Mr Price Group Limited (MRP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody, and welcome. It's great to have you. I was going to say it's almost not a spare seat in the house, it's maybe one or two, but guys, I really appreciate for our inaugural Capital Day Markets -- Capital Markets Day get together that you all found the time someone in hectic diaries to come and spend some time with us and obviously to all those dialing in from overseas or remotely, great to have you with those, too. Yes, we've got a full 1.5 days that we're going to spend together, could stretch to a little bit beyond 1.5 days depending on how late you guys want to stay tonight, but we'll make sure that we're quite guarded in the late evening conversations. But welcome. It's great to have you. In fact, it reminds me of the pre-COVID days. We used to have results presentations, hop on a plane, go to Johannesburg, have a presentation there, have some one-on-ones, get on a plane to Cape Town, do the same there. And it's not too often we get in a forum like this with so many people in the room. So it's great to interact because I think you lose a lot remotely or yes, that I think engagements certainly the preferred mode for us, but I know that the way the market's moved I think it has made it a lot more convenient for people. But certainly, the interaction is what we like. So thank you for making it. Guys, a huge thank you to Investec for letting us use their very humble offices. You must figure of our excitement. We value retailers. We don't often get to be exposed to this kind of environment. So we're very thankful to Investec. Thanks, guys. And I think the room is one thing, but obviously, there's a whole ExCo setup outside. So we've tended to take over the floor. But I think from my side, guys, let's really use that as engagement sessions. The managing directors will be at each of those divisional ExCo sites. So whether you want to chat during a coffee break, ask some questions on your mind about some of the divisions, I think this really use it for its intended purposes. Of course, there's product there, but it's the engagement that I think will be particularly useful. And just as you know, yes, we're here for transparency. So we're a transparent business. It's the way -- and Nigel Payne is here, our Chairman, but it's the way that we run our business, and it's the relationship that we've got between our Board and our business, they've got access to people in our business. There's no Chinese walls or lines that can't cross. So within that, I think let's just respect that we're here to talk about the long term and the strategy. We're not here to actually talk numbers and short-term performance and all that kind of stuff because there's nothing in the public domain. So we can all just respect that and really don't put yourselves in a difficult position and don't put us in a difficult position where we start testing those boundaries. Okay. So it's great that we're going to have a really detailed look at our business. So it is a real opportunity when other engagements, one-on-ones is one thing, but results presentations, guys, it's pretty -- we're pretty pushed for time. So it's going to be good just to slow things down, tell you a lot of what we think you want to know or some information that you do want. And where we haven't met that objective, well, there's definitely going to be Q&A after that where we can spend as long as you want. You also noticed that when I go through -- or you've seen the agenda, we're not talking risks specifically. Our Group Risk Director, is in the room, so you can certainly ask questions if you want to. But the reason that we didn't address risk is that it's really embedded in our divisional thinking, in our group thinking, and I can just give you the assurance that we've got proper methodologies of managing risk. It's involved in the strategy process. It's involved in our operations, but we didn't think that we needed to cover that per se. So 2 days, we've got the better part of 2 days. Timing is tight. So if Matt thinks I'm ad-libbing too much or waxing lyrical, you're going to ring a brass bell but there's a time at the end, and I know that people are dialing in at a certain times for certain slots. So we'll try to keep to that as much as possible. Yes. So I think let me just -- if you then look at the agenda, and you have pre-sight of this, this is really dealing with day 1. And what you can't see here, but obviously, there will be slots coming up. There's engagement sessions with the expos, coffee breaks, lunch breaks and certainly a session at the end, where we can also talk around divisional stuff with -- on the ExCo sites as well. So if you guys don't have too much of a rough night, we're going to hit the DC tomorrow morning. And we look forward to starting off with a tour there. We'll then get into a discussion about logistics in totality. Werner Pelser will take us through that. And then we'll also talk ESG, and then a Q&A on those 2 topics thereafter but if you've got any mop-up questions from the day before, please feel free to ask that, too. Just like you to meet the team. I think you've probably engaged a little bit in coffee before the session. But this is the exec team. You know myself and I think you've all met Praneel already. But besides those 2 people, I mean, when did you last see such a good looking and capable management team? And wait until they speak, you're going to be even more impressed. But if -- and I won't go through everybody, but I think just from the ExCo side, if you wouldn't mind just raising hands, so people can -- you can identify yourself to people. Antoinette Joubert, Group Director of Strategy and Growth. She's down there. Liziwe Masoga, Chief People Officer, also known as the Director of Fund internally. Kim Sim, Chief Information Officer; Werner Pelser, Group Director of Logistics; Don Baney, Group Retail Director of Apparel; and Clint Larsson, Group Retail Director of Homeware. People in the room go way beyond that, but I won't ask you to identify yourselves but we've got Kevin Smith, Managing Director of Mr Price Division; Bruce Binnie, MD of Studio 88 Group. And [ Finlay ], the recent appointment as MD of Mr Price Sport. Unfortunately, Natalie Swales isn't here today. In fact, she hasn't joined us here. She's only joining next week, I think it is, 18th. She recently joined us. She is the ex-head of Cotton:On Africa but has been appointed Managing Director of Miladys and we'll be starting with as soon as I just said. And then last but not least, on the apparel side, Roger Maingard, who is MD of Power Fashion, and Roger has been with the group, I think, probably the longest in the room. Where is Roger? There you are there. And we'll get on to it and you'll see a bit about how we operate and how we work but having someone like Roger skills was an excellent position to put us in for an acquisition where we had to transform the management team, put Mr Price culture in there and the like and that's exactly what succession and leadership is all about. On the Homeware sector side, we've got Sally-Anne Jackson, MD of Mr Price Home. Melissa Dempster, a recent appointment as MD of Sheet Street and Mark Hill, a recent appointment at MD of Yuppiechef. On the financial services side, Roxanne [ Miles ] is also quite a recent appointment, been with the group a number of years, but she's expecting, in fact, this week. Okay, maybe even today. So I think it's a valid excuse. So pretty she can't be here, but very capable lady. Then we go into the centers of excellence, which is the old terminology of service divisions, which is a very inappropriate word. They're here to lead our strategic thinking in areas and to work with our trading divisions to move the organization forward. So of course, there's a whole lot of operational things, but that they are strategic thought leaders in the group as well. Couple of people that do slot in or here were ExCo people, as I just mentioned. Werner Pelser, Group Logistics Director; Kim Sim, CIO; and Dr. Liziwe Masoga CPO. Suren Roopnarian, the Group Risk Director was referring to earlier. Shawn Sweeney, our Group Real Estate Director; Janis Cheadle, our group ESG Director who will tap tomorrow and then Matt Warriner, as well, Group Investor Relations Director. Niraksha Sookraj is our Group Finance Director; and Octavius Phukubye our Group Director of Mr Price Foundation -- the Executive Director, I beg your pardon. So that's the team. I think before I hand over to Nigel for a few words, I did spend a minute just thanking Investec for the use of their facilities. But I think there's a couple of other people as well. It's certainly my gratitude to our leadership by ExCo members who put a lot into this, not only in the presentation, but in the setup as well. Thanks, guys. But a special thank you to Antoinette, who was instrumental in putting some of the information together and a very special thank you to Matt, who has either hair or gone gray, but certainly, Matt, what we see today, I think it's a stupendous effort, and thanks to everybody involved. It's really appreciated. Great. So I'm going to hand over to Nigel. Nigel is going to say a few words. Nigel Payne, our Chairman, and then we'll -- then I'll come back and pick it up and get into the investment case in a sec.

