KAL Group Limited (KAL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thanks to all the shareholders, investors and other parties joining us for our annual results presentation for the financial year ending 30 September, '23. This is a prerecorded results presentation. And as been normal with webcasts, I would ask you to start sending questions as soon as you are ready, and we will try our best to answer all of them at the end of the results presentation. KAL will follow up with you on a specific matter we are unable to handle appropriately. The presentation of our full year results will take between 45 and 50 minutes and will also be available by link on our website post this presentation. I'm supported by our Financial Director, Graeme Sim. After a challenging year, I believe we have shown a high degree of resilience and outperformed sector role players on quite a few levels. Today's agenda covers various topics of importance to shareholders and investors alike with a fresh business segment and trading activity review. I really believe you will agree with me at the end of this presentation that the KAL Group has finally arrived with us having transformed the business from an agri retail-focused business to very much more of a lifestyle minded customer retailer, more alike to the tractor supply company in the U.S.A. than a traditional agri input supplier. In both cases, our company names understate our diversity and custom target markets with the tractor supply company actually not selling many tractors, but a lot more products to lifestyle farmers who by chance also have massive pet lovers in the U.S.A. In our case, of the Agrimark and The Fuel Company, we are also trading more than ever before with more lifestyle minded customers, which we call farmers, family friends and the full family. I might repeat this a few times today in the presentation. In terms of our purpose, strategy and strategic initiatives, it should come as no surprise that we firmly believe in our ability to grow, to optimize, to leverage culture and diversity and our drive to digitally transform our business and processes, as this has delivered with a high level of consistency a superior compound annual growth rate in recurring headline earnings per share of 11.8% and 13% in the last 5 and 10 years, respectively. Initiatives remain largely focused around measured bricks-and-mortar as well as virtual branch footprint growth initiatives, focused on current and additional customer target groups and optimization drive continuously looking to improve labor space inventory effectiveness while implementing alternative energy projects and continuing to invest time and effort into our culture and people. While a number of digitization initiatives are progressing and focused on the way we interface with our customers, both B2B and B2C, while modernizing our ERP system to ensure our top customers and potential customers experience a customer-first environment. Ultimately, the outcome we are chasing is to achieve ZAR 1 billion profit before tax by F '25, 2 years' time. And we are optimistic that by focusing on return on invested capital, economic value added and recurring headline earnings per share growth, we shall achieve this. Shareholdings, our group structure have not changed since our previous reporting period. I would highlight a few points on this though. As part of the naming convention changes, which you are aware of to move from the Kaap Agri name to the KAL Group naming convention, this has presented the opportunity to do the name changes for KBL to Agrimark operations. And both Kaap Agri Namibia and Kaap Agri Aussenkehr to reflect both -- in both cases, the Agrimark naming convention. Seeing that this is a customer-facing brand used at store level. The Fuel Company was previously a subsidiary of KBL, and we are on process unbundling The Fuel Company to be a direct subsidiary of the KAL Group Limited. The [ TFC B ] ownership status has remained at 52.72% on a direct black ownership basis, well above the current requirement of 25% as required by the liquid petroleum fuel charter. Lastly, it is also pertinent for all to consider the KAL Group shareholding in The Fuel Company of 58.2% or 61.4% when including ETI when modeling attributable earnings to shareholders of the holding company. This slide is a geographical heat map of all 268 KAL Group business units, including PEG since July '22 on the left-hand side and business unit movement per year on the right-hand side. During the year, we closed 1 [ New Holland Agency ] workshop, and disinvested from 1 fuel site, while opening 7 new business units during the year. This has all been done while focusing on consolidating the PEG acquisition on the one hand and accelerating our virtual brand strategy on the other hand. The group now operates 148 retail fuel license sites in RSA and Namibia, of which TFC operates 85 in South Africa. There have been 4 TFC sites earmarked for disinvestment in the new year. Whilst the Agrimark footprint has largely focused on water-intensive areas of South Africa, the TFC footprint has focused on clusters and specific provinces and with the addition of PEG now high-value highway sites. Overall, our footprint is biased towards mainly peri-urban rural and highway locations with mostly lifestyle-minded customers. Overall group revenue grew 42.7%, off the back of revenue growth of 48% in the prior year, again driven by high fuel prices with a large fuel revenue contribution, which has increased post the PEG deal. Like-for-like revenue growth of 5% was achieved with our product basket inflation ending at 8%, down from 24% in the prior year as fuel inflation normalized. Transaction growth of 93% was achieved mainly due to the additional 9-month contribution from PEG. The star of the year was undoubtedly our convenience and quick-service restaurant revenue growth. In contrast to this, high interest rates, load shedding and high input costs dampened Agrimark sales into the agri and building materials sectors also affecting manufacturing. Agrimark Grain revenue was down due to a lower-than-average wheat harvest at the end of 2022. Load shedding not only had a direct impact on increased OpEx spend for us, but also had a severe inherent impact on our customers' spending patterns. As cash flow at a specialty fruit farm level was rerouted to generate power for cold rooms away from the normal infrastructure and general spend with our Agrimark. Overall, we still gain market share in various sectors we service. In terms of turnover, more specifically into the retail and agri channels and excluding PEG Retail turnover, which was significant in the year. So as to get