Freightways Group Limited (FRW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Foreign Language] Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and fellow shareholders. I am Mark Cairns, the Chairman of Freightways. Welcome to our Annual Shareholders Meeting. It's great to be able to meet again in person, and a very warm welcome to those joining us online also. With us today are my fellow directors: Mark Rushworth; Peter Kean; Abby Foote; Fiona Oliver; and David Gibson. David Gibson joined the Board in April earlier this year and will address the meeting a little later today on his election. We'll be shortly hearing from our Chief Executive, Mark Troughear. Up on the stage, we also have our Chief Financial Officer, Stephan Deschamps and our General Counsel and company Secretary, Nicola Silke. Other members of our Executive are also present in the room today, keen for a chat with you over a cup of tea after the Annual Meeting. A welcome to the company's auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the company's external legal advisors, Russell McVeagh, who are also with us today. We have a quorum of shareholders, so I declare the meeting open. Firstly a few housekeeping matters: the bathrooms are located in the western foyer area, near where you entered. In the unlikely event of an emergency, you'll be required to evacuate and gather at the nominated assembly point over on Reimer's Avenue. Should this occur, please exit the room through the rear doors and follow the directions of Eden Park staff or security. Please also take this opportunity to switch your mobile phones to silent. As set out in your meeting guide, any shareholder or proxy attending the meeting or participating online, is eligible to ask a question. Can I please ask that shareholders give their name when asking questions, and to confirm if they are a shareholder or proxy holder? As usual, during question time, roving microphones will be available to ensure that your questions are conveyed to everyone present and also online. Please wait for the microphone prior to asking your question. If you are attending online, please select the Q&A tab on the right half of your screen anytime, and then type your question into the field and press Send. Please note that whilst you can submit questions from now on, I will not address them until the relevant time in the meeting. Please also note that your questions may be moderated or amalgamated if we receive multiple questions on the same topic. Finally, due to time constraints we may run out of time to answer all of your questions. If this happens, we will answer them in due course via email. Should you require any assistance using the Computershare online platform, you can type your query and one of the Computershare team will assist with that chat function and reply to your query. Alternatively, you can call Computershare on 0800-650-034. All of the resolutions put to shareholders today will be decided by way of a poll. The polls will be administered by our share registry and the results of the polls will be announced via the stock exchange after the close of the meeting. If you are attending the meeting virtually, when asked at the relevant time the resolutions are put, if you are eligible to vote at this meeting, you'll be able to cast your vote under the Vote tab. Once the voting has opened, the resolutions will allow votes to be submitted. To vote, simply select your voting direction from the options shown on screen. You can vote for all resolutions at once or by each resolution. Your vote has been cast when the tick appears. To change your vote, simply select Change Your Vote. You have the ability to change your vote, up until the time I declare voting closed. In order to provide you with enough time to vote, I will shortly open the voting for all resolutions. Persons attending the meeting, who are not shareholders, proxy holders or corporate representatives of a shareholder, may not vote. I now declare voting open on all items of business. The resolutions will now be open in the Vote tab, please submit your votes at any time. I'll give you a warning before I move to close voting. I'll remind everyone again of these 2 processes when we come to vote on the resolutions later in the meeting. I'd like now to run through the structure of the meeting. The Notice of Meeting, which includes the explanatory notes, was circulated to all shareholders and I intend to take this as read. I will begin with procedural matters, and then summarize some of the company's highlights over the last financial year. I will then ask Mark Troughear, your Chief Executive to provide an overview of the company, an update on current trading performance, and a commentary on our outlook for the rest of the financial year. Following the CEO's presentation and questions relating to the management of the company, I will then introduce the formal resolutions as outlined in the Notice of Meeting. Proxies have been appointed for the purpose of this meeting in respect of approximately 67 million ordinary shares. As was indicated on the proxy form, where