Thanks, Mark. Good morning, everyone. At Mr Price, we don't refer to the people who work in the organization as employees. They're our partners. 34,000 people in the Mr Price Group. So on behalf of all 34,000 of us, good morning, welcome. Thank you for joining us. So that's 34,000 people at all levels up to the level that Mark has introduced our senior executive, welcome from them, from our Board of Directors, from our founders, Stewart Cohen and Laurie Chiappini, we'll be hearing from them on video shortly. We've been becoming increasingly excited about this Capital Markets Day as it's got closer, not only Matt, but all of us. The opportunity to engage with you, like Mark says, hasn't really happened since pre-COVID days. So thank you all in person and online. We've got almost 60% of our shareholders with us. That's just incredible. Thank you all. We really appreciate your time and your support. Wow, 60% of our shareholders. I'm sure you're going to experience a few things about Mr Price today, but you don't really get in results presentations when you're looking at how big is the dividend and what's the date and that kind of stuff. You're going to get a big dose of our culture. Some of the things that are going to come through our passion, our growth mindset, our will to win. Retail can be tough. Particularly fashion retail, in addition to all of the other things that other retailers face, we've got seasonality, the weather and the last couple of years have been tough. I liken it sometimes to looking out there at the ocean, paddling out in a surfski, when the conditions are quite tough. Then you got to work hard to get out there through the surf, but then when you turn, you ride the waves. And the harder it was heading out, the more fun you have riding the waves back in. Of course, if you decided to sit on the beach and watch those paddling out, well, then when they turn to ride the waves you're still sitting on the beach. And I think during the next 1.5 days, you're going to see that we haven't been sitting on the beach. In fact, I've been on the Mr Price Board for a number of years, when I joined, we were in favorable times. Things were going well. We were pumping. The economy was supportive. Then we hit tough times, and we had to pedal through the -- we continue investing. And wow, when the conditions turned, we were able to surf the waves. We had some incredible growth years, the years that Mr Price really pumped. In the last 4.5 years since COVID, we all know what the challenges have been. So it's been tough. One thing about being a fashion value retailer, which we are, we take the hit first. but we also bounced back first. And provided we've been paddling out through the surf, not only do we bounce back first, we bounce back strongly. So yes, the last 4.5 years have been the toughest in our 40-year history, but we've been doing the right things. We've been paddling appropriately. I'm enormously confident that our management team has been investing in the right things during the tough times that ensure we're in for a number of really good years. The good news is I'm not an economist. So I'm not going to forecast specific stuff, but I've seen it before a number of times when the cycle turns, when consumer confidence turns. The combo that we're going to experience in the next couple of months of a drop in the interest rate and a simultaneous big drop in the petrol price. Petrol price often doesn't get muddled in, but it's huge in your pocket immediately or not out of your pocket into the tank, and that's direct in your own vehicle or in the taxi that you use for your transport, plus indirectly in the cost of everything. So I'm confident that our management team have been investing in the tough times in the right things. We invested in great acquisitions. We'll talk a bit more about those. I'm sure those acquisitions still have plenty more room for growth. We've invested in our people, in our systems, our technology. We've invested in our stores, our existing stores, ongoing store refresh that customers love. We've also invested in new stores. One of the realities of paddling out in the surf in tough times is that's when store space tends to be available because the people who are sitting on the beach, one of the things they were doing was exiting good space. When you turn and start riding the waves, new retail space doesn't get built overnight or over year or over next year or over 4 years. So when everyone suddenly starts looking for retail space, the good stuff is gone because the paddlers invested in it in the tough times. We've been investing in new growth vehicles, expanding our brand, Mr Price Kids is obvious example. So our brand appeal and again, across a broader segment of customers. We can do this because we've got a highly cash-generative model. Most of our sales are for cash and we're very disciplined with capital allocation and cost control. So when the tide turns, the consumer confidence turns, the extra cash flow that's available, and you can add 2 pot and a whole bunch of other things into lower interest rates and the impact of the petrol price. And we managed to do that while still generating cash, still paying a dividend according to policy still maintaining a strong balance sheet and not sitting on the beach. As investors in person and online, I think you know that retail is probably the sector where your stock selection has to be most accurate because the difference between those who are going to be surfing and those who are going to be looking for where is my pedal, the difference can be huge. The contract between the outperformers and the underperformers in our sector is perhaps the biggest in any of the major investment segments. And I think you'll hear in the next 1.5 days because of our investment in the tough times, we're in a very good place. Of course, many of our competitors have tried to copy us. And yes, you can copy our goods and you can try and copy our store outlook or our pricing model. You can't copy culture. You can't copy our people, you can't copy our value mindset, you can't copy our passion and you can't copy our 40 years of experience since Stewart and Laurie started the Mr Price Group. I'd just like to mention 2 examples of things that -- we'll show you that we know what we're about. The first one, a couple of years ago, we decided in the Mr Price Sport business, running shoes were just getting too expensive. ZAR 1,500 to ZAR 1,800 for a pair of the kind of running shoes you would need to run the Comrades Marathon. So we decided we're going to launch a Maxed Elite Running Shoe with 2 objectives. Firstly, it must sell for under ZAR 300 and secondly, it must win the Comrades Marathon. So we launched it just under ZAR 300. It took just a couple of years before, we started winning gold medals in Comrades, but in fact, I've got a smack, I celebrated the fact that wow our shoe came [indiscernible], and I got mandate because now, we wanted to win but the following year did win. By then, it was selling for about ZAR 250, but wow, what a story to be able to say we're going to do it, we're going to implement it. So we know about innovation. We know about brand building. We know about value retailing. We know about expanding into segments next to us. Then the other opportunity. So product is one of our big opportunities in our brands. The other opportunity is the opportunity for people to grow. I mentioned 34,000 people in the Mr Price Group, but in the recent past, over 6,500 people previously unemployed never had a job, got their first job in the Mr Price Group, trained through the Mr Price Foundation through our jumpstart retail program and then started working for Mr Price in their very first job. The start of their careers, the opportunity to grow. And how far can you grow in a growing group like Mr Price. How much people growth is available? So my favorite example, it's even better than Maxed Elite winning the Comrades Marathon, In 1993, [ a grade 11 pupil ] started working for us part-time in our store in the Pavilion in Durban, 1993. He grew so much that 5 years later, by 1998, we appointed him as a trainee planner. Planning is an enormously important part of our business. And he kept growing. And today, Kevin Smith is the MD of Mr Price Apparel. That's the kind of growth we like. So welcome. Thank you again for joining us. We hugely appreciate your confidence in the Mr Price Group in our prospects, in our team to deliver on that. So to dive into some of the detail, the 40 years of experience from our founders, Stewart Cohen and Laurie Chiappini, we're going to play a few clips of them. I look forward to engaging with all of you in the next day. Welcome. Thanks again. [Presentation]

Great video. So I'm going to talk about the investment case. And I think I'm often posed the question, I'm sure many of my colleagues are too. Guys, so we think there's something different about Mr Price. What is it that you could put on it, what is the reason that you're different. And of course, it's quite easy to go into the more technical answer, well, we're cash based, we're omnichannel. We're obsessed with providing differentiated fashion. I mean this is -- it's all 100% valid and fashion differentiation is at the very core of what we do. Differentiated fashion, bringing value to it so that you can feel good by dressing well with up-to-date fashion at a fraction of the cost. And to a diverse range of customers, because I think there's a preconception that we only service the low to mid income. I think we'll certainly talk to that a bit later. And by the way, when I'm talking about differentiated fashion, and if any anyone in the room or anyone listening in, does want it, I think let's just understand that what we see as differentiated fashion, obviously, it's part of it -- it's at the roots of our business, but we want you to understand it as well. And why I'm saying that we actually took a group of investors, I'm going back a year or 18 months and in fact, I'd extended the invitation at a meeting in Cape Town. Guys, if you don't know what we mean and it's not translating about what we mean about differentiated fashion value we're going to organize a dedicated tour you for. They are very big shareholders. And we took them out and we showed them differentiated value in the stores, what we do, would you find this product at competitors and I think the pin you really dropped for them. So I'm just going to open invitation whether it's Matt, it's tours that are designed for a larger audience or you want a one-on-one. Nigel is saying we got 60% of our shareholders in the room, I think it's a really part -- important part of showing you what we do and so that you can understand it the way that we do. But for me, that's probably be the more technical side of the response to what makes Mr Price special. And I think if I really have to distill it down, Nigel spoke about culture. I think we're now starting to go in the direction of the things that make Mr Price special. So if I had to really look at culture and then I had to distill that down further, what is the thing that makes Mr Price special? And I think you've just seen the video. It's actually Stewart and Laurie. Once in a generation people who had big plans in mind but started with real discussions very early on in their career and in the history of Mr Price to put people first, to build teams and to build a special organization. And it's decades later, and we still feel it's alive in our business, and