, but in line with '21. And the management have had to implement further operational and cost synergies and strategies in that business, which they've done. Look, it's strong market condition position remains. And we do think with the down trading to secondhand cars, it can only be a positive for the business. Eazi the other hand, very strong performance. It's the market leader in terms of providing industrial equipment working at height. We made some very significant changes, both to the management team, to the capital structure, the back end of last year, and the very, very substantial year-to-date EBITDA growth, and it is substantial has been driven by market share gains, new products. But I think probably most importantly, it's not about EBITDA growth, it's about return on invested capital and the management have got a much better handle in our view of that in this business currently. So the outlook for that business remains very positive, and we would hope it continues to outperform the budget. Moving on to the Brait portfolio. I've touched a bit on this in my introduction. Premier had a very, very strong performance to March. Its EBITDA was up 36% year-on-year and 30% if you excluded Mister Sweet. So very strong organic growth as well as acquisitive growth. Margins were significantly up from 8.8% the year before to 10.3%. And very importantly, return on invested capital, which I think is the most important measure in this business grew from 11.5% to 14.8%. Pleasingly, this business has completed the integration of Mister Sweet. As I mentioned, the merger synergies were certainly above what we put what was put to the Board. And the bakery, the Pretoria bakery has now been commissioned. The second line is now up and running. And we're very pleased with that. And secondly, we have broadly a 30-odd percent market share in Premier across most of our territories that we operate in, most of the geographies, except for our inland bakery where we have around 12%. So we think that there is opportunity to grow once the Pretoria bakery is up to full capacity. The business, as I mentioned, has continued to grow strongly, double-digit growth in EBITDA and profitability through the year to September. And as I mentioned, both of that has come through volume growth and the ability to pass on pricing to consumers. So [ clean job ] the management team, it's a business we look -- are still looking to bring to the market. As we mentioned, nothing has changed. I think what we are keen to do is ensure that the 6 months trading is reflected in the results because, as I mentioned, those are positive and also showing that this business' ability to withstand tough operating conditions and relatively high commodity prices. So business performs well, still looking to list the business off the back hopefully the September results. Slightly more difficult business, as we all know, is Virgin Active. That said, every single month, we continue to grind forward. As I show here, total membership as of May was around 75% on pre-COVID levels. That number is now just under 80%. So we had active members of 847. That number is now flowing its way close to 880. So very significant growth even since May. And that comes through pretty much across the board with very good sales in South Africa. Good sales in Italy in the last couple of months. And even in the U.K., we started to see some decent traction around sales. As we've mentioned before, key to the strategy is enhancing and improving membership engagement and reducing churn. I think churn comes in 2 sectors. One, the average person we decide no longer use no longer wants to go to gym. Those are active churn members. We see a reduction in those numbers across the board. But what we have seen across some territories, but even in South Africa is, obviously, with consumers under pressure, you see a number of people who can't pay for the offering at the end of the month. So I think the churn at the moment is more on that than it is a lot of people deciding they don't want to go to gym. So key for us is to improve the membership engagement, enhance the digital offering and data strategies to sure we know more about our members and ensure we're offering them the right product. Dean Kowarski, as I mentioned, took over -- I think it was on the 1st of -- 2nd of April -- I would say the 1st of April, and he's doing a great job. He's shaking up the business. He's taken it to the next level. He shows a lot of urgency around execution, and we're seeing some of that in where we're putting money to work currently is investing in the estate, investing in the proposition for members, and we are starting to see early signs of positive performance around that. So 12% membership and growth year-to-date has been positive. That has continued to the end of September, and we hopefully that will continue. It's not to say that increased utility costs aren't an impact on the business. As we mentioned in a report, there absolutely are. It's a business that has a relatively significant utility bill across its territory and particularly in the U.K. and Italy, those have been significantly impacted. So we continue to watch for the impact of that. In terms of liquidity, apologies for the [ scooby chalk ], was my best effort to try and do it online. But just to show where are we in terms of the J curve at an e-sales capital level. As you mentioned, you'll remember, we started in 2016 where at that time, we held cash in low-risk bonds, to be honest, as we continue to invest that into the portfolio. And then you can see where we are. We went through probably at the beginning part of 2020 to be honest, back into 2019, started to leverage up the balance sheet because we were nearly fully invested. And where we are today is pretty