proxy discretion has been given, as Chairman, I intend to vote these proxies in favor of the 2 resolutions as set out in the Notice of Meeting. I also note that as set out in the proxy form, the director standing for election will abstain from voting discretionary proxies in respect of his appointment. As requested by the New Zealand Shareholders Association, we will not disclose the voting of valid proxies received for each resolution before shareholders vote today, and as usual, we will declare the outcome of the polls after the meeting on the NZX. The financial statements for the year ended 30 June '22 are set out in the company's Annual Report, released to shareholders in August. COVID-19 remained a significant factor during the year, both in New Zealand and in Australia. In the Annual Report, we provide information on how the company was impacted and how we continue to respond. I would like to convey the Board's immense gratitude for the commitment of each and every employee and contractor of Freightways, who went above and beyond to ensure that our staff, customers, communities and shareholders were all well looked after. We were pleased to complete the acquisition of Allied Express in Australia in late September, which give Freightways its first Express Package footprint outside of New Zealand. We welcome the McDowell's into the Freightways family. I would now like to speak briefly to some of the financial highlights of the Freightways' '22 year, and I'll then ask your Chief Executive, Mark Troughear to address the meeting. The financial year has continued to be disrupted by COVID-19, and I'll come back to that in a moment. Despite this, I'm proud to report that the business still managed to generate a significant revenue increase, reflecting both organic growth with existing customers and ongoing market share gains on the back of our superior service levels. Overall, revenue increased by 9%, across our Express Package business. Outside of Express Package, we experienced very significant growth in our Waste Renewal business in Australia, mostly thanks to very strong medical waste activity in the context of COVID. Our earnings growth was slightly lower at 4%, impacted by a number of additional costs in the second half of the year. I want to highlight a few of the cost headwinds facing the business. Firstly fuel, fuel prices increased significantly throughout the year. We do, however, have a mechanism to pass this cost increase on to customers, but there is a 2-month lag to implement the fuel escalation. The impact of this lag is approximately $5 million. Secondly, staff costs. With the Omicron wave significantly impacting our workforce, we increasingly had to use temporary labor and also paid COVID premiums to our teams, in order to maintain our levels of service. Finally, network capacity. The growth that we've experienced over the last 2 years did stretch our network in our main centers. We've subsequently invested in new depots, which will position us well to manage the current and growing volumes into the future. We're focused on restoring Express Package margins to pre-COVID levels over the next 2 years. In addition to the financials, there were a number of achievements I would like to call out. With business to customer or B2C volumes now at a higher level than pre-COVID, our Pricing for Effort has now reached our target of $1.52 per item. This has allowed us to make sure that our B2C delivery provided a comparable return to our business to business deliveries, but importantly, it's allowed us to reward drivers commensurately, with contractors' earning 7% higher than the previous year. Amongst the Express Package businesses, our recent acquisition of Big Chill Distribution is also continuing to exceed expectations, with strong revenue growth and reasonable margins. Finally, we're seeing a number of new initiatives growing across the businesses, with strong digital growth in our Information Management businesses, continued growth in our Waste Renewal businesses, as well as investments to improve productivity in our Business Mail operations. I mentioned earlier that this year had continued to be impacted by COVID-19. We started the financial year with an Alert Level 4 lockdown of 4 weeks in Auckland, and slightly less in the rest of the country. At Alert Level 4, our activity is significantly impacted. The largest impact was related to the Omicron wave of the virus. With almost 1/3 of our staff in depots unable to work, we had to rely extensively on temporary workers to maintain service levels that our customers are accustomed to, and this came at a cost. The additional cost is now unwinding, but remains impacted by the scarcity of workers in New Zealand. Whilst many New Zealand companies were forced to recapitalize and suspend dividend payments throughout COVID, Freightways were pleased to announce a 10% increase in total dividends from the previous year, with a final dividend of $0.19 per share, bringing the total annual dividend to $0.37 per share. I'll now hand over to our Chief Executive, Mark Troughear, to give his address.