a good feel for the call it like-for-like turnover trends, this graph is a quarterly turnover growth trend graph. The blue graph being our retail channel sales and the green grass being our agri channel sales movements, comparing year-on-year quarterly movements while monitoring 12-month moving inflationary trends. Firstly, F '22 clearly had a high agri input growth of the back of increasing inflation. While this year has not seen not only deflation, but huge pressure on farm expenditure due to low churning and high interest rates. The agri channel has recovered in quarter 4, and we have seen this continue into quarter 1 of the new year. For clarification purposes, with our focus on farmers and predominantly water-intensive areas, most export product produced by our farmer customer base require refrigeration and processing for periods of time. Hence, the high load shedding impact being referred to. We therefore estimate lost sales to our agri channel of circa ZAR 140 million for the quarter 2 and quarter 3 periods alone due to load shedding. Retail, on the other hand, has seen a marked decline into negative real growth this year again, due mainly to consumer pressure as a result of higher interest rates and high food inflation while spend was diverted to convenience offerings, what we call the load shedding impact, and alternative energy projects by our lifestyle customers in these channels. Although negative real growth is being experienced, we can report that we are beating sector trends in the main categories. We also could clearly see this coming and went into severe OpEx curtailment mode amongst other actions to counter the impact of load shedding on ourselves and that of our customers. Graeme will now take us through the highlights, investor dashboard and financial performance.

Thanks, Sean. Reflecting on the highlights for the period. It's clear that the group has once again achieved growth despite numerous challenges. Revenue has grown by 42.7% and includes 12 months of PEG. Like-for-like comparable sales grew by 5%. Supporting the growth was a 93% increase in the number of transactions during the period. This is mainly the result of including PEG transactions for the full 12 months. We did just over ZAR 64 million transactions for the year. EBITDA increased by 33.5% to ZAR 898.6 million, a strong measure of financial health and cash flow generation. Recurring headline earnings grew 14.7% with recurring headline earnings per share growing by 7.2%. The impact of load shedding has been significant, as you will see in a later slide. Excluding the direct costs incurred due to load shedding, recurring headline earnings per share grew by 13.1%. RHEPS growth remains a key benchmark to measure performance and to allow for meaningful year-on-year comparison and is also one of the performance measures for our long-term share incentive scheme. Group fuel volumes increased by an impressive 68.9% off the back of the PEG acquisition. Encouragingly, the Agrimark segment grew market share with fuel volumes increasing by 16.3%. Return on invested capital increased from 11.6% last year to 14.3% this year and above the weighted average cost of capital. A final dividend of ZAR 0.130 per share was declared, bringing the total dividend for the year to ZAR 0.180 per share. This increase of 7.1% on the prior year represents a dividend cover of 3.3x, slightly higher than the targeted 3x cover, due to debt repayments, largely PEG-related from TFC attributable earnings. Looking at our gearing ratios, debt-to-equity has increased marginally. Really, the impact of the calculation being on average balances, which meant that last year, only half the PEG acquisition debt was brought into this ratio. As you will see later, net interest-bearing debt has reduced year-on-year by ZAR 133.7 million or 7%. Our debt-to-equity ratio, excluding PEG, is the lowest in over 10 years and continues to decrease. Debt-to-EBITDA improved from 2.8x last year to 2x this year. Interest cover has decreased the impact of 12 months interest on the PEG acquisition debt and at increased interest rates compared to a year ago. We thought we would add a slide with some key investor information. The past 18 months has seen a fair amount of change to our shareholding. During the second half of 2022, both Zeder and PSG unbundled their shareholdings in KAL, resulting in a large increase in the number of shareholders. In April this year, we successfully implemented an odd lot offer process and in doing so, reduced the number of shareholders by over 11,000. Given that recently, the KAL shares traded at a discount to net asset value, the share repurchase was contemplated. It was, however, not considered opportunity to proceed given the current economic landscape, and it was agreed that cash retention and debt repayment should be prioritized during this period with balance sheet strength and sustainability being the core focus areas. In terms of our long-term incentive scheme, certain minimum shareholding requirements have been set for participants. Currently, both the group CEO and group FD are ahead of the plan in this regard. During the year, 19.8% of issued shares were traded with the KAL share ending the year 10.4% down year-on-year and below NAV. Our consistent dividend policy remains, taking into account debt repayment priorities. As mentioned, our 2023 total dividend increased by 7.1%. Our financial performance when looked at in terms of a 5-year compound annual growth rate is impressive. We have consistently delivered superior performance with recurring headline earnings growing by 14.4% compound and return on invested capital ending the year on 14.3%, an improvement of 2.1% compared to 5 years ago. As mentioned on the previous slide, our gearing improvement is evident and in line with previous commitments. During the year, we also investigated the feasibility of moving our debtors book off balance sheet taking everything into consideration, including customer sentiment, debtor performance, cost impact and the forecast debt reduction over the next 2 to 3 years. It was decided not to proceed with us. However, to keep this opportunity on the radar and reassess it on an ongoing basis. We continue to investigate value-adding merger and acquisition opportunities. And lastly, our strategy of balancing earnings evenly across the 4 sectors, being agri, general retail, convenience retail and fuel, remains. Given the 2023 performance and our view of 2024, we believe that our target of ZAR 1 billion PBT by F '25 is very achievable. Looking at the income statement. Revenue grew by 42.7% and gross profit increased by 45.7%. This translated into a higher GP