I'll go through talking a little bit about who we are and the kind of things that we do, but certainly, that's the slide, and I think it came up in Stewart's presentation as well, ordinary people doing extraordinary things. So Stewart and Laurie, what they created and we're still blessed by having them involved in the business in slightly different capacities, but it's really what they started off in day 1 and what we've indoctrinated in our business is an absolute nonnegotiable and when you -- I'll show you a slide just now in the Mr Price Way, that's not a bunch of fluffy words. Our people will understand it. We live by it, we hold people to account by it, new people indoctrinated in it and it's at the very, very of what we do. So -- and I guess my job as a CEO, my job is to preserve and to nurture that culture. I'm the temporary custodian of it, and when I hand it over to my successor in time, then you can bet your bottom dollar that my success is going to be someone who's got a very balanced EQ and IQ as well. And I was chatting to someone a bit earlier in the room about finding people and EQs and all the rest and I think for any leadership position, you're always looking for that balance in EQ and an IQ. But I think even more so at Mr Price, where when you see what Stewart and Laurie is saying about people, what Nigel is saying by people that ability to grow teams and harness the collective power and together, the team can do more is really what we're all about. And in so doing, there's no airs and graces internally in our business. Leave titles at the door, treat people with respect and just, I guess, at the end of the day, just be real. And I think that's who we are. So I'm on this page, it says what really drives Mr Price, and this is now what I'm talking about, The Mr Price Way. So this is a summary of -- in fact, it's a document I take everywhere. A couple of things in my briefcase is my corporate -- my calendar. I've always got our budget and our strat summary in place. I've got a 4-page document on The Mr Price Way as a constant reference point, and it's an incredibly insightful thing and it always has got the ability to bring you back. So we set out obviously, and I'm going to talk about our vision a little bit later, being your value champion, it's the reason that we get up and go to work every day to bring value to our customers. So that's our purpose. And what Stewart and Laurie were just talking about and Nigel, it's our value system. So passion, value and partnership. I'm not going to unpack them all in totality, but passion is exactly that, ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Value everything that we do in our business, whether it's the ultimate price and quality of the garment, all the way that we have to think about expenditure, CapEx, anything like that, it's always at the center of decisions that we make. So we've got some words up in our boardroom. Every decision made every day must support our value routes. And those are the kind of things that always draw us back to stress test our thinking. It's an incredible belief system that's been developed, and of course, there's a lot under this, and we'll get into the DNA in the bottom right quadrant just now as well. But you saw wording called founders mentality and what Stewart and Laurie talking about a little bit earlier and what Nigel was talking about is what are these qualities? How do we want to run the business? How are we running the business? And if you want to just expand your horizon, you're thinking on it, we -- there's an amazing book called The Founder's Mentality. The author is look, Zook and Adams or something like that, I can't quite remember. And what we use that to, if you read that book, it's -- you swear it was written about Mr Price. So what we just use some of the frameworks there to formalize some of the thinking, but it would be a great reference point just for you to understand what a founder -- originally a founder-led business with the founders still in the room, what it means and what makes that special. So in that Founders Mentality, it's insurgency. And what I mean by that is while I spoke about our purpose and getting up in the morning to bring value. It's this bold mission and really what inspires us is that we feel that we're at war on behalf of the consumer. So everything that we do, and as I said a little bit earlier, selling prices, the amount of the volume that we order to drive down selling prices, that's all in that bold mission of absolute fight on behalf of the consumer. And in this country, I think people really need that when you look at the demographic. Spikiness that there's just a bold mission. We're clear on the big things and the big calls and why we have to do them and limitless horizons, we think long term. Even if we take some short-term punishment, or there's a short-term impact. That's absolutely fine. We'll probably have modeled it already, but we're prepared to go through that for the long-term good of the company. Then you get into an owner's mindset and any entrepreneur will tell you, cash is everything. So strong cash focus. It's one of the reasons that we actually just don't open the taps on credit, but I'll talk to that a bit later. Bias for action means less bureaucracy and then we get on to frontline obsession. It's an absolute obsession fighting on behalf of customers and making sure that whatever happens on the front line that we treat those people with the respect that they deserve and I think we do that as an organization. We're one of the few companies that I know of that offers basic pay, STIs at a store level and LTIs at a store level. And they in fact, store associates are the ambassadors of our business. What we have to do then is make sure that the learnings we can take from that have to permeate up through the organization and ultimately to the boardroom. So frontline empowerment and our people having a say and our people having a go takes me on to relentless experimentation. To always try and stay ahead, you have to be trying things. Some will work, some won't work, but we never want -- and we do think really deeply about things. But we never want to create an impression or an internal thought process that we're not prepared to have a go. If we've done our best thinking, we must be prepared to put effort and CapEx behind it. And then if we fail, we must fail fast and move on. So -- and I think over the years, we've got a fair share of failures, but we've got far more successes than failures. We then get into the guide to survival and prosperity, which is something that we use in our merchandise area, which guides us and things like clarity of offer, category dominance I was talking about when we make big calls, and I'm sure that the group retail directors will cover this in their presentation. Everything that goes into making that call and in the volume that we place is there's a very, very detailed process behind that, which limits risk. And then there's a whole bunch of other things, center, which is also control and I said that a little bit earlier, making sure that we fight for every cent, making sure that value is at the heart of every we do -- of everything that we do and making sure that costs is a thing that's alive and cost management is alive in our business. So I often get the question, how do you guys manage to do it? When times are bad and maybe some top line pressure because we've been through such a disruptive 5 years, how do you always manage to manage your costs? I say, well, you don't have to look at me. You don't have to look at Praneel, of course, we're the leaders in this business, managing those things. But when I was talking about indoctrination and a belief in the business, the things already happening. Sure, we'll start putting targets to it, and we'll try to start managing the process. but the organization is this live organism, and they're already dealing with cost curtailment. So if that's in your DNA, Nigel was talking about a bit earlier as well, things come naturally. So all these kind of things you'll I think all contribute to the special thing and have to be preserved at all costs. Yes. Then there's the whole DNA and culture, there's a lot of detail behind this. I think for the sake of time, I'm not going to do too much on that. I've spoken about teamwork, I've spoken about being brave and having a go, being real and empathetic as a leader. But at the end of this, we're not a [indiscernible] organization, we're very hard on performance. And if you can match the special culture with performance, then I think you really have got something worth preserving. So we started off with a vision. I'm going back to a couple of years ago, probably 3 or 4, 4 years ago. And when I assumed leadership of the group, I really thought I had a great team of people. Perhaps, a lot of them have been in their positions a little bit too long, so we need some refreshing but in many other respects, I thought that we needed to move the business forward a bit. And what we did is when we came up with a vision and therefore, the strategy, we collaborated widely internally and the vision that we had was to be the most valuable retail in Africa. So there, we are looking at the market cap of food and drug retailers and the general retail index in South Africa. And at the time, we have placed ourselves fourth in that. And look, this is a long-term thing. So it's not going to happen in 5 or 10 years, but it's something that keeps us anchored in what we're actually after. The good news is that played forward a couple of years and what I just described as the worst retail environment, I can remember with disruption, we've actually gained a place. But the reality for us is that the people above us have pulled away from us. So when I start talking about our strategy and the next wave of research that we're doing and scalability and all these things, it is in pursuit of that vision. And I think you'll leave with an impression that we've got a really great team. We're quite clear on our plans. We're not at risk of distraction and I'm feeling really comfortable that I'm in a place now that I can start spending even more time on the pursuit of that vision. But that's what the next day or so is all about. Stakeholder engagement that our relationships are based on the true spirit of partnership and that the group is ranked as the leader in engagement and delivery. And that's an area I'm really, really happy about. We've been recognized. We do surveys amongst all our stakeholder groups. We've got landlord surveys and interactions. We've got suppliers with our investors, we are ranked #1 in Investor Relations. And the great thing is that the internal surveys with our own associates, I'm not going to steal the thunder, but we're doing exceptionally well there, too. So stakeholder engagement, and we're not getting back to the values. I think let me just spend a minute maybe just discussing and reflecting on probably the time where you play your cards is when it's the darkest days and where your values are the most important, and you really put on the spot and I'm going back to the hard lockdown and the like in COVID. And what we -- so it's very easy to panic because this is big things that's affecting the globe. We are very calm. We knew that was a crisis. We knew it had catastrophic potential consequences, but we got together as a leadership group, and we said, right, what's going to guide us through this? Incomes our value system, incomes