much fully invested. As I mentioned, we have ZAR 148 million of undrawn commitments, which we will invest. But other than that, we are fully invested. And we would hope, based on that squiggly blue line, you can see that start to see the realizations turn into cash. And that's my point about realized returns in the private equity portfolio. So if you look at 2024 there, that's probably the year where you can see it and you can see it in the chart below the bottom right, where we start to see pretty significant realizations and therefore, cash into the business. On the left-hand side at the bottom, it just runs through the liquidity profile. As we mentioned, we've got net undrawn commitments of ZAR 148 million. We've got significant capacity, both through our gearing facility at RMB plus the treasury shares. So as of today, we said to ZAR 268 million of surplus capacity. So we have enough capacity to ensure we can fund any commitments we need into the business. Moving on to the outlook. This is the last chart that before I can answer any questions people have. It's definitely a dichotomy of this market. On the positive side, what has been positive is to see a broad-based recovery across the portfolio. It wasn't limited to 1 or 2 key assets. Almost every portfolio company grew EBITDA. And as I mentioned, 70% of our portfolio companies grew EBITDA at more than 25%. And that's not because the business conditions have been easy, to be honest, I think we all recognize whether it be market conditions, the right, whatever it was, it's been a tough year. But I think the top decision that the management team took throughout COVID have genuinely positioned these businesses as better businesses and whether they be strategic or financial or capital changes that we made, they're starting to see the benefit of that come through the leverage. That said, consumers in South Africa and certainly compared to the rest of the world, I think, remain unbelievably resilient. We haven't seen the impact on SA consumers that we've seen in other parts of the world, if you ask me. And that's despite whether it be global turmoil or the inflation outlook. So if that consumers still remain resilient, which is very positive for our businesses. And I think -- you can say a lot of things, and I tried to say some of those in my CEO reports. We are seeing some of the early signs of government intervention. We need more urgency from government. We all know that. But certainly, there are some early signs that government has woken up to the need to move quickly. How quickly that actually translates into Eskom or anything being in a more sustainable platform. I don't know. But we certainly are starting to see some of the early signs. As I mentioned a couple of slides ago, slow a steady improvement in Virgin Active, getting that business back on track and back to 2019 levels is absolutely key for Ethos Capital is to keep a brake. And certainly, at an Ethos level, we are very focused on that. Very importantly, new investments in the tailwind sectors have performed very, very well. So lots of EBITDA growth has come from the tailwind sectors. And I think importantly, if you're looking to exit businesses, I said there's been more international interest in South African assets in the last and sub-Saharan African assets in the last 18 months and in the last 8 years of my career. So that's a very big positive. If you're looking to sell assets, and we've seen some of those big deals come to fruition. We've also seen and had active interest from some international parties in our portfolio. But I think importantly, the key assets remain well capitalized, whether it be TymeBank, Virgin Active, Braits, et cetera, following some of the capital raise. So that's on the positive side. We're not naive. We're not myopic on the negative side. We have generationally high inflation outlook impacting the globe. And the impact that has and the secondary impact of that has yet to be felt in my view. There are some markets not ours who I think have been scared by what has happened and some of the policy decisions, I think, remain at best uncertain. And we recognize that as an investor, as a capital allocator, we need to be sure about the outlook for that before we make any big moves. Eskom loadshedding probably remains the key impediment to any business in South Africa. How long it takes to solve? I don't know. We see some of the early signs of urgency, but we really do need to see that result. It impacts just about every single business that we own. Obviously, decreasing valuation multiples, to be honest, much more in developed markets than we've seen in emerging markets outside of China, but that will obviously continue to impact or have an impact on company valuations, around exits. And then as I've mentioned before, the continued share price discount will impact capital allocation decisions. And before I happen to answer the question, which I'm sure I will, that does mean when we have liquidity that we will buy back shares and trade at a discount. It's not to try and close the discount necessarily, but we believe it's your best approach to increasing NAV per share. It's the buyback of shares of traded and as a discount. So if you think you can get 2x, 2.5x money back and you can buy back your shares at a 50% discount, you don't need an Excel spreadsheet to work out where is a good place to put your money. So we continue to look at that. We'd hope to be in a position from a liquidity perspective to act on that. But we're not naive to the point that buybacks are a very important part of the Board's job. So with that, I will hand over to questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question we have from the conference is from [ Gregory Blank ] from GLB Trading.