margin year-on-year due largely to the increased contribution of high-margin Convenience Retail revenue and improved General Retail margins, partly set off by pressure on Agri Input margins and a higher contribution of lower margin Fuel revenue. Effective cost management remained a key focus area during the period, specifically the optimization of salary-related expenditure and associated costs. The non-like-for-like impact of costs related to the PEG acquisition, the disposal of TFC properties and subsequent leaseback of those properties in March 2022, as well as new sites resulted in expenditure increasing by 47.3% in the year. Notably, however, like-for-like expenditure reduced by 2.1%. And like-for-like expenditure, excluding the impact of load shedding, reduced by 3.7%. Recurring headline earnings grew 14.7% with recurring headline earnings per share of ZAR 619.69 growing 7.2% for the year. Return on equity increased to 16.7% from 16.5% last year. And as mentioned earlier, the total dividend increased by 7.1%. The 3 graphs illustrate the ramped-up 5-year performance of the business, resulting in the strong year-on-year recurring headline earnings per share growth. Moving on to the balance sheet. Total assets remained fairly constant after the 2022 increase due to the acquisition of PEG with prudent capital expenditure and effectively managed working capital levels. whilst credit sales have increased trade debtor balances have reduced year-on-year. Inventory grew only 0.9% year-on-year and creditor days ended marginally down. Debt repayment is a high priority focus area and our strong cash generation allowed for debt repayment in line with requirements and as previously communicated. Overall, net interest-bearing debt reduced by ZAR 133.7 million. The group's debt-to-equity ratio increased to 61.9% due to the ratio applying average debt and as mentioned, effectively and including half the PEG acquisition debt last year. When excluding the impact of the funding required for the PEG acquisition, the group's debt-to-equity decreased to 45.4% compared to 48.8% last year, the lowest level in over 10 years with a net debt-to-EBITDA of 2x and interest cover of 4x. Net asset value per share continues to increase, albeit that assets are historic values. RONA remained constant at 10.3% year-on-year. Interest cover reduced to 4x of our interest rates, but remains healthy. In summary, the balance sheet has strengthened during the period, and gearing levels are appropriate to meet the coming year's requirements. This slide reflects the recurring headline earnings waterfall from 2022 to 2023. Gross profit growth was strong and ahead of revenue growth. Expenses reduced by 2.1% on a true like-for-like comparable basis. Total expense growth, however, was driven by the non-like-for-like impact of costs related to PEG, the disposal of TFC properties and subsequent leaseback as well as new sites. Interest received increased due to higher average debtors balances, increased interest rates on debtors accounts and the inclusion of PEG's strong cash generation. Interest paid increased due mainly to a combination of higher interest rates and higher average borrowings for the period, which included the funding of the PEG acquisition. As mentioned earlier, recurring headline earnings grew by 14.7%. This slide has again been included to show the financial impact that load shedding has had and continues to have on our business. During 2023, we endured unprecedented levels of extended load shedding, leading to significant additional direct costs to keep servicing our customers. The full year direct cost impact has been ZAR 63 million, an increase of almost ZAR 49 million over last year. The area of our business most impacted has been our 24/7, 365 retail, fuel and convenience operations with the TFC group accounting for almost 74% of group spend. Additional to the direct cost impact, we estimate direct loss revenue due to load shedding at around ZAR 140 million. To part mitigate the impact of load shedding and to ensure our sustainability going forward, we incurred capital expenditure amounting to ZAR 24.3 million for various alternate energy solutions. This CapEx is expected to save approximately 13% in generator-related costs in the year going forward. Effectively, the cost and impact of load shedding has eaten into our earnings with recurring headline earnings per share growth 5.9% lower due to this. Load shedding is driving up costs, driving up capital expenditure and driving down earnings. This slide illustrates the items impacting earnings to calculate headline earnings and recurring headline earnings. You will see that headline earnings per share grew by 11.1% year-on-year. Headline earnings adjustments related to profit on disposal of various low return generating or nonessential assets, as well as goodwill written off on the 4 TFC sites held for sale. Nonrecurring items for the current year are minimal and consist mainly of costs associated with new business development as well as certain legal costs. As you will see, recurring headline earnings per share grew by 7.2%. But when excluding direct load trading costs, RHEPS grew by an impressive 13.1%. Our RHEPS has grown at a compound annual rate of 13% over the last 10 years. Over the past few years, we have prioritized to return on invested capital and EVA as key performance indicators to measure our efficiency of allocating capital within the business. With reference to the 10-year return on invested capital performance, we have previously highlighted the sizable investment into the business since 2017 in terms of upgrades and expansions and acquisitions, the subsequent subdued economic conditions and the impact of COVID during 2020 and into 2021. Despite this, through a committed ROIC and EVA focus, we were able to reverse the prior declining rate trend and significantly reduced debt levels. Furthermore, we embarked on a more prudent capital expenditure approach and successfully disposed of TFC properties during 2022. PEG was acquired in July 2022 and has had a very positive impact on earnings, as can be seen from the uptick in ROIC and the increased economic value add. Trading is expected to improve in the current year and we will continue to explore high return, low capital requirement investment opportunities. And lastly, as previously indicated, you will notice in the remuneration report for our AGM in February 2024 that 40% of executive reward in terms of the long-term share incentive scheme is linked to EVA as a performance hurdle with management incentivized to outperform specific ROIC targets. I'll hand back to Sean to take us through the segmental reviews.