our culture and our DNA. And at the end of it, we said how do we want to be judged when we come through this. So that was a critical sort of think tank and a critical outcome for us. So we were never one of those organizations sending letters to suppliers saying that, sorry, I don't care if I've ordered, we're not accepting an order at our DC tomorrow. We actually work through it with suppliers. And in the true spirit of partnership, and why I'm elaborating it's under our stakeholder engagement is that sure, we lost. Our suppliers also lost a bit, but we've worked with them to manage the way -- our way through it. And at the end of the process, and we came back and evaluated ourselves, it was a massive tick for us. We came out with reputation enhanced. And I could only look at the larger business and how they work together, work with stakeholders and you are a couple of years later, it's almost like it never happened. That's the way you forge long-term relationships. The other pillar is innovation and growth. We'll talk at length about that over the next days and also where we're going. Brand promise, continues to surprise and delight our customers with value I've spoken about that. This particular pillar, I am looking at consolidating at a group level because it's now owned at the respective divisional levels. So there's some potential, some change to org design coming on that. And then people are going to talk at length about people that's really having this energized environment of engaged people, driving performance and being really attractive as an employer in retail. Strategic enablement that was enabling growth and innovation through what I said or our centers of excellence and everything that comes around that and the sustainability to be recognized by stakeholders as relevant ethical, sustainable and proudly South African. And for me, this is also another area that we've done very well at. In fact, when we meet with investors and maybe particularly so -- some of the international guys. For a value retailer, which I suppose it could be the thought that we're behind the curve with ESG or we're in the third-world country, what can we possibly be doing, I think they're actually very, very pleasantly surprised when they founded what we actually do. And we did have an ESG Day, which I think worked very well, but certainly, I think we -- I think we're taking a leading position there in retail. So those are the strategic pillars. I often also then get asked the question, but what kind of operating model have you got? And can you just explain it to us? So I think over the years, we've had a sort of a blend of between 2 and 3, but we're probably more a Model 3, as you see on the slide. And part of this has been a transition because if you go 4 or 5 years ago, a lot of our group thinking and strategy was actually was bottom fed. So it actually came up through the divisions and there was an aggregation and a stress testing of that. I've turned that completely around it. Although we still have that process, strategy group stage is a top-down process in the 2 meet and we deliberate and we discuss. So Corporate Center sets top-down direction, approves trading. So there's ExCo representation at the Trading Division Board meetings, trading division strategies and we're obviously deeply into the detail in those organizations. And then we've got some shared services that span the business. But right now, we don't necessarily span all the business because of acquisitions, but we'll talk about some of that just now. So very much in an operational orientation block. But our current operations, where we expect to be moving to is more towards the 4. So much more integration but it's not going to be forced at all cost. And there's a reason that I think will surface over today as to why we've taken the approach to integration that we have and where we find ourselves now and what are we ready for. Part of our history and the things I think we've done well over a number of years is -- and this is going back some time, it's going back 1987. But the point here is that we're not -- it's not one thing in particular that we're looking to do to push on our growth. So we've got organic growth in our businesses, and that is -- we'll talk at length about that over the next couple of hours. But we've actually been -- there's a really good balance here between acquisitive growth and then new concepts in the business. So when you go back for a number of years. At some point, and I suppose a long time ago, Sheet Street was acquired. But then we had a job to do to grow it to the business that it is today. Home is obviously a startup. Sport was our own startup. Money was our own startup. Cellular and mobile and Mr Price.com (sic) [ mrp.com ], our e-com office start in 2012, those are all organic concepts. We started testing baby a couple of years ago. Where did that lead us? It actually led us into refining the assortment and deciding that, in fact, what we had there was it was a really, I think, a really solid offer with a good potential, but we had to change the shape of the assortments that have morphed into our kids business rather. And then more recently, some acquisitions that we -- as Nigel is saying, we had a really strong balance sheet in an environment that was as bad as it's been in the last 5 years. We took the view to invest. And I'll leave it to Antoinette to explain the process we went through and to remind you, it will just allow you into our thinking a little bit deeper once again. So a really great history of building businesses and brands. And I think that's really set us up in a really nice position for an improving economy and I love that analogy of the paddling out to back line and I think that explains it quite well. And if -- yes, look, I think if you now think about where the economy is poised, where our operations sit, the growth that we've got ahead of our operations. Well, you can't argue against this, and this is the power of the Mr Price brand. And although there's other retailers ahead of us, we're the only apparel and footwear and homeware brand, but we currently sit as the 25th most valuable brand in South Africa, and that's not our estimation that per Kantar and certainly the only retailer that in that -- on that page, it doesn't incorporate a food offer. Also per Kantar, we are recognized as the value champion. So a lot of the focus that I said we bring to the business. This puts us firmly in that great value component. And that's a mix of pricing power and perceived price, and that's exactly where we want to be. So I think just to bring that to a summary at the end, talks through our business model that we think is correctly positioned. And by the way, I think the other thing is I just want to talk to you that when we talk about the size of the retail sector and market share and all those kind of things and it's going to lead us on to the presentation that we've got tonight and the discussion we'll have around that. We're all talking about the formal markets, that stats SA, it's RLC very important because we can judge ourselves versus our competition in that. But there's this massive informal market, and I'll let our speaker take you through that tonight. But if you then think of, well, who the retailers best placed to serve that market and it is massive, then we'd certainly be in that discussion as one of the top 2. So positioning with everyday low prices, everyday price is really key. It means that our customers don't wait for sales and sales events. We offer them the best price all the time. I said a little bit earlier, we fight on their behalf, and they're not conditioned to waiting for an end-of-season sale with us. If the fashion is in the store, they must go and buy it, and they'll get a really good price. We've got leading brand awareness. We've got a defensive low-cost model that Praneel will talk about. We've got -- and I'm going to talk quite a bit about e-com and our thoughts around e-comm a little bit later, but we do have a strong e-com offering. And I've spoken about ESG leadership that it doesn't come and it's not all the pursuit of profit. Of course, we could, in the short term, probably be making a lot more money if we weren't doing the things that we're doing, but it's all to build a sustainable future. The balance sheet and our zero free debt, I'm not talking about operating leases, but other types of debt. Cash generative, we all know that. Stakeholder engagement that I've spoken about. And in our growth, what we will spend quite a lot of time over the next day is talking about how does our growth look? How is it shaping our balance sheet? And how do we think about metrics and where is the shape? What's the trajectory of those metrics over the next couple of years that we're expecting and that we're certainly striving for. And as I said, it's a long-term track record, which speaks for itself. But as I said as well, we've been through 5 of the most difficult years that I can remember. Our compound growth rate in sales was still 11 -- touching 12%. Didn't quite have the leverage down to operating profit. Our compound growth rate was 6% but it's getting back to what Nigel said as well, invested through the cycle. I honestly believe we've transformed our business internally, much of what you won't see. We've got added growth vehicles back in place. We've got space growth opportunities across our business, and there's a lot to be happy about. So what you've seen is obviously a kick on in the share price in the last 12 months. And when we look at are we lagging or are we ahead of the pack, there's 2 things I always bring to mind is what side of the equation we're on and what base were we on. And a lot of you can go back to last 12 to 24 months, and I know that I set up explaining to the market whilst we had lost market share, what the reasons for that loss of market share is. So just to reiterate, we had power disruption through load shedding, and we had to get all our stores in backup power. And we also -- we had successfully gone through an ERP transition, which would be effectively a 10-year journey, but it was in, but that caused disruption as people got used to it. And of course, there were tweaks necessary to change the way people understood the system and could use the system. So in that environment and with those that kind of disruption, and the loss of market share that resulted in whilst people were distracted, I stood up and I said to the market, I'm 100% confident our merchandise offers right, but there were some things in context in the backdrop of a really poor economy that I'm very confident getting the market share back. And I think that's what you've seen. And it's a reason that our share price has reacted the way it has. The messaging I gave to the market did transpire. We did gain market share back. And in fact, it's just probably share that we should never have lost in the first phase, but then there were those events that I spoke to. So great to be in a position where we're now ahead of the market in performance. And certainly, what I'm looking for is, as the head of this business, is making sure that those jaws, the gap between our performance and our competitors, actually grows and that we, after a lot more consistency, given a lot of that disruption is now out of the way. Okay. That's it for me. I'm going to hand over to Antoinette, who's going to talk about the progress that we've made in our strategy over the last couple of years.

Good morning, everyone. In the spirit of transparency, a few confessions. I'm the shopaholic in the group. I think in pictures. I'll have a post-it note, and so you're going to see some of those post-it notes now when we show you how the strategy has progressed, and they generally ask me not to talk about numbers because I'm not a CA. And so I'm going to talk about how the strategy has progressed. And then Praneel is going to come and wrap it up for you in terms of how it's changing the shape and the numbers in the business. So one of the best parts of my job is actually being -- when I was here last night, and just watching the merchants set that Expo up last night, because part of what we get to do, if I didn't work from Mr Price is that I'd work in the FBI, and that is because I love trying to solve a problem. And what we try and do in the strat team is we solve whether we should do things organically or inorganically. And just watching that team last night, you realize how many amazing things this business can do just with the talent that we've got. So my father always says to me that he would be much happier if I was a doctor because it would be easier to explain to people what I do Monday to Friday. So I'm going to try and give you an analogy of how I do explain what we do. And that is I say to people, think about a ping pong ball in a room, in a vortex. So I know this diagram looks very static, and it looks like our strategy process is very circular. But in a day, the ball can jump from any part of that vortex in terms of solving problems for the business. So we are responsible for making sure that we do the right things to deliver growth at a group level, and then making sure that the divisions are doing things right to deliver on their own visions and growth trajectories. And part of that comes to the process that we've built of continuous monitoring and calibration of strategy. Now I know that can often come across as being very negative, then people think that we only obsess about the red KPIs, but we don't. We're a very competitive business. We're a very passionate business. And so part of the excitement for us in monitoring and calibration is actually when the KPI is green, because that means that we can stretch ourselves, and it means that the opportunity was bigger than we had originally identified. So we spend a lot of time in that. And then on the other side of the vortex is we get to be the detectives. So we spent time researching different markets, looking at different customer segments, trying to identify how we can deliver long-term shareholder value and then the best model to bring that to the market, whether it is organically or inorganically. So interestingly, in 2019, as Mark said, the detectives were faced with an interesting space. We've had senior leadership change. Mark had moved from the CFO to the CEO position. He made some executive changes. The market was in a bit of a tricky space. So at a market level, markets were -- the sales were growing at sort of low single digits, and costs were coming. And so for all of you who are sitting in this audience, the worst thing for a retailer is negative operating leverage. We hate it. And so we started thinking about what do we do. The other thing we discovered in 2019 is Matt's favorite joke, and that is that Ant loves the due diligence. So actually, what a lot of people don't know is that in late 2019, we actually did our first DD. And what was very interesting about that process was that we'd identified an organic opportunity. And because we were nervous about capacity and bringing too much change into the business, we actually identified a business that we could buy to fill that gap. And so we spent 6 months in DD, and we learned about all sorts of things that I still have nightmares about: mac clauses, W&I insurance, shareholders' agreements. But the thing I'm actually proudest about is the fact that we didn't do that deal. And that's one of the things that is so interesting about working in the vortex is that we sometimes are incredibly busy deciding what not to do. So 2020 came. And for those of you who remember the 26th of March, we all packed up our offices, computers, screens, the notes we thought we were going to need for 3 weeks. And I'll never forget walking out of the office and Mark said to me, so what are you going to do for the next 3 weeks, because we literally just decided to walk away from the deal. And I thought I was going to spend 3 weeks learning to bake banana bread, run the comrades around the pool, paint my own nails, stare at the sea, and it lasted 48 hours. And on Sunday morning, I was sitting on the patio, and I got an e-mail from Mark saying, could we chat the next day? And on the Monday morning, we decided that we were going to use lockdown to just take a step back. We were going to look at the markets. We were going to do some research, and we're going to use the time to just think. And so we started with trying to understand the big macro of SA. And that process has actually become a very powerful framework for us in terms of how we think about growth. So as Mark was saying, we've become quite top down in terms of how we think about things. And what we did is we analyzed the market to try and identify the segments that we're going to present great opportunities for us, but that we're also going to deliver on all of our other investment criteria. So we didn't want to bring a lot of cannibalization into the business, that had to be about new customers, new products, new formats. We like margins, so we didn't want to go into anything that was too low margin. And we also are incredibly aware of bringing too much distraction and too much complexity into the business at once. So I stupidly sat at my dining room table and I drew some post-it notes. And I didn't know that the post-it note was going to become something that you were all going to have to look at for the next 5 to 10 years. So this was one of the first post-it notes that came out of the process. And this is how we tried to plot the company based on how we saw product classification and SA at the time. So we looked at -- we talk about price value, fashion value, aspirational value premium. If I work for LV, we'd go another level up, and we put in luxury. A girl can dream. And then we looked at the different categories that we played in. So apparel, homeware, financial services and telecom and e-comm. And on my post-it note, the white space looked very interesting because it identified all the areas that we could potentially go into that would simply grow the business. And so 2 years later, along with all of the talented people that are in the room with me, the business now looks like this. And so I think we can all be very proud to say we've closed a lot of gaps. Three of them via acquisition and two of them via organic launches. I think I'm allowed to say we're not done. We are always busy and we are always researching. So to talk to you a little bit about the 3 that we did acquire, you will know them all. So Power Fashion was the first. And that was really because we identified that there was this huge customer market that sat in the price value space, and that it was an easy opportunity for us to go and compete in. It's also a fantastic deal for us because it was identified, we knew the owner. And so it was a bilateral process. It was negotiated through masks in COVID with lots of zoo biscuits. But it was -- it's been an excellent deal for us. And so that has closed that bottom price value, sorry the screen is a bit slower, the bottom price value side. The second business that we acquired was Yuppiechef, which has given us access to that higher LSM homewares customer. It's also brought in an omnichannel offering to the business. And perhaps if we weren't so busy going back to back into doing the Studio 88 deal, I would have actually learned to bake banana bread after we bought Yuppiechef because of all they sold. And then the third deal we did was acquiring Studio 88, which has, of course, introduced the group to that very high growth athleisure branded market. We get asked a lot about integration when we buy businesses. So a few things that are very important for us when we think about it. We don't buy a deal, we don't buy businesses synergies. So if the investment case doesn't work for the strategic side of the business, it's not something that we're looking to do. So synergies and efficiencies that come through in time, that's for us as cream on the top of the margin. So it's very important for us that we acquire businesses that are really high performing, that they have strong management teams, that they've got clear product differentiation and that they have a clear [ CBP ]. When you acquire businesses, it's very disruptive for the management teams, and so we need to just give them time to settle. And so our approach to integration has always been light touch to start. But as Mark and Nigel have shared with you, we have an incredible culture, and it's contagious. And so it doesn't take long for us to one, to become a one big family. And so the easier part for us to integrate are typically in the centers of excellence. So we do quite a lot of work with them in finance. There's often huge benefits on the people side. Werner runs world-class logistics, and so that brings efficiencies to the business as he starts working with them. Kim probably has the toughest job because tech tends to be more on a case-by-case basis, is it right for the business, and it must be in an appropriate investment. But also the thing about integration is to remember that these businesses teach us things too. So we don't want to integrate businesses only to do things the Mr Price way. We have bought businesses and categories that we didn't typically trade in. And so we try and collaborate and make sure that we're taking best of breed as we integrate the businesses, so that the whole group is in a better place. So some of the early sort of successes we've had, Power Fashion, I think Roger will tell you that he quite enjoys the benefits of being part of group supply chain. And he certainly keeps our real estate team incredibly busy. He was our biggest store opening in terms of a single chain last year because of the real estate team. Yuppiechef has benefited from stealing some skills from the Mr Price team. So Mark Hill, the new MD, was from the Mr Price apparel team. And they are also working with the logistics and real estate team at the moment. And Kim had to get involved in some tech PCI and cybersecurity for them. And Studio 88, they also work with our real estate team at the moment. And they interestingly are doing some work on the supply chain through Don and our apparel merchandise team. But it's not all about letting me spend money, although I do need to spend a little bit more in the next 2 years as we acquired the last two tranches of the Studio 88 business, just for those of you that haven't seen the slide before. So the twelve deals we did, we acquired 100% of the business. In the Studio 88 business, we acquired the last 30% of the business over 3 years. But we also have this huge talent in the business. We have this incredible brand, and often, there aren't businesses to acquire that fill the white space that we've identified. And so the two big organic businesses that we are busy with at the moment, both actually have very different backgrounds. So Kids is an amazing opportunity for us because it's not only about the learnings of which part of the baby market we wanted to serve, but it's also been about giving Kids and the Kids customer, their own store format and their own shopping experience. And then we get the added benefit that when you take Kids out of the mothership store, it allows that store to use the space for the categories that were under indexed, and to give that core fashion value customer whose 16 to 24 and quite funky shopping experience without a baby sister. And then the cellular business is -- was also an opportunity to grow our brand. If you haven't been to the expo yet, Praneel can tell you all about the white label cellphone. And it was interesting when we listen to our customer, I mean, they've asked us to launch Mr Price Airlines. They have asked us to launch Mr Price liquor, they've asked us to launch the Mr Price real estate business. So we know that the customer believes in product -- petrol stations. So we know that the customer knows that we live and breathe their value, and it was just a very easy extension for us to do that in the cellular and data space. As I said, living in the vortex is about making sure that we do the right things. It's about making sure that we execute with absolute discipline and that we manage distraction. So part of what we do is making sure that we deploy capital well, and that's often about the trade-offs. So often, there are five or six things that we'd love to do at once. That is just not the right thing for the business. And that is very much led by our commitment to long-term metrics and market-leading metrics. So that's a very big part of how we decide where to invest our money. As Nigel says, we've invested through the cycle, but it hasn't only been about letting me spend money outside of the country. It's also been about doing things in terms of our own existing business. And so this slide just talks about everything that has happened in the business in the last 4 years. And so if you think I've done a terrible job of talking about the progress we've made in terms of growing the business through what has been some of life's experiences that we really don't want to relive. We did this through lockdown. We did this through the terrible social unrest of July 21. We survived the KZN floods, and we hopefully come out of the worst stages of load shedding for the country. I will ask you when you've got some time to go and look at the 2006 results presentations, if you really want to understand the progress that we've made. And the reason I ask you to go and look at 2006 is that's actually where my journey with the business started. So in May 2006 I went into my first Mr Price results presentation at the Hyatt Hotel, and we are forever indebted to Matt, that our presentations look the way they do now versus the fliers you used to get in 2006. But when Praneel shows you how the numbers have changed just in the past 4 years, I think it's very evident how the team has progressed over the past 4 years. So I'm going to hand over to Praneel to talk numbers.

Thanks, Ant. And I can confirm that Ant has the biggest credit card in the group. She is the shopper, and she loves buying businesses. So all of that we can confirm. Good morning to everyone. It's great to see so many of our shareholders and stakeholders present here today, and also to all those joining in online, thanks for your time in the webcast. It's really going to be a great 2 days. And I hope that by the time you leave tomorrow, you're as excited about our business as we are. Today, I'm going to talk to you initially about the change in shape of our business. I think this is probably one of the most often asked questions whenever we engage with investors and stakeholders. And for all the things that Ant has said, there's been significant change in the market, but also significant change in the business. So it's great today to be able to give you a view of the business from the lens of the management team to understand how we see the business. At the end of the presentation, I'll also just give you a view in terms of how we see our positioning in relation to some of the changing environment or economic environment that we see coming. So moving on, what have we been doing over the last 5 years? It's a question you're probably asking. And to Nigel's point, we haven't been sitting on the beach. We've actually been quite busy. I think you can sum up the last 5 years in two words, it's been about growth and it's been about diversification. When we started in F 2020, we started with retail sales of ZAR 21.7 billion, and that has grown to ZAR 36.6 billion by F '24. Nine divisions growing -- sorry, 6 divisions back in 2020, with 5 retail chains growing to 9 divisions and 15 retail chains by 2024. And the diversification really coming through as you look at the pie chart, with the Mr Price Apparel contribution at 58% in 2020, moving to 42% in 2024 based on the acquisitions that have come through and some organic growth in other verticals. From a store perspective, we were at 1,378 stores in 2020, growing by 110% by 2024 to 2,900 stores through both acquisitions and internal growth of the core business. Our associates grew from 18,000, up 78% to 32,000 by the end of the financial year. 78% increase in people. And it's -- as you've seen in the slide earlier, it's really created some great opportunity for our people in the business. What has been quite pleasing to note is that the significant growth that we have delivered has come in a very highly disruptive operating environment over the last 5 years. And if we could just pause there and maybe reflect and started talking to you about some of the big things that have happened over the last 5 years. But in recapping, I think it's important to pause and think about the effect of COVID-19 that started in 2020 with a hangover into 2021. During the civil unrest in 2021, we had about 111 stores that were looted, that took various stages of time to get back up and running. The flooding in '22 and also our internal ERP go-live, which Mark spoke about earlier also. And we saw the intensified impact of load shedding that started in '22 and then grew into '23 and into the early part of '24. Also, earlier this year from an election perspective, uncertainty pre-elections and also in terms of how the GNU would be formed and how that would settle. And I guess, overall, in that context of 5 years, there's also been severe macroeconomic challenges which have impacted consumers and results. But in that highly disruptive operating environment, it's really then put our performance into context. With retail sales, we said growing at 69% from the ZAR 21 billion to ZAR 36 billion. Operating profit grew 33% also over that time, EBITDA up from ZAR 5.6 billion to ZAR 8.2 billion, up 47%. From a headline earnings perspective, headline earnings grew from 1,047 cents to 1,286 cents, so up 23% over that 5-year period. So really, the summarization of the growth over the last 5 years has come through the acquisitions that we have done, but also from the organic launches that we've done over the last 5 years, and also growth in the core business. So not to forget some of the market share gains that Mark spoke about, together with the new store opportunities where we were investing through the cycle that was quite a good opportunity for us. In terms of how our business margins have evolved over the last 5 years, this is also quite a big area of focus that we get quite often from the investment community. And you will remember when we presented our year-end results a few months ago in June, we spent some time talking about GP margins and operating margins. And for the first time also, we had given you a view as to what medium-term targets could look like. When you look at the 5-year view, you can see that from a GP perspective, our acquisitions brought great growth, but also brought a little bit of lower margin into the group. I think the great opportunities there is that we've identified opportunities for some margin expansion from that perspective. And hence, you see the medium-term targets, the red dotted line, trending slightly up based on those opportunities. From an operating margin perspective, you also note from '22 to '24, you see the operating margin also slightly lower than the historic returns. We spoke to you then also about the acquisitions, op margins being lower than the core business. But also important to note in a slide earlier, you would have seen that our 5-year average op margin at 16.3%, ahead of competitors at 9.3% over that time. Again, the red dotted line for the medium-term target shows you the opportunity for us that we see in the op margin space. And I think it's important context to know that over this 5-year period, there's also been quite a significant higher cost of doing business that we've had to manage. So while we've been really great at cost management, there are -- there have been -- if you just look at the last 2 years, for example, and some of the costs that influenced the business. Food inflation, for example, up 8% for our consumers, fuel was up 7.8% and the national minimum wage averaging about 9% over the last 2 years, with electricity also up 13.4%. So these escalating costs impacting the cost of doing business over that period. And we also mentioned the disruptions from the operating environment. The immediate next question we get when we talk margins is about how do we close that gap? And how do we achieve the medium-term ranges that we have set? I think from a GP perspective, we have spoken to you before about the fact that from an acquisition perspective, there is growth. We've identified the private label assortments and then increase in the contribution of private label to those businesses as a great way to unlock GP margin. Also increased opportunistic stock buying for Power Fashion, which has really been a lot of Roger's time over the last probably 6 months, that strategy is really taking off now. We're able to deliver great value to customers at improved margins. And Ant's slide on integration spoke to you about some of the efficiencies we've seen coming through integration, but also more opportunities on the horizon. For the core business, it's really -- it's really about executing the merchandise strategy, managing markdowns. And I guess we saw over the last couple of years from a sector perspective, the impact of what's happened from an inventory perspective with overhanging inventory and quite a difficult markdown environment. but more regulation in the markdown space would help -- is anticipated to help the GP margins. And obviously, the other big one, which we've cited, I think we've started speaking to you about that over the last 12 months is the sourcing benefits from segmental procurement. So the opportunity there is for the core business and for the acquisitions, for the first time through the introduction of the org design, where you'll hear from Clint and Don later from a sector perspective across Apparel and homeware, we're able to negotiate across all our trading chains and introduce the wider supply base across all those businesses, which also unlocks some GP margin. From an operating margin perspective, we spoke earlier about having disciplined cost management. We're not a business that has lazy or excess costs lying around. There isn't any excess fat in the model, but what we are is to be very active. And you would have seen in Mark's slide earlier, that cost mentality is ingrained in the business. So that effort to pull back costs when we need to based on the trading environment is something that we hold the trading dividends quite tightly by, and we always get the support when we need to. Also in terms of closing the gap on the operating margin, the anticipated cost of business lowering, led by some cooling inflation to have a double effect, both for the business and for consumers and also the extraction of synergies and efficiencies. So in the short term, we've also identified the opportunity for a new role in the business to focus on reengineering some cost savings and some efficiency savings, which will provide some relief from an operating margin perspective. So to reflect in my comments just now about having a low-cost model, what you see on the right is the 5-year average in total expenses as a percentage of sales for the Mr Price Group at 27.7% average over the last 5 years and competitors at 34.7%. So there's obviously, for our business, an ongoing focus on cost management and part of the DNA of the business. In terms of gross debt, we have quite an ungeared balance sheet, which we've spoken to you about before. But you also see that the debt that is reflected here is the IFRS 16 debt, which came through from leases, but largely ungeared. So in terms of the track record that we've created, yes, we do have the track record of tailoring costs, but we also acknowledge that we can't save our way to the future. It's really about growth. In terms of returns of the business and the evolution there of, return on net worth and return on capital employed over the last 5 years have been a focus for us, and they've been quite stable in terms of the delivery. But a point to note over this period also that returns have changed or been impacted by the introduction of IFRS 16 on the lease side, which obviously affects your capital structure. The acquired businesses being slightly more capital-intensive and lower margin to the rest of the group. And then also great to see from a return on equity perspective, our 5-year average at 26.7%, ahead of competitors at 22.6%. On the right-hand side, we've also modeled the WACC for you on the black line, and it's really great to see that the returns being generated from an ROE perspective ahead of the WACC. Also, there's been detailed plans put down from divisions in terms of how we close the ROE gap. So you see the medium-term targets presenting some opportunity for us into the future. So we spoke about investing through the cycle. And I think that in the highly disruptive environment that we've seen, to be able to have invested through really does position us well and benefit from that change in the cycle that we're expecting to see. Over the last 5 years, we've generated cash of ZAR 21 billion after working capital in leases. Our first returns from a capital allocation perspective goes to returns to shareholders. So the dividends paid have come in at ZAR 8.6 billion and credit card at ZAR 5.3 billion with the acquisition purchases, quite a big allocation of capital, and then store investments. So we spoke about investing into the retail store environment over the last 5 years when it's been quite disruptive and you've seen different strategies play out at the different retailers, but quite a significant investment of ZAR 2.2 billion by the group. Later in the presentation, you'll hear from Mark around how we manage returns from the store investment perspective. So quite clear on the returns that we expect from stores and the feasibility processes that we use. Technology and Logistics, ZAR 1 billion invested into that. We've spoken about the ERP platform that we upgraded during the course of that 5-year period, which again is a great setup for future growth. It was quite a mega project for us. And then we closed cash out at ZAR 2.8 billion by the end of the financial year. So when we speak about strong cash generation, so the business, 89% of the business cash based and 11% on credit, which we'll talk a little bit more about when we get into the financial services presentation, but the cash conversion ratio really had a big focus for us at 86.9%. So in terms of managing working capital to achieve the cash generation and conversion targets, and important really for us always is watching inventory days. I think the first point to note on working capital as we look at inventory days, the sector graph on the left-hand side gives you the view that since around 2020, 2021, there's been an increase in sector days, which has been quite substantial. And if you look at the graph on the right, Mr Price Group has had a similar increase in inventory days to the sector. Some reasons really around the view of inventory days from a Mr Price perspective. We spoke quite a lot about acquisitions that happened over that period. So in 2022, when our inventory day starts increasing, you see the introduction of Power Fashion and Yupi shift into the business. And then in F '23, the introduction of Studio 88 into the business at lower stock turns. I think we've spoken about that before. It's quite a good opportunity for us. Also, there's been a significant growth in new stores. So in terms of outside just the acquisitions, but about a 20% growth in the core business new stores. And a really big focus for us has been on derisking the business. So in terms of the global shipping disruptions that we've seen come through, and you'll hear more about that from [ Badner ] tomorrow in terms of the Red Sea together with the national infrastructure challenges that we've seen play out has really required us to increase some lead time buffers into the inventory planning cycle. So the contribution of all those factors really impacting the increase in inventory days. I guess the big opportunity here then is how do we get those days down into a more acceptable range for us. And the opportunity for us really is around improving those stock turns. And you will see in the medium-term targets we've set stock turn at 4, which is a bit of a stretch from where we are now, but with plans to achieve that. And also in terms of the improvement in infrastructure, the national infrastructure. Obviously, we've seen some investment being made into Transnet, and we'll continue to do so over the next 12 months, we hear. So once that infrastructure is in and the efficiency of the port increases, we're anticipating to see a reduction in the inventory days, but more in the medium term than in the short term. Moving forward, looking at debtors days. So over the 5-year period, you'll see a decrease in debtor days really due to a very conservative credit granting posture that we've maintained. It hasn't been a really good cycle from a credit perspective with interest rates being high, disposable income challenges for consumers. So we've just maintained a very focused strategy when it comes to credit. Also quite a big focus on the collection strategy from a group perspective to help manage that book. And the opportunity really here is about how do we grow the book in a better environment. So as we speak about the cycle changing, there's many data points we look at when we look at book growth. One of the data points is on the bottom right-hand side, the TransUnion CCI, the Consumer Credit Index, and we see that the credit index for the industry is moving back towards the neutral zone, which is great. But there's obviously other data points that we look at internally in terms of debtor's help before we start looking at that portfolio growth. A key metric that we track from a debtor's perspective is the net bad debt, and the range would have been between 7.5% and 8.5% over the last short term. It's important to note that even within the net bad debt metric, there is opportunity between divisions. So as you can imagine, the different customer profiles for a Miladys customer or a home customer, being slightly higher from an LSM perspective than the rest of the group, for example, a Sheet Street customer does present an opportunity to take more risk in the higher LSM better performing customer segment. And then moving on to creditor days. I think the supply chain finance program that we've spoken to you about before has really been a great headline for us in terms of how we're positioning the creditor days increasing over the last 5 years. Our momentum gaining from 2022. So you see the increase in days coming through. And I think that's been a great outcome for the business. So a high component of our local suppliers are on the SCF program, with still some opportunity to extend to the international suppliers. To date, we've unlocked about ZAR 1.5 billion in working capital. And if you just fast forward that over the next 2 years, we're anticipating a further ZAR 900 million to be unlocked through that supply chain finance program. So getting on to the medium-term targets. And you've seen these before at the year-end disclosure in June. I think the important part for us was around enhancing transparency and disclosure with the market. For the first time we disclosed these targets, and I hope they've been helpful in terms of how you've understood the business and how you've started modeling the business. I guess on reflection on the last 5 years, with all of the disruptions happening together with acquisitions and organic growth, I'm sure you guys have had a hard time trying to model the business and anticipate where it would head to. But the medium-term targets just provide you with an opportunity to understand how we're thinking about the business from a medium-term perspective. So these targets will be reviewed and refined and reset as we track progress against the targets. One point to make also is that the targets we've set are not falsely optimistic. So it's on the back of a strategy planning process. And I think Ant and Mark spoke to you about the top-down and bottom-up process we approach through the strategy, and that's really what's driving the medium-term targets that we've set. In terms of outlook on CapEx for the next couple of years, we put a 4-year view for you. So anticipating to spend about ZAR 5.5 billion, so to continue investing in terms of where that -- where the bulk of that's going to, you can see that the bulk of the approximately 50% will be allocated to stores, new stores, revamped, relocations and expansions over the next 4 years. And in F '26, you see an increase in the gray bar, which is the technology and logistics piece. You'll hear from Werner tomorrow around some of the risk mitigation that we're doing from a DC perspective and some further investment to enhance our growth enablement. That project on the DC also enhances integration opportunities for the acquisitions and will be closed out when Werner gives you a view tomorrow. So if we had to pause here in terms of the 5-year review that I've taken you through, what's really important for us to understand is the dilution impact of the returns of metrics was considered quite clearly by management and weighed up at the time of the investments that we had made. Investments made in acquisitions of organic concept stores in IT was really about growth and diversification, and I think we've delivered that quite successfully over the last 5 years in what has been quite a challenging environment operationally. These platforms are also great for us. It provides a great opportunity for us to continue to grow, and we've set some strict in our medium-term targets. It also shows the opportunity to bring sustainable returns into the long term. Okay. So now that I've taken you through the highlights package of the last 5 years, a little bit of forward-looking views now. I think the next few slides just want to plant the seed around how we're thinking about what the changing economic cycle could look like for the business. So we put a few data points together that's shaping our thinking in terms of the change in the consumer environment. The first graph that you see is -- and we took it all the way back to 2020, GDP growth in 2020 was at 3%, which was quite supportive of the household consumer expenditure growth at 5.7% and real wage growth 7.2%. You see the downward trajectory of that line graph into quarter 1 of 2024. I guess we've been speaking about the macroeconomics for quite a while, but that's what it looks like when you look at those data points over that period. In terms of what the forecast looks like, so if you draw your attention to the 2025 forecast, that last column in the table, GDP forecast at 2% for 2025, which will likely support improved wage growth and household consumer expenditure over that period, with positive impacts expected for the sector. If we had to hone in a little bit on customer spend, so in terms of dissecting the data, this data from Stats SA goes back to 2018 and brings it back to 2024. And the key point to note is that despite the cycles that we've spoken about just now and the disruptions that we've seen over the last 5 years, the average spend from a wallet perspective of the consumer on apparel and footwear ranges between 13% and 14%. So with the inference that as the wallet grows and is anticipated to grow in the changing cycle, we expect more rands to be diverted to the sector into the discretionary spend sector where we will be quite a big beneficiary of. In terms of giving you another lens, another data point, quite a big portion of consumers or households in South Africa rely on social grants. You'll see that the stat shows that 50% of South African household are social grant beneficiaries. We've given you a view that really talks to the increase in grants since 2020. So that line graph on the bottom left, you see the black line is the increase in unemployed people since 2020, with also an increase in the number of social grants, which have been quite a big surge since 2020 to date. From the macro conditions that have played out over the last 5 years, this has been quite a significant increase in reliance on social grants, which has sustained household -- income for households together with other forms of income like side hustles, and social grants account for 17% of total retail sales, and this was from 2023 Stats SA stats. Social grants also support the informal sector, which is valued at about ZAR 750 billion. And as Mark mentioned, you'll hear a bit later from our speaker on the informal sector and how did ZAR 750 billion, how that spend -- how he thinks about that spend and where that opportunity lies. But all in all, I think what we're trying to position is quite a large customer base of ours comes through from the social grant beneficiaries. And we anticipate that as they get relief also in the changing consumer cycle, we expected to see some uptick. And then from a customer profile perspective, this is one area that we wanted to share with you and give you a view in terms of what our customers look like because there's been a quite misconception that we only target the lower-income customer. So really, this data sources from MAPS 2024, which is quite a reliable marketing or product survey. This was released a few months ago and quite a substantial sample size, about 20,000 data points in the sample, covering both metro, urban and rural areas across all provinces. And the really big takeaway is that in the last quarter, Mr Price was the most shopped apparel retailer, with 3.2 million shoppers, quite substantially high. But more interestingly enough, when you dig into the detail, you have a view that across all income bands, starting with the red block, ZAR 1 to ZAR 5,000 monthly income, all the way up to the greater than ZAR 20,000 income per month in the gray block, are all shopping at Mr Price. So the conception that we only service the lower end of the market was quite an important point for us to share with you that it's actually consumers across different income levels. So with the cycle turning, what do we anticipate? Obviously, we've spoken about moderating inflation across markets, the anticipation of the interest rates being cut over the next 6 to 12 months by about 100 basis points. We've already seen the reduction in load shed income through this year. The 2-part system, which has been quite a big, I think, ahead of forecast for everyone's expectation. This morning, I read that [ SARS ] were saying that they got up to ZAR 4.1 billion in requests in the first 10 days from a 2-part application perspective. So it shows quite a significant increase that, that could bring into the [ fiscus ]. And then obviously, the consumer sentiment and business sentiment entering more positive perspective. Also with some gains, further gains expected on the rand and higher GDP, obviously being the big stimulator to real disposable income, really the big beneficiary to the retail sector. So what we graphed for you below also is a view from 2001 up until 2023. The correlation between discretionary sales growth and household disposable income. It's quite clear to see that when household disposable income increases, so does discretionary sales. So with all the data points that we've gathered around what the cycle turning means, together with the customer profile of the Mr Price customer, we do believe that we are well placed to benefit from this changing customer -- consumer cycle. Great. So that brings me to the end of my session.

All right. I wish I'd had a heads up that my mic was on. Nearly said something bad. Good morning, everyone. Yes, I think I've met most of you. My name is Don Baney. But for those who I haven't met, hopefully, we can meet in the course of this afternoon or this evening at the [ pencil ]. I'm going to take you through an overview of the apparel sector. And in the break, I spoke to a couple of you, you posted some questions. And I said, hopefully, I'll be answering them through this presentation. And so if I haven't answered all of your questions, then we can catch up after the break. Just a reminder, many of you would have seen this information before. The apparel sector makes up a little under 80% of the group's turnover. And in the middle there, you can see how each of the divisions constitute debt. Mr Price -- Praneel shared a little bit earlier, at one point, I think in F '20, was just under 60% of the group's turnover, and that's now down to 42%, and that's by virtue of our acquisitions, which is Power and Studio 88. Studio 88 a little over 20% of the group sales and then Mr Price Sport, Miladys and Power sort of 5%, 6% each. We've shared this with you as well, our operating margin for the segment, 15.3%, and it is our medium-term target to get that to 16% to 18%. And again, as I get into some of the divisional slides a little later, hopefully give you some insight into some of the things that will help us to achieve that. Also, just a reminder, I think Praneel touched on this as well, but we went through -- so I think Mark touched on it, a period where we suffered some market share losses up until about June, July of 2023. And as you said, that was by virtue of two key factors on the one hand. The load shedding that caught us by surprise, the escalation in load shedding at least, and we had very little to no backup power. And then the second being in the transition into our new ERP, which created a couple of hiccups for our merchants, and we weren't able to trade optimally. But you'll see there from the graph that over the past 12 months or so, once we had our backup power in place, and once we had settled our ERP issues that we've been gaining market share consistently for the past 12 months or so. And so we're back to normal, so to speak. So just in the break, having a couple of discussions aside, Warwick, you asked me the question, well, what is it that helps us to be differentiated, because we often speak as a business of us being differentiated on passion and value, but we don't often talk to how we're able to achieve that. And so over the next couple of slides, I want to just look under the hood a little bit on how we achieve that. I can't go into all of the details in terms of everything that helps us to achieve it. But at present five areas to just delve into a little bit that essentially as enablers for our fashion and value differentiation. Also, just to note that what I'm sharing with you now is applicable to, obviously, the apparel sector, but also to [indiscernible] on the homeware side. And so really, I'm just speaking on behalf of both of us here, and can point out any differences when new pops up. So those are the five areas. And so I'll just jump straight in. And again, in the break, a number of questions on our supply chain. And so probably worthwhile just starting off by saying that we've got a number of different types of supplier relationships, both locally in South Africa, nearshore in Swaziland, Lesotho, Mauritius, Madagascar and also further afield in places like China, Bangladesh and so on. And so I want to draw your attention to the far left-hand side of your screen in the white shaded area, and you can see a red spark and a black spark. So the black spark represents a fabric that we use in merchandise, it's what we call single jersey, so it's basically T-shirt material. And then the red spark represents a different kind of fabric. It's what we call seamless. Now the point to note here is that seamless merchandise or fabric and single jersey fabric are made in completely different factories with completely different yarn, completely different equipment, completely different technology. And so if we owned our factories, then what would be difficult would be to achieve what I'm going to show you on the right-hand side of the graph. So if you fast forward to 2 years later, just to the peak of our 2023 year, so this last fiscal period, you can see that the red line and the black line have inversed and that the seamless line is far higher than the single jersey line. Now if we had owned our factories, for example, a single jersey factory, and the fashion demand pitch trend had changed, we'd still be compelled as the factory owner to feed that factory with the units because we want to make sure that it's breaking even, if not making a profit. But because we don't own our factories and we have agility in our supply chain, we're able to flip and switch the kinds of factories that we're working with continuously, that allowed us to chase the fashion trend that was moving into seamless, better in fiscal of 2023. And so really, if I had to say one word that defines our supply chain, it's agility and that agility is a key enabler of the fashion part of our fashion value metrics. Before I leave this slide, you'll notice on the bottom right of your screen as well that there's a little blue line and a gray line that's spiking in there as well. And if I had to fast forward this slide into rest of this year, you see those 2 lines really spiking up well above the other two, and for obvious reasons, I wouldn't say what those are yet, but it's just to show that we work with many different kinds of factories and agility, yes, wouldn't be possible without the kind of supply chain structure that we have in place. The second area I wanted to touch on is around our merchandise processes. And I really feel that this is a differentiator for the Mr Price Group. And any retailer of significance will largely have process that focuses around the area on the left of your screen, which we call postmortem. And really, this is the science part of how we build a future assortment. So the merchant teams will -- it's what we'll call a postmortem, and the merchant teams will analyze what's sold in the previous season. So if I'm planning this for winter of 2025, what did we sell in winter of 2024? And we'll analyze it by what's sold. We'll analyze it by what we call a clearance, how quickly did it sell? We'll analyze it by what the input margin was and of course, the net margin, the GP margin and net of promotions and markdowns and so on. And the kind of data points