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everybody. So, it's a reasonably small crew today and maybe that's a sign of the times where we've transitioned from virtual-only to hybrid meetings being back in person. But welcome everyone who's made the effort to turn up here today. Thanks very much for attending. I think the ratio is about 1:1 between Freightways people and shareholders visiting. So you'll have a good chance to have a chat to the ladies and gentlemen, typically in suits afterwards, pick them off one by one, ask them whatever questions you want. The package that didn't get picked up or delivered any of those things. There's plenty of brain power there to help you out with that. I'll talk to a number of points in my address. I'll talk through our strategy firstly and give you a brief overview of the key growth strategies we have within Freightways, talk to a summary of some of the ESG objectives that we have through the business and then talk through the trading update for the company, which covers off the first quarter's results. The diagram on the screen there is our attempt at depicting within a circle, what Freightways key growth strategies are all about. The business, broadly speaking, picks up, processes and delivers items. And we pick up and process, deliver around about 100 million items a year. They might be courier items, letters, medical waste bins, archives, tapes, data, but it's an awful lot of movement. And so, the key to doing that is doing it with utmost efficiency. Each item that we handle has a touch point of about 5x. That's around 0.5 billion touch points through our networks for the various items we handle. So striving for efficiency is a key capability of our business. Delivering reliably is the second component, which makes us unique. But that reliability, particularly through COVID for all of those people who relied on courier deliveries in that period. And we measure our performance quite distinctly against competitors and know that we deliver more reliably than they do. So delivering reliably really key for us, as is loving our customers. I think what's fantastic through all the Freightways businesses is the relationships we have with customers, don't just go back years, but in many cases, go back decades. These are customers who, in many cases, don't need to contract with us but continue trading with each of our businesses really due to the service performance and the experience of the people that we put in front of them. The fourth capability is really about entrepreneurship and each of our businesses strive to find another horizon of growth and another area that we can grow the business. The diagram here then looks at our business through 4 activities: Express Package and Business Mail, Information Management, Waste Renewal and Temperature Controlled. And it thinks about each of the horizons that we have started with a niche activity. So in the green, you have the first horizon. That's where the business started. B2B for couriers, national distribution for Temperature Control, document destruction for our Waste Renewal business and storage, storage of documents and data for Information Management. Those are the foundations that the business is based upon. On top of that, we seek to scale a second horizon. And we've done that pretty successfully. I think the example that Mark gave earlier, where medical waste has grown off the back of a secured destruction network in Australia is a great example of building a second horizon of growth of the infrastructure we have in that first horizon. And then the third horizon represented in dark blue represents areas of the business, which we believe in 5 years' time will be material. That'll be a material part of the group. And in an example like couriers, over 25 kilos, we think will be a material part of what we do, 25 kg up to 50 kg in New Zealand, 22 kg and above in Australia with our partners, Allied Express, we feel that will be a material growth pathway for us. So what the diagram seeks to portray is that, we have growth opportunities in every part of our business. We have a stable first horizon, a scaling second horizon and then emerging third horizon opportunities, which we can grow into material businesses over the longer term. If we look at each of those in turn for B2B horizon 1 is extending and defending. It's expanding the footprint and facilities. It's building courier pay and making sure the contractors we have within our business are resilient, well remunerated and there for the long run. And it's making sure that service performance is particularly strong because it gives us the basis for picking up market share in the future. In terms of growing scale, horizon 2, that was B2C and COVID really pushed that hard through those last couple of years. Fundamentally, our B2C residential delivery volumes are more than double what they were pre-COVID. And that is us picking up market share and serving new customers to those markets. And there's opportunities for further gains there. We're really only scratching the surface in terms of the available market for us to tap into for B2C, but it must be at the right price. It's got to be at a price where we can remunerate couriers and make a margin for the company. Third horizon, as I said, over 22 kilos in Australia, over 25 kilos in New Zealand. And it's breaching the gap between what the freight forwarders will do and what couriers have typically done. And there's a niche in there. There's a skinny niche in there, where customers are underserved either by the freight forwarders or in