As stated in my intro, the company has transformed and now offers investors a balanced exposure to a lifestyle-minded customer. We call the farmers, families friends and the fur family. We serve these customers in peri-urban, rural and highway locations, doing over 5 million transactions per month. Later on in the presentation, we will elaborate on how this transformation is showing up in the contributions to trading cash flow and returns from non-agri related trading activities. Right. Let's get into our refreshed segmental business review, and I'll start with our Agrimark business segment. I purposely chose these images for you because this epitomizes what Agrimark's trading activities were focused on 7 years ago. Very much focused on agri input requirements of farmers, their post-harvest packaging requirements. They spend on farm expansions and their general farm maintenance spend. This has changed quite dramatically over time. We have invested smartly in supply chain capabilities like stock warehousing, distribution, stock replenishment, stock assortment planning and optimization, price and margin management. This is now all done centrally and digitally. Our distribution center plays is a critical role in enabling the Agrimark to focus on a customer-first experience. And due to this investment, we are now able to offer a vastly improved product range to farmers, families friends and our fur family. A typical store, as you see on the bottom of your screen, is up to 20,000 SKUs versus an old Agrimark offering of only about 6,000 SKUs. We obviously tailor the formats depending on the locations. This journey has been exciting and fulfilling as we do business with more customers in more places with more products and make more money. Let's get to the numbers. As my Chairman would say, pictures don't pay for the whiskey. Yes, with the Agrimark business segment review. Firstly, strategy for the Agrimark remain largely unchanged with a focus on business to business and business to customer growth initiatives. The one being farmers or others being more retail customers. While optimizing our retail formats and increasing our DC utilization and applying a measured approach to virtual branch market share growth, drives and bricks-and-mortar store expansions. Our new data-driven market share focused sales drive to current and new customers is quite unique and will drive growth going forward. For the year under review, Agri Input sales contract by 3%. This was the back of high deflation in fertilizer for the year, reduced infrastructure sales to farmers, due to the channeling were spent to alternative energy sources, due to load shedding, while packaging materials and chemicals showed growth for the year. A very challenging agri year for Agrimark, way more challenging than in COVID. New Holland Agency sales were also down 15% mainly due to less units sold, while coming off 3 record years. Retail, although contracting by 4.9% was still able to gain market share in categories like Paints and Cement, while Workwear and Pet grew by 11% each. A new drive on Arms & Ammo realized high growth off a low base. The categories that took the most pressure were the building materials categories, which contracted by 7%. Total revenue was, however, up 4.5% due to significant fuel market share gains and keep in mind, the circa ZAR 140 million lost sales to farmers due to load shedding. Trading profits contracted by 5.3%, impacted by lower fuel price gains and lower sales growth, while OpEx was very well managed and interest paid grew significantly off the back of high interest rates. Our DC cost to serve reduced by 2.9% despite low churning costs. And overall profit before tax was flat off the back of a significant jump in the prior year as well as increased contribution from Agrimark Financial Services for the year. In terms of the segment's outlook, we are happy with the uptick experience since August. Fuel market share gains are expected to continue while farm spending patterns are expected to normalize. The current wheat harvest prospects are very positive, an above-average wheat harvest is being received. We are therefore optimistic on agri and general trading, but we believe building materials would take longer to recover. As with the tractor supply company in the U.S.A., we believe our digital focus and innovations in this segment will assure us healthy growth going forward. Moving on to The Fuel Company business segment. Even in this space, we have now completed our transition from mainly our 20-odd owned brand 24/7 service stations as the depicted in the bottom left of your screen to a large business segment with over 80 service stations and nearly 350 retail touch points. I repeat that, 350 retail touch points, including most of the retail fuel-related convenience offerings in South Africa. We now operate nationally with the main volume and convenience contribution coming from highway locations. Not only are we the leading independent retail fuel and convenience operator in South Africa but also a leading role player in the famous brands table, reinforcing our diversified lifestyle-minded customer base. The Fuel Company comfortably does over 4 million transactions per month which equates to 1.5 transactions per second. And yet, we still only boast a 3.4% market share of fuel volumes in South Africa with much potential going forward. The company is also well positioned to take advantage of EV charging developments in its network. Getting to the performance of The Fuel Company business segment. The strategy for the year was to onboard PEG. This is complete. We will now continue with selective footprint growth as we pay down debt incurred for the PEG transaction over the next 2 to 3 years. We will leverage convenience opportunities while duplicating supply chain efficiencies. We only added 1 site in there and exited 1 site while focusing on the onboarding and the first year's debt repayments, which are firmly on track. Although average fuel prices were only 7% higher than the prior year, the current high fuel prices are impacting travel patterns of especially petrol customers. One can see in the table how the diesel mix has increased year-on-year. Fuel