Thanks very much for your illuminating reports as always. It just comes back for us, the main key is always Premier. And you obviously saw Tiger Brands blow out results. So it begs the question and you intimated towards that you are sitting and waiting to press the button, but you're waiting for your 6-month results for Premier to be done and dusted. Are you saying that once that happens, you would be closer to a listing or are you still a bit tentative after looking at market conditions?

Gregory, look, yes, the markets have got to be open for a listing, but I think we've said it on many times, if you bring a good high-quality business back to market that's growing as a sustainable moat around its business, has the ability to continue to grow, has a good management team. We think there's a place on the JSE for a business like that. We think Premier absolutely fits the bill based on size, all of those good attributes. And the feedback we've had from investors has been, and I say universally positive in terms of welcoming Premier back to the market. So all of that suggests it's a business that should come back to the market, and we are very keen to see it come back to the market. Clearly, when we -- we're having some discussions at the back end of Braits results for May, I think it was, there was a lot of uncertainty around the tanks rolling into Ukraine, what it had an impact on the commodity prices, ability to pass on those costs to price increases to your consumers and the impact they have on volumes. As we said in our release 2 weeks ago, we've now shown and demonstrated yet again that Premier does have the ability to pass it on, sensibly to consumers. It might obviously needs to look after its consumers. But to the extent that these 2, it has been able to pass those down and have seen volume increases and price increases. That gives us the confidence to be able to get on the front foot when we bring the business back to market, but we need the market to see those results to believe it. And that's, as I mentioned, it's a September year-end. And if you work a way back to where the Brait results are, that'd probably give you a good indication of when we would hope if market conditions are remotely open that we could bring Premier the high-quality business like Premier back to the market. So we absolutely are focused despite what some market come in there to say I'm bringing it back to the market. But we've always said we look to it in the right environment. We're not in a rush to do it. But to the extent the window is open, we think it would be a good business to add back on the board.

Okay. I mean your rate trick is very similar to what Tiger Brands said that despite increases, they were able to pass that on store margin. But when you look at Tiger, and obviously, it's a far bigger business, but they're trading on a forward multiple of just over 12.5%. I mean your metric is about 8.8x if I remember correctly, for Premier. So it probably would suggest that you have got some room to maneuver if you came for a listing.