fact, the courier company. So we've launched Kiwi Oversize this year, and it will be a slow start, but we'll work our way through customers with slightly larger items. And then the partnership with Allied Express, Australia, they really have forged a niche with a national network targeting that type of freight. Temperature Controlled Logistics, we made our first acquisition in this space a number of years ago with Big Chill. And the horizon 1 strategy really is to extend, defend, carry on building out the network, expand where we need to and pick up market share and organic growth in national distribution. This year, we've expanded facilities in Wellington and Hawkes Bay. And in the coming years, we'll look at a number of other depots around the country where we can expand to deal with greater capacity. Horizon 2 for this division is third-party logistics. And again, shortly after we took over the business, we opened up the first third-party logistics operation. So it holds frozen and chilled food for customers as the orders come in, we pick, pack and dispatch. We filled it up in no time at all. So that currently sits at around 95% utilization, and we were pleased to announce earlier in the year the commissioning of a new plant down in Ruakura in Hamilton, which will hold 16,000 pallets and allow us to grow that second horizon with 3PL. The third horizon in Temperature Controlled is same-day van delivery. We acquired a small business called ProducePronto. This specialty is holding product again in Temperature Controlled facilities and completing same-day deliveries. At the moment, it's convenience stores and in places that require fresh food, replenish daily. Really neat service, and we've been pleased to see that grow and be able to leverage the infrastructure that we provide at Big Chill. In terms of Information Management, the first horizon has always been storage, be it vaults or warehouses. We store records, we store tapes, we store hospital files, that type of material. That's a slow-growing part of the business, but it's a really strong foundation on which to build your horizon 2 activity. And horizon 2 for us is digitalization. So we have been growing the scope and extent of digitalization projects, both in New Zealand and Australia, such that has become the fastest-growing part of the Information Management business. The third horizon for Information Management, again, seeks to leverage the assets and infrastructure we have. So if we think about warehouses racking people, systems, our third horizon is targeting 3PL for small e-commerce players. And again, it's an underserved niche. This is an area we've had our Startery team work on and understand customers' needs, wants and where they're unsatisfied. And what we found as an opportunity there for the smaller e-commerce players who are ready to grow out of the garage but scale up and use our infrastructure to pick, pack and dispatch through the courier businesses to fulfill their deliveries. So we're excited about what we can do with what we call Stocka, both in New Zealand and in Australia. The fourth segment, Waste Renewal. And again, a really good story of the 3 horizons. First horizon, document destruction. We are the biggest document destruction player in New Zealand and Australia. We've built a really defensible position there. Plants, shredders, balers, assets to pick up, collect various materials. The second horizon in Australia has been medical waste. And the growth here has been quite remarkable from a small business that turned over $3 million in revenue. Last year, we did $26 million, only 4 years later. And again, helps by COVID. Through COVID, you had higher volumes and the ability to get a higher price. So the second rise in medical waste growing really well. The third horizon for this particular division is at high-value recyclables. And so, we're looking for the products which have inherent value and can be recycled, can be turned back through the circular economy. And a great example of that has been our investment in saveBOARD, which takes old courier satchels, Tetra Pak containers, coffee cups, that type of material, shreds them, cleanse them together and produces building product. So we launched that late last year here in New Zealand, and we'll have further plants opening up on the Eastern Seaboard of Australia, really good example of high-value waste streams which fit our network, fit our capability in terms of vehicles been and capability. We'll continue to target other high-value waste streams, already the team are experimenting with things like textiles, where they can be collected, shredded through the plants and then again, turned into value-added products rather than sent to landfill. So I think really proud of what we do there, both from a circular economy point of view, but also in terms of growing the business and giving ourselves a defensible, growing 3 horizon business. In terms of ESG, there's a slide here, which is reasonably busy, but it talks to the key areas that we focus on from an ESG point of view. And what we seek to do is only focus on those areas where we think we can move the dial, okay? This is not a game of bingo where we're trying to solve all the world's problems all at once through our business. It's focusing on the areas where we can contribute meaningfully. So the first of those is in terms of good wealth, good health and well-being. And a very strong focus on health and safety, a pleasing reduction in the number of lost time injury rate, injuries we had in this past year. Deployment of new technologies, Freightways