volumes were 97% higher in the segment than the prior year. But when executing PEG, 4% higher. Now that might sound modest. But I can confirm this is comfortably outperforming the sector currently. Having on-boarded PEG, average gross profit per liter has improved by 27%. As expected, as a result of the high retail convenience contribution that the PEG sites achieve as can be seen in the high retail sales component of revenue. In fact, the current high fuel price has distorted the relevance of retail sales in this segment. Our records show that the rand value of trading profit achieved from the retail sales is high, even although fuel sales has a high mix percentage. This segment is, therefore, mainly a retail-driven segment more so than a fuel. And although fuel also brings a feed to the site, our focus on the service station of the future is, therefore, quite relevant as we focus on optimizing our convenience offerings. Evidence of this was the growth in convenience sales at the site we converted in the year from figure-to-go-offerings to Mugg & Bean on-the-go offerings. This was done at the end of the financial year. This talks to the 100% growth in profit before tax despite ZAR 46.5 million load shedding direct cost. With our profit before tax, return on net assets improving to 35% from 19% last year. Some other stats include every site tenure now being at 18 years. The fuel price gains for the year being ZAR 12 million lower and the star for the year being double-digit growth for convenience in both retail shop touch points as well as quick-service restaurant touch points. From an outlook point of view, we believe fuel volumes growth will continue to be modest this year, depending on the fuel price trends. We're obviously very positive about the low December fuel price outlook as decreases are expected in the fuel price, and this should make it a bumper month. While we also expect convenience retail to show a more moderate growth trend for the year off the back of the double-digit growth of F '23. And our focus will continue to be optimizing our convenience offerings, like TFC and Mugg & Bean. We do have 4-site disinvestments underway as we believe we can rather free up that cash for better return investments elsewhere. And let's not forget, we invested in The Fuel Company segment for its strong cash generation ability. Let's move on to the Agrimark Grain segment, the management of which actually forms part of the Agrimark team but due to its significance in the Swartland area of the Western Cape, we continue to add detail on this segment. Although Agrimark Grain's a relatively small contribution to group profit before tax of only 9%, it is a division which is strategically aligned to our Agrimark operations in the Swartland area of the Western Cape. The strategy for this division is to maximize wheat and seed market share while optimizing their facilities and being the leading role player in the Swartland area. This is achieved by ensuring farmers get optimal grain handling, storage and seed processing services. The 2022 retail was below average with the resulted lower harvest off the back of 2021's 15-year record. Agrimark Grain has invested circa ZAR 27 million over the last 5 years in additional and alternative grain handling and storage capabilities. Although the '22-'23 harvest was down 20% lower than the prior year, we believe that the new year will have a positive outlook, as you can see on the right-hand side of the screen that the harvest is expected to be just below 15-year record of 2 years ago. Now to our Manufacturing segment, which focuses on our farmers and mainly the fruit, vegetable and sugarcane sectors. The Manufacturing division consists of Agriplas and Tego. Target market is the fruit and vegetable farming sector, and the strategy remains to increase market share, optimal use of facilities and not producing one-way plastic. These business units also felt the impact of load shedding and high interest rates, which dampened form infrastructure spend with quarter 2 being exceptionally exposed to these pressures for these 2 segments. Fortunately, we have seen Tego bins sales increase with the Xtra Volume Pome bin very well accepted in the market. Repeat sales of the citrus bin and Agriplas showing a significant recovery in quarter 3 and quarter 4. Profit before tax decreased by ZAR 4.3 million, mainly due to the sales pressures experienced at Agriplas in first half of the year. Both businesses have managed margins and OpEx very well. Tego will be launching an agri crate in December '23 while continue to grow bin market share and Agriplas sales should see firming up back to normal levels. We have revamped this slide to reflect previous info contained in 3 slides, and it is both a segment and trading activity summary. The intention of this slide is to show contribution to trading activities of the group while emphasizing earnings and return diversification achieved. Too many role players still referred to us as an agri retail, while we now firmly believe we are more a lifestyle retailer with our reach in agri. So if I can first draw your attention to the bottom right graph, which indicates that since the additional PEG, our non-agri trading profit contribution has increased to 73% of total trading profit activities. On the top right graph, it is now evident that fuel trading profit contribution is larger than that of agri. But also note that although fuel gets sold to many retail customers, that circa 24% of fuel volumes will get sold to farming operations. Also and most importantly, that retail activities now contribute more to trading profit than either fuel or agri. This retail activity is focused on general building, DIY, pets, workwear in the Agrimark and convenience and quick-service restaurant offerings in The Fuel Company, a balanced lifestyle retail customer offering. To complete the analysis, one can see in the graphs on the left that Agrimark might only contribute 36% of revenue but still generate 60% of the earnings. Also to note, the profit before tax return on net assets being better in The Fuel Company space than that of Agrimark. We believe to be a well-balanced trading activity and returns business.