Yes, I think that's right. To be honest, I mean, obviously, Tigers had its own issues, but it remains a key market benchmark that we need to reference ourselves to. We would hope the market would suggest we have proved to be a better business over the last couple of years, but it's -- whatever you say, we do think that, that gives us scope to bring market -- bring Premier back to the market as a sensible valuation, to be honest. And there are a couple of other questions that I've got here, and then we can go back to the lines and there's something on the lines now. And the first one is a question from Exeter Capital. Can you expand on why there was a small uptick in the unlisted multiple considering how many much markets have derated? As I mentioned in my [ métiers ], I literally cannot think of one. So when I say there weren't any, I can't think of one, which we increased the multiple on. The reason the multiple went up is we bought the business, Crossfin, which had a multiple above 7.5x. You can work it out to do the math. So the increase is literally due to that. Every other portfolio company remains broadly where it was. We have always said, and I've been consistent when the market went up as when they come down. We believe unless there is a fundamental change to the structure of the market or your peer group or the business itself that you should keep the EV/EBITDA multiple or whatever month you benchmark, relatively consistent. A business doesn't change from 1 month to the next massively from a value proposition because the market goes one way or the other up or down 3%. We have been consistent and you can go back as many years as you want almost back to 2016 across most of our portfolio companies to keep the multiple the same. So when we look about NAV growth, it's driven by profitability or de-gearing and very, very little through EBITDA multiple accretion or derating. Clearly, for example, when COVID hit and the whole structure of the market went down, we did derate our multiples. And in many cases, we haven't changed it since then. But we think that's an important distinction between us and the listed space, where you have to worry every day what the multiple is. A business that's were 6 times today just with this peer group in the U.S. goes up by 5% overnight, does not make that business worth 5% more in our eyes. If there's a structural change to the market, we will change to multiple other than if we kept it constant. So that's our strategy. It may not be right, but that's what we've done, and we've been consistent in doing so. So the uptick in the number that you see there to 7.7% from 7.5% is literally due to the new acquisitions. Another question from Charles, Titanium Capital. [indiscernible], good year, well done to the team. Question one, if Brait is unable to IPO, given market conditions and given the slow recovery in its VA, is this business Brait likely to require further capital raises? Listen, I'm not naive enough to say never. Charles, I don't see a reason why it would to be honest. We are focused at the moment in creating liquidity out of Premier. We think it's, as I mentioned, 2 seconds ago, a fantastic business that would give a more than sufficient capital to pursue what it needs to do. So the honest answer is you're asking it does Brait need further capital, the answer is unlikely. I will never say never, because otherwise, you will shoot me if it ever does happen. But I would suggest that if we can get, and we're very confident of doing so, Premier ad in a listing that would solve Brait's liquidity requirements that Brait would have. Question 2, has there been any thinking about how you could exit or crystallize value in Optasia? Charles, a lot, to be honest. I mean it's a business which I think has hit the radar of many different people across the world, different advisers, big buyers. So we have a number of inbound interest from those 2 in terms of what we could do with the business. We've had approaches from a number of people, and we will continue to look at them. And I said always that you should net await until the business goes to exco before you want to sell it. It continues to grow not quite exponentially, but very, very strongly. We see that continuing, but there will come a time when I think we must look and will look at crystallizing value there. So I think the opportunity set for exiting have improved significantly just because the business has got bigger and performed better and particularly around Mobile Financial Services. I think it's one thing to be good at airtime credit services. We've always said if we can get MFS, the Mobile Financial Services business up to a critical contribution and by that, I mean 25%, let's say, that will have a very, very significant increase in the valuation of this business. So I think we're more confident than we were before that there would be interest in this asset. Our next question from [ Keith McLoughlin ], Integral Asset Management. Thanks, Keith. Re Premier, which categories has Premier won strongest market share gains -- has one of the strongest market share? Has it managed to maintain gross profit margin whilst balancing this growth -- volume growth? Or has it somewhat offset the other? Keith, long answer to that is in terms of market share gains, we've obviously seen it on the confectionery business, but large component part of that was the Mister Sweet acquisition, but 1 plus 1 now equals probably 2.5 from a market share perspective, i.e., I added the 2 market shares together, we've gained market share as a combined business. We continue to gain market share in the formal space, in the Brait market and in the [ customer ] business, to be honest. And I think we've also continued in the informal space, which is less monitored, so you don't get stats on it, but we think we can see that coming through in our numbers. So relatively across the board, we've increased our market share. Absolutely important to say, and I've said this many, many times on behalf of the Premier management team. This isn't about having a price or we are not going after volume at the expense of gross margin. Clearly, just so that you're all aware, obviously, if commodity prices go up, and you need to add a margin. We are much more interested in the gross contribution margin in rand terms. So obviously, you would see your percentage, your gross margin percentage might come down slightly, but actually, it's about your gross rand contribution that you get from a particular product. That has remained constant. That's what we want to take it to the Competition Commission, all these other people. We haven't tried to [ rip the ringer ]. It's about passing on price increases to your consumers in a responsible manner. So therefore, if you look at your margin, you might have seen a slight decrease. But if you look at your actual gross profit contribution, which is what we look at, that has remained constant. So very positive across the board there. The next question, re Optasia, what is your view on how you would ultimately realize this asset sale, listing, other action? Yes, Keith, look, as I mentioned in the previous discussion, what has been pleasing is when you become a bit bigger and more successful, you hit the radar of people you've never quite heard of before. I mean you've got all lots of clever advisers has coming to tell you how to do things. It's always interesting to listen, I think there's not so optionality here. There's obviously a listing. I think it would need to be on a foreign bore. I don't think it would be a JSE listing. The London probably would be a listing that we would look at potentially in time, sale absolutely. I think there's interested parties, you potentially would want to either part with us or come in and buy that business or other action. And by action, I mean, listen, it's a business that's totally underleveraged. I think there are sensible ways to leverage up the business and sure it's -- we've got the right level of leverage and is ensuring that it's got the right capital structure and tax deductibility, et cetera. So that's another way to realize not value per se, but certainly to get cash out of the asset. So it's a business continues to perform well. So long as it does, I think you're not going to struggle to find people living to knock on your door. Next question is from Graeme Körner from Korner Perspective, are those assets that are in or entering the exit clients there because they really are full or right for harvest or because of a need, i.e., underlying funds to monetize? Graeme, I'd be absolutely lying if I said there was no -- not take pressure, but urgency from funds to realize value from certain assets at the end of their life span, but that's not driving any decision that we would make to be honest. Clearly, it's about 2 things really. Is the asset ready to be listed? And second question is, is there an investment community who's likely to accept the asset will be willing to buy. So you could have an asset that's absolutely ready to go. But it's 3 key buyers or most likely buyers have got indigestion from an acquisition they did last 12 months. We worth push a process into that market. So it's trying to align those 2 stars. The reality is it's very difficult to always do that. But I would genuinely suggest we try to kick off processes or entertain opportunistic interest when our asset is ready to go, but also that there is a market for that asset. No good that we need to get in the market close quite frankly. But it's not driven by indeed for the fund, any investment in the fund would certainly rather us wait another 18 months to get value out of the asset than Russia out the exit door. I think on that's any questions we have. And if there any others, I'm very happy to answer. Nick, have you got a question?