run probably what is the most modern linehaul fleet in the country. And we need to do that because reliability through Big Chill or through the courier brands is paramount. So we run fuel-efficient vehicles, but those vehicles are also equipped with sophisticated in-cab technology, which detect fatigue and give alerts and announcements, both to drivers and to managers. It also provides dash cam technology, which enables us to see what is happening on the roads every day and every night. We've implemented employee wellness programs and mental health awareness. And I think that was particularly important through COVID where people have grappled with the personal challenges of COVID, are working remotely, working at -- back at the office and transitioning between the 2. A huge amount of training has gone into our management teams to help recognize the signs of mental health weaknesses and issues and then be able to respond to those appropriately. The third thing in this particular area that we mention is that, we've commissioned New Zealand's first virtual forklift simulator. What that allows us to do is to train and certify our own people and refresh them more regularly than you would do if you follow the usual New Zealand regulatory regime. It mimics exactly the Freightways sites, operating environments and allows people to get on and experience what it's like to operate a forklift before you actually get in the field. In terms of decent work and economic growth, we're introducing training programs at all levels of the business. We've just introduced the pilot program, which includes literacy and numeracy training for people in on the ground floor, incorporates it with health and safety training, set through the first few sessions of that and really pleased with what I've seen there. I think that will be increasingly important in tight labor markets where we're having to bring people in and scale them up and then develop them through our business. In terms of professional development, management/leadership training, over this year, we have again sent 250 people through Freightways Fundamentals and Lead programs, which helps develop them into managers of bigger business units and bigger departments. It's a really key part of what Freightways does. The majority of the people that you meet in the room here have started on the ground floor and worked their way up to run sizable business units. And it's come through that kind of philosophy of developing from within and developing that leadership capability. In terms of industry, innovation, infrastructure, we continue to strengthen our networks. We know our networks are critical both for food transportation, for Express Package, which covers pharmaceuticals, parts, time-critical items. So making sure that we have robust and reliable networks is critical, not just for our business, but for our customers. I'll touch a little bit more on climate action in the next slide because it's obviously highly topical. We are a business, which relies on predominantly diesel and aviation fuel. And in fact, 95% of our emissions are driven out of fossil fuels. 5% is everything else. So 95% is covered off in the fuels that our truck drivers, van drivers and airplanes used to go up and down New Zealand and Australia. In terms of disclosure and transparency, really proud that we're one of a relatively small number of companies that went early on TCFDs and published those in our '21 report. I'm not going to go through all of that, which will be a relief to many of you because a lot of words on that slide. But you can look at that in your leisure. What I would summarize through this is that, our target is to reduce our carbon emissions by 50% by 2035. And we think that's a completely realistic goal. So we worked through science-based targets and looked at how we can achieve that reduction. And effectively, it means working down through the various technologies. So the easiest thing that we can influence today is through the fleets of company cars that we run and shift those to alternative fuel cell. So we have commenced on that, and we expect that we've got 100% of those fleets and they're pretty extensive converted by 2029. And there's a number of barriers to that. Not everyone has a garage where they can roll up park the car, particularly in Auckland. And I don't think you want to see extension [ cord ] trailing down streets all over the place. It's not quite as simple -- simply swapping over. Most of those vehicles sit on lease terms and as the lease terms roll off, we'll steadily push them through into alternative fuel cell vehicles. The light commercial fleets we operate are predominantly run by our contractors, not exclusively, but predominantly. And we're very mindful that that technology has yet to arrive to cope with the weight, the distance and the time the vehicles need to operate. There's some very early technology, which can handle maybe 500, 600 kilos can maybe do a smaller range and a shorter number of hours. But what will be important to our contractors is that, they can shift into an investment, which can carry 1.5, 2 ton and can do that over a 9- to 10- to 11-hour a day and can do 280 kilometers over hills and over various terrain. So we have a program watching the various technologies coming through. The biggest single thing we can do in this space is make sure our contractors are remunerated well so they can make that transition. We run modern van fleets today. We have guidelines, which mean the majority of the vans we run are within a 7-year life time, 7 years old. And so, it means