Thanks, Sean. Moving to the cash flow performance. You can see that the group continues to generate strong cash flows from operations through increased cash profits and working capital management. The acquisition of PEG has further enhanced the cash generation of the group with a cash component of turnover increasing from 47.8% last year to 61% this year. Although working capital increased slightly, the business has managed this very effectively. Our investment in centralized procurement and distribution as well as stock management continues to generate positive results with inventory growing by only 0.9% during the period compared to revenue growth of 42.7%. Trade debt has reduced year-on-year, more of that on a later slide. Creditors days excluding the increased impact of short-term fuel suppliers are marginally down on last year. Group net interest-bearing debt decreased by ZAR 133.7 million with existing term debt service in line with requirements. All capital expenditure was funded through the normal general banking facilities. Cash interest paid was significantly up year-on-year on the back of increased interest rates and the annualized impact of additional debt funding for the PEG acquisition. Our consistent 3x dividend cover remains, taking into account debt repayments, largely PEG-related from attributable earnings. So overall, the group's cash flow improved during the year and cash generation remains strong. With regard to capital expenditure, during the year, we spent ZAR 173.1 million on CapEx, down from the ZAR 217.6 million spent last year. The spend was largely expansion related and mostly incurred in the Agrimark and TFC segments. Agrimark Grain spend was mainly to expand grain handling capacity, and our corporate spend was predominantly with regard to our ERP modernization with a smaller portion for Agrimark online development. ZAR 24.3 million was spent on alternate energy solutions to -- for power interruption challenges and a further ZAR 24.9 million was incurred for replacement CapEx. Capital spend is subject to stringent feasibility modeling and allocated based on our strategic initiatives and in line with our return on invested capital focus. Given the ongoing interest in our credit book, we continue to share key debtors information and statistics. Our strategy to grow the debtors book remains key to our business model. Credit extension is considered a revenue growth enabler and gives customers the ability to purchase from our various trade and retail offerings. We provide production credit and not consumer credit, and the credit granted can only be used for purchases at our various Agrimark and TFC outlets. Our stringent and well entrenched credit vetting process takes into account a range of variables, including financial and nonfinancial factors as well as the nature and value of any securities provided. The resulting credit rating is used to determine the size of the facility that is approved as well as the interest rate charge to the account. Our debtors book reduced by 3.6% during the period on the back of lower and in some cases, negative product inflation together with the impact of constrained customer cash flow, which hampered infrastructural expansion and related spend. The book totals just over 16,100 accounts with roughly 21% of these accounts being seasonal accounts with payment periods linked to the cash flow cycle of the underlying product produced. These seasonal accounts could have payment terms varying from 3 to 12 months. The contribution of debtors by product type at year-end was fairly similar to last year with a slight increase in fruit, specifically citrus and remains weighted towards grain and fruit. Our bad debt write-offs continue to be very low and are reflective of the quality of the underlying accounts with only 0.17% of the debtors book being written off during the current year. The 5- and 10-year average bad debt written-off remain very low. And lastly, we make in the region of 240 bps net interest received on all debtors accounts. Moving on to our out-of-term debtors. This graph shows the monthly 5-year trend of overdue debtors as a percentage of total debtors and highlights the following: you will see from the graph that over the past 5 years, we've successfully navigated some of the worst agricultural and economic conditions that have been faced by our customers in decades without any significant deterioration in the book and without any meaningful default. Monthly trends are similar year-on-year, except where we have had specific events as we saw in 2020 with COVID-related table grape and wine grape payment challenges that successfully cleared within a few short months. The 2022 out-of-term percentage was the lowest on average we have seen during the prior 5 years. We saw a spike in our out-of-terms balances in February of this year, coinciding with the increased levels of load shedding. This resulted in certain customers holding back on settlement as they navigated the challenges associated with severe power interruptions. We ended the year up 3% of debtors with this increase representing a small number of specific customers on which we hold sufficient