We have a question from [ Nick Kirk ] from Signal Asset.

Can you guys hear me?

Yes, we can, Nick.

I've got 2 questions. I'm going to -- because they're separate questions, I'm going to ask them one at a time. Just Optasia, who are the big customers of Optasia. Can you just sketch the customer base for me?

No. Look, Nick, it's all the big mobile network operators. You take it MTM-Vodacom, it's got 20-odd MNOs that are as key customers. So clearly, MTN is a big customer, but it's M&Os across South Saran Africa content across Asia, plus even now Latin America and the Middle East. So it's a very, very broad range of customers. But yes, it's largely its customer base and its partners really rather than its customers of the MNOs. So it goes to the MNOs and says, "Listen, let's play a role together with you and share the revenue around airtime credit services to your customer base." And that's what it does. And that's why its partners are really the 20-odd MNOs that are around the world.

And I mean you get the impression sometimes that MTN is a dominant customer, and I should really just be focusing on your relationship with MTN? Would that be accurate or not? Or can you give me a feel for what proportion MTN makes up of your customer base of the revenue base, profit base?

Yes. Look, so MTN has always been an important part of our business. In fact, our business was at -- this business was started off the back of the relationship with MTN, and we have a very, very good relation with Ralph and the team there. So we see them as a core strategic partner of ours. We designed products for them. We work closely with them to maximize the other fintech operations. So it's a fantastically important customer to us, but it's not the most -- it is a very key, but no matter means the only customer you should focus on and certainly not the only customer that Optasia focuses on. We've got very important customers in different markets. So clearly, in Nigeria, MTN Nigeria is a huge part of our business. And obviously, MTN is the leading player in that market. But in other areas where MTN isn't part of, we have very strong now in each market. And I'm giving you a rough numbers, so don't quote me on exactly because I don't actually have it to hand. But let's say MTN is [ the end ] of the business, but it's certainly not by any matter, it means all of the business. And each of our customers remain important. And probably very importantly, if you look at the results this year, the growth from the other non-MTN customers significantly exceeded MTN. So that shows you that we're going across the board.