we're running more modern technology, which is more fuel-efficient, but it also means, and we are confident in that period between 2028 and 2035, that we will change that fleet out into EVs. And in fact, I think we will start much early in that, but we typically prefer to overdeliver, underpromise. So I think it will come earlier, but what a science-based targets have shown us is that, 50% reduction is absolutely achievable over that period. Trucks are more challenging. Metro trucks will be the first target for us for those trucks that run around within cities maybe have the opportunity to recharge during a day. Linehaul vehicles will be even more challenging. And there's a huge amount of debate around what the right technology will be there. Is it hydrogen? Is it hybrid hydrogen? Is it EV? There's a [ leeway ] to go in that space yet. And then aircraft, we have a fleet of aircraft, which are locked until 2027. And already, we are reviewing what the future fleet will look like. And you can be guaranteed that the new aircraft we go to will be more fuel-efficient, but they will still rely on aviation fuel in the short-term. Finally, we have a program where we look at the design and build of any new depots that we are establishing and looking at how we can achieve the highest green star ratings and to equip those depots with the right charging infrastructure to enable our staff and contractors to be able to recharge and carry on with their normal day. I'll now give you an update on quarter 1 trading, so the first 3 months of this financial year. So the first table, you'll see here is consolidated for the Freightways Group. For the first quarter in FY '23, we saw an around these numbers, FY '23, we saw revenue up 17%, EBITDA up 9% and EBITA up 8% on the PCP. A few key things to keep in mind in this trading result. We've got higher revenue, and that's driven by market share gains in almost all of our businesses, also the impact of fuel surcharges. Fuel is at a materially higher level in this quarter than it was in the prior corresponding period. Labor costs are also higher. So through the cost lines, we are paying significantly more for labor in this quarter than we were in the prior period. And that's driven by a whole range of things. That's driven by minimum wage rates, which just push the base up, and we always try to keep well above that minimum wage band. It's driven by labor market conditions, which mean to get good quality people, you have to pay for them and that is more expensive than it has been in the past. It's also driven by things like an extra 5 days sick leave, which came in during the year and with COVID, people have availed themselves of the extra sick leave that's available to them. You've also got additional public holiday with the Queen's Commemoration Day in New Zealand and Australia. This result doesn't include any contribution from Allied Express, which was effective from the 1st of October, so just outside this period. But with number of -- the team here from Allied Express and really happy to see the performance of the business in just the first 4 weeks that we've been together has certainly lived up to expectations. In terms of the Express Mail -- Express Package and Business Mail division. So the first quarter revenue was up 15%, EBITDA and EBITA up 11% on the prior period. This first quarter overlapped last year where we had a number of weeks of lockdown and Auckland was particularly affected through that. So I'll show you a graph in a couple of slides' time that just shows the impact on volumes, and it shows that lockdown in the prior period. Labor costs in this division, again, certainly higher than the prior period. Typically, with truck drivers and depot staff. So with contractors, we haven't had the same issues probably around that tight labor market. But certainly, with depot staff and the wage truck drivers we have in businesses like Big Chill, that's where there has been a huge amount of pressure on wage rates. There is a shortage of truck drivers. It's not 9,000, like Michael Wood tried to claim the other day, but it is material. In terms of fuel, while fuel prices fell briefly during the quarter, they've come back up again in terms of diesel. So, again, you've got materially higher fuel revenue in this division in that particular quarter. Also just like to make mention of Messenger Services. So we had talked about a large contract that was transitioning away from Freightways supermarket delivery where we couldn't quite agree terms on what was the right Pricing for Effort for doing that business. What I'm pleased to say is that, Messenger Services business has continued to grow despite that contract starting to transition away from us. So particularly strong performance by them in the first quarter. In terms of Information Management, which includes our Waste Renewal business. The first quarter saw revenue up 25%, EBITDA up 8% and EBITA up 6% on the prior period. That revenue really benefited from a bounce back of people returning to work and returning to offices in New Zealand and Australia. So you've seen a strong lift in things like destruction, revenue and particularly in Australia. Medical waste at the full year, we signaled that we had a real boom in medical waste through the prior comparative period and that the rates have been higher because the demand had been so high. So those rates have now normalized. The volumes have normalized a little bit, but the rates have certainly gone back to what they were in more usual times. The cost to serve in this business, and again, particularly