security. As such, the increase is not considered a default risk, but has definitely negatively impacted our cash flow. Agri conditions looking forward are really positive, and this bodes well for facility repayment. Overall, we are comfortable with the book, consider it suitably provided -- given the track record we have with our long-standing customers. The next 3 slides were added last year for the first time and have generated a lot of interest. This graph reflects the debtors' balances by month by underlying product group. Note that the only significant product group that is exposed to dryland farming is wheat. Furthermore, the large exposure to table grapes during the month of March -- December to March is driven by packaging material, which will be far lower in the event of a poor harvest. The various product groups have different harvest timelines and, as such, have different cash flow timings, which reduces any single cash flow constraint event in the group. You'll also see that no product group ever gets to 0. The reason being that even during an off-season period, farmers continue to spend on their accounts, be it for infrastructure, maintenance, upgrades, preseason activities or the like. Product groupings with shorter seasons, example, vegetables, also have a less cyclical and flatter cycle. Ultimately, a good spread over the various product ranges, which reduces risk. Our strategic agri focus revolves around water-intensive farming areas, and this graph shows the credit sales by month by river system. The higher sales areas are the Berg and Hex River systems, which aligns to the wheat and table grape information on the previous slide. The wide geographic distribution of the debtors' book is evident and ensures the impact of regional weather or other challenges is lessened, in addition to also smoothing the cash flow impact from debtors. We have a decentralized credit team in all the regions who engage face-to-face with customers, supported by a centralized credit vetting office. The growth opportunities for Agrimark in certain of these river systems is very encouraging. So in summary, a good spread over a wide geographic area which further reduces risk. The last slide on debtors sets out how long our customers have been with the group. More than half our customers by credit facility value have been with the group for more than 10 years and 76.5% have been with us for 5 years and more. Only 10.3% of debtors have been customers for less than 10 years. And remember, this 10% even includes accounts where there have been entity changes. By example, where a farmer previously traded in a CC and now trades in a [ PDY ]. It's clear that a very large percentage of our debtors have supported the KAL Group for a long time. It speaks to the low default rates we are able to achieve. We know our credit customers well. We are familiar with the individual operations, and we have very close relationships with them. With regard to the risk profile of the book, 60.7% of the book is considered to be low and very low risk with less than 1% being seen as a high risk. So in summary, the book is well managed, stringently vetted, diversified from a product and geographic perspective, has an exceptionally low default ratio and is suitably secured. Furthermore, we are well positioned given the positive agri conditions being experienced in our areas. These specific slides on debtors should give a very good insight into why we are very comfortable with the quantum and risk profile of the credit book and why we will continue to leverage credit sales to drive sales. Sean will close out from here.

We made it. It will go down as the year Eskom ate our pie. It’s behind us. We learnt that being resilient in challenging times was crucial, yet again, that we can outperform some of the big guns, that the future holds exciting prospects, that we can still sell more products to more customers in more areas, and make more money by growing, optimizing, leveraging culture and digitization. Sound simple. Maybe not so simple as what life is. But therefore, I conclude with a summary of the highlights for the year. We grew earnings despite the Eskom challenges for the 12th year in a row. Surviving the agri and general retail downturn by managing operational expenditure. Bedding down our PEG investment and capitalizing on the retail convenience uptick. Growing fuel volume market share with both retail and agri customers. Improving our ability to service customers with alternate energy solutions and products. Significantly increasing return on invested capital and growing EVA. Improving balance sheet strength through strong cash generation and reducing debt. Improving the quality of our employees lives with above inflation increases. Increasing our Trust beneficiation by 354% since 2021. And finally, continuing to pay a consistent dividend to shareholders. Now forgive me for adding these wonderful pictures of Tractor Supply Company in the U.S.A. But to compare with us, I thought it would be pertinent to then add the Agrimark right next to that. And I think it is a very appropriate way to close out the session. Thank you very much for attending today.

Thank you, everyone, for listening in. We will move now to the questions section of the presentation. So we do have a few questions. Thank you very much. In no particular order, let's just deal with them as they comes through. There's a question around the aftermarket of New Holland Agency business and how that looks going into the future? So just on that, obviously, when one sells a new tractor, it's under an OEM warranty. And that then leads to part sales as you're doing all the services as per the service plans thereafter. And when the unit then goes off warranty, the farmer is able to buy more great parts if he's so required. All our New Holland Agency sales are supported by workshops and parts divisions in the areas that we operate. So it is interesting that on the medium-term outlook, when you've sold quite a number of new tractors for a few years, it takes, obviously, a bit of time for that to then realize into part sales. And then as your unit sales reduce, it is then normally when your part sales increase because the tractors are then older and require more parts. So it is cyclical. We have had 3 very good years up until F '22 on the whole good sales, a bit lower in F '23. The F '23 is much higher than F '19, well, for example. So it's not poor. Actually, it's just lower than the prior year. And that will relate through to aftermarket sales in our shops and our parts divisions later on. Another question that comes through is really just elaborating on the Agrimark development and our prospects there. So the intention with the Agrimark segment is to look at probably 3 or 4 areas of growth. The first, obviously, being organic growth. So we are finding that we are gaining market share in the DIY, building materials, workwear, paints, pets areas of the business with in-store organic growth, and we really believe that is due to our ability of our DC to service our stores and achieve above 90% in stock availability of those items. It is reliant on our ability to essentially manage our assortments margins, selling prices. So that investment is really paying off for us. So apart from that organic growth, firstly, which will continue, we believe we have found great success in growing sales into areas where we do not have bricks-and-mortar through virtual branches where we link large customers that are selected in certain areas and are targeted by business relationship management teams and increase sales to the closest branch sometimes is hundreds of kilometers away on a virtual basis. The third level of growth will obviously be some bricks-and-mortar expansion, but a very measured approach. We are not as aggressive on the bricks-and-mortar side as for example, a shop, right, and so. We are focused mainly on the water-intensive areas, and our representations is relatively good there already. Then the last area of growth will obviously be on the digital side with the online platforms, and we are now into Phase 2 of our online process, where we are adding the ability to extend the aisle and add products to our web catalog. Currently, 40,000 SKUs on that. We'd like to expand that tremendously so that our digital customers out there could actually shop all the way through to a supplier. That is full range. For example, Jonsson Workwear has probably only about 3,000 SKUs on our catalog currently, and we can expand that to 16,000 or more by extending our aisle from a digital point of view. So that's where Agrimark focus is. We have tested Agrimark Pet [ niche ] stores. They do all work everywhere. We have tested [indiscernible] about the share in purchase and at what net debt-to-EBITDA level we would consider a share buyback. Graeme, if you could please handle that one.

Thanks, Sean. Thanks, [indiscernible], for the question. Although debt-to-EBITDA is obviously a consideration in this process. It's not the only measure. Also, we don't have a specific debt-to-EBITDA level at which we would consider a repurchase appropriate. As I said, there's various considerations we look at these. These are largely our long and short-term debt levels and the intended repayment of those and a key consideration is the additional PEG acquisition debt that we brought on board last year and our intention to accelerate the repayment thereof. Share liquidity very important to us. Ultimately, balance sheet strength and sustainability are the key considerations. So those are really the large consideration areas we would look at in such a decision. As we said, we deem it not appropriate at the moment. But this topic will definitely remain on the radar and be reconsidered on an ongoing basis.

Thanks, Graeme. There's another question here, which I think is probably pertinent. I agree the question as it is stated. How was it possible for the KAL Group to grow headline earnings with the severe impact of load shedding compared to other large retail role players, where that load shedding has had a deeper impact on us than COVID? But I mean, we didn't sit back and wait for all of this to happen to us. We could see it happening, and we reacted. So we curtailed our OpEx. We offer our customers alternative energy solutions and products. We installed ZAR 24 million worth of solar, which is saving us load shedding costs currently. We've onboarded PEG during the year. which has been very successful for us and in line with our expectations, even although they were worst impacted or most impacted by load shedding. And obviously, we've capitalized on the uptick of convenience retail in the year. It grew double-digit figures, probably also due to load shedding. So it was a positive on that side with that. There is another question on the out-of-terms debtors and what has happened since year-end? Graeme, if you can handle that?

Thanks, Sean. First, I think it's important to stress that we're very comfortable with the level of out-of-terms debtors as at the end of September, as you mentioned in the presentation or the slight uptick in the out-of-terms portion of that debtors book. It's really on the back of a very small and specific number of customers who we're engaging with closely and on which we have strong securities. So it's really about a default risk in our view. Unfortunately, it does have a cash flow impact. And on those customers, given that challenges are specific to them, there's been no change since September. That's it on our overall percentages. We're also similar to where we were at the end of September. But as mentioned, our expectation is over the coming few months that these percentages will get back to similar levels that we had last year.

I see your last question here is really just -- I think -- are there any plans in the pipeline for further diversification? Thank you for the question. Obviously, one is realizing that the diversified customer base is now more a lifestyle-minded customer, which we call the farmers, families friends and the fur family. Now it is our intention to continue growing the business while balancing the earnings from our 4 main trading channels, being the agri retail, general retail, fuel retail and convenience retail. So we now firmly extremely good role players in those channels. We would want to, therefore, grow on a balanced basis going forward. So I'd like to thank everyone for joining us for the presentation. We've got to the end of all the questions. I really appreciate all your time. And hopefully, the results were pleasing to everyone. Thank you very much.