Yes. It seems like a really good business. Secretly, hoping would be listed and that you can participate in that growth that they're experiencing at the moment. So anyway, I wouldn't mind investing in it and having it spun out of Ethos which leads me on to the next question. I mean, if one looks at the stock market right now, I'm just going to rattle off of RMH did unbundling, RMI did unbundling, Zeder's busy unbundling, PSG did a very successful unbundling. The list goes on and on. [ Sabvesters ] had fantastic returns. HCI has had fantastic returns. And you guys remain the bag holder. I mean you're the one almost exception. And I just wondered how the management team feel about it. I mean everybody is racing past you and you guys are looking for parking I have a little bit of a problem. You guys always say, "Okay, well, look, money -- the value will out one day. I'm just hold on to these assets and one day, I'll get rich." And that's great to say, but in the meantime, you guys get us a nice salary and you almost get to bite of the cherry. So it's not as urgent for you guys to unlock the value as it is for me because I get nothing. While you guys are getting your salary enough, and I'm finding this -- I wondered if you didn't get a salary and you were like Warren Buffett on getting $100,000 a year, if you wouldn't maybe have a different strategy for Ethos and become more urgent to unlock value. So I just wondered how you guys felt about that you definitely have the bag holder and surely, that requires some type of introspection.

Nick, I'll take a deep breath before answering the thing but I appreciate your question and your thoughts rights. Listen, it's got absolutely nothing to do with [indiscernible] -- the urgency comes from when we set this business up, it's not that I'm sitting here today saying, "Just be patient, it's private equity." But that is a reality of private equity. The reality of private equity is about realized returns. So when you talk about unbundling, if you take RMI, RMH, Zeder, what is their own bundle listed assets. So let's talk about Brait for 2 seconds because that's the asset that you should be talking about. It is absolutely our intention as soon as possible to unbundle the value to Brait's shareholders. It's not a strategy, it's the strategy. We intend to do that. The only time we can do that is once we have raised enough liquidity to pay back the convertible bond because structurally, we can't do that without doing that. And secondly, once Virgin Active is ready to be listed. So if you take Brait, and you can't compare us where we have a whole lot of unlisted assets. What are you going to unbundle. So if you take Brait, which has listable assets, we can see the strategy for break to say, in 3 years' time, we repaid the convertible bond, we unbundle the premier business, the remaining Premier shares and the Virgin Active shares to shareholders, and that's exactly what RMI, RMH, Zeder have done. So I can tick that box 5 times over. There's urgency to do that. We continue to drive it as hard as we can. Just look at that slide on what we've done with Brait. To enable us to get there we've got to have 2 things. One, pay back the convertible bond; 2, get virgin in the state where it's listable. Until those happen, don't matter what I do, whether I get a fee or not doesn't make absolutely no difference. So we are 100% behind our strategy of unlocking value. Where you have unlisted assets. I own 12% of our unlisted assets, for example. I can't list it. It's unlistable. I can't end this 1% of Optasia. So that is not the right strategy. The right strategy there is to find the right buyer for that business, get capital in. Once you have capital, return that capital either through buybacks at a 50% discount or through dividends to our shareholders. So there's 2 different strategies. Nick, one to do with price, which is around your unbundling strategy. So please just hear me and hear me clearly, we are absolutely on track to unbundle those assets to you as shareholders. Second question around Ethos Capital, it isn't unbundled label, if that's even a word. Because you can't unbundle 12% stakes to the market. There, it is about growing those assets to a point where and by a buyer, a market, someone else will value that thing at a premium to where you have it and then bring -- sell it and give the capital back to your investors. So I think I do take a bit of a front to say we are sitting around doing nothing. I really do. We have grown NAV by 27% this year. It continued to grow NAV. And if we can do that and buy back shares at a 50% discount, yes, at that point, the share price should reflect it. I mean does it worry me? Of course, it worries me. Do I take it personally. Of course, I take it personally. Do I have my money tied up in this asset? Absolutely. But we need to be conscious of there's a time to sell assets. It's not about running off tomorrow and unbundle a whole lot of unlisted stakes. It can't happen. But around Brait, that remains our strategy, and we will continue to look to try and unlock value for shareholders.

Yes. I think -- I appreciate your view that you can't -- don't have many assets to unbundle listed assets. But [ Sabes ] have been very successful in unlocking value as well. And one can look at their strategy of unlocking value to. So again, I mean, Ethos does stand out as the one that just hasn't gotten -- that just fail to perform all the time, it's really tough to be a shareholder. And I didn't want to say that you guys are doing nothing. I'd just say, "You must come and join me my boat where you get nothing. I don't get a fee or anything for holding this share. I've just got to rely on the management to unlock the value." And I think there's a bit of a conflict now between what I'm looking for and I don't see why you guys can't take a Warren Buffett type of salary. I mean what's wrong with that idea? Warren Buffett surely is good enough for you. And maybe there'll be more urgency and maybe better appreciation for how tough it has been for shareholders. It's been tough for shareholders. I mean I wouldn't be asking this question if I didn't say [ did ] money for a very long time.

Look, as I said, I have absolute -- I totally understand the sentiment. I think I've answered the question. I don't think I can answer it again. And just rest assured, if it's tough for you, it's extremely tough for me in my personal capacity because I'm also a big investor, this is my business. The point on fees is absolutely our urgency to unlock value and get value into the portfolio has got absolutely nothing to do with the fee. I know you could say we could take nothing I can get more upside whatever. That's not the model that is there currently, but I promise you that is not what's holding us back. What's holding us back is they are difficult markets to exit businesses in, but we managed to do it successfully. We've made 7 exits in the last 2 years. I don't think it's a private next firm, we could came to do any of that over the last 7 years -- last 2 years. And all of that at significant premiums to where we have them in the books. That is what private equity is about. But anyway, Charles, Primedia, what is the medium stoke long-term outlook for radio assets? So it's a good question. The Primedia business has seen a really good turnaround, quite honestly, radio assets have obviously been impacted as it all media advertising media, to be honest, around the COVID levels. But we've seen it come back very quickly back to pretty much the same market share as it had in terms of advertising spend that pre-COVID. And our market share in Primedia has actually increased across the station. So a bit of a double whammy, really. It's come back to where it was, and we've increased. I think, look, the biggest opportunity in the radio space is deregulation. There's lots of talk about it. That would be a massive unlock for Primedia. By that, I mean, currently, you can only own 2 radio stations, FM stations, if you open that up, that really enables you to do a lot more with your infrastructure, whether it be your sales force, et cetera. So I think that's the key opportunity. There's lots of talk about what's going to happen. I think there is deregulation that would be a massive boon for this business, Charles. Moving on to Graeme Körner. R&D facility is constant in spite of growth in the portfolio. Is this quantum -- is it hard locked the quantum of the facility? Graeme, we've got a fixed commission for the ZAR 450 million. We don't want to pay commitment fees if we don't need it, quite honestly, if we needed additional liquidity, we could go and ask the banks to release the other ZAR 300 million. We -- I think we have ZAR 700 million facility of which we are ZAR 450 million committed. Clearly, we don't want to be paying large client fees for the privilege. So it is constant, just because that's what we think we need. But we said we absolutely needed to, for whatever reason, leverage up the business, we could go back to the banks and ask them to extend the facility. That's the last question we have, unless there's any other on the phone.

There are no questions on the conference.

Okay. Well, thank you very much, and in particular, Nick, for your comments. So as I mentioned, and Nick in particular, feel free to reach out to us. I'm very happy to come and meet you to whatever to discuss it. It doesn't have to happen once or twice a year. In Ethos, we were extremely open to having engagement with our shareholders, and we are very, very appreciative of the support, and we understand the issues that have been raised by you, Nick. But thanks to everybody, and we appreciate your support. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that then concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.