around truck drivers and drivers has increased. So the biggest wage increases we've had in Australia around the drivers that we have in that Waste Renewal business. TIMG Australia had a slight decline in margins through that quarter, and that just reflected the nature of the work that came back and the cost to serve through, again, higher labor costs. Next slide has a couple of graphs, and it just provides a bit of context around what's happening in volumes through the Express Package network business. So you've got FY '23 versus '22, so the first 15 weeks of this year versus last year. And you can see the large peaks where it was a lockdown last year. By and large, volumes have tracked pretty well on track with last year, up to about week 12. Last year, around that week 12 period is where things took off for us. So that was the period where our competitors struggled. We picked up market share, freight forward has fed volumes into us, and we really had a big boom over the last 15 weeks of the calendar year. So we'll track slightly below that. And we expect that will be about 7% below for these next few weeks into Christmas. The second graph gives you a slightly different context. So it compares these 15 weeks of this year versus a pre-COVID period in FY '20. And again, if you take out the one-off public holiday in week 13, you can see that the growth through the year has averaged around 12%. So around 12% up on pre-COVID times. And I think 2020 is the last normal year that we have imagined and seen. In terms of outlook and our feelings around the outlook in the short-term. We expect the item count in this first half of the year just to be slightly below the prior comparative period, and that really reflects what I've just talked about with last year really going off the charts for the last 15 weeks of the year. We're really mindful of that economic environment and possible recession. But I think at this stage, we're pleased to say we haven't seen any material impact on our customers. So our customers continue to trade, the market share gains we have made through the year have meant volumes are fairly steady and predictable. That labor market does remain particularly tight and the cost of labor is a source of pressure and that is something that is felt by every business that I have spoken to customers, suppliers, fellow CEOs. It is the biggest strain on the economy at the moment. We levied the general rate increase through all of our businesses. In the Express Package division that's returned 6.2%, so the headline rate was around 8%. We've got 6.2% out of it. There'll be a few more increases to dribble through. But that largely will offset the labor costs that we have coming through the business. We believe we've got a platform for growth and profitability in FY '23 through our existing businesses and through those horizon 2 and 3 initiatives. And we've got the ability to flex our cost base if the volumes do decline. We're really excited to welcome the Allied Express team to our family. There is a world of opportunity in Australia. It's an incredibly well-positioned business. And I think we'll have a lot of fun together developing what we can in Aussie. Finally, I'd just like to extend my thanks to all of the people of Freightways. The teams have done a remarkable job. It's been a couple of years. We're not quite sure what normal has been. But normal for a lot of our team has been being out in shorts and shirts and [ shorten ] freight, delivering freight, doing that kind of [indiscernible] along with their normal job, and they've inspired their teams to do the same thing. So a big thank you to all of our people here. There's a selection of them here. If you haven't got a question, you might just want to say thank you. Well done because they have done a really good job. And for all of their teams, I know they will go and pass that back to those people. Thanks very much, and I'll hand back to Mark Cairns.

Thank you, Mark. Are there any questions, comments or discussion in relation to the financial statements, presentations or management of the company?

Yes. My name is [ Philip O'Brien ]. I am a shareholder in the company. A question with regards to the financial statements, it's -- particularly with the new larger acquisitions in Big Chill and Allied Express, it may be time to rethink the formatting of the financial results. It's very difficult to pick up the different divisions and how they're doing, the different drivers, particularly a P&L for the likes of Big Chill and Allied Express will provide better visibility to shareholders.

Yes. Look, that's a good question. You might be made of Andy's who is an analyst here from Forsyth Barr sort of would love the same thing. Look, I think we tread that road very carefully between giving our competitors too much information on individual businesses and their margins and their performance. And likewise, some of the very large customers we have and giving them any leverage to come back to us and say, you're making too much money there, we'd like a discount. So, it's just a very careful line that we tread between giving disclosure, which we ultimately think could put pressure on the business and hurt the business and giving that minute level of disclosure, which shareholders and analysts would love to have. So I acknowledge what you are saying. And we'll certainly consider how we disclose just the results that come through in Australia, in particular, with what is, as you say, a much larger acquisition.

Are there any other questions in the room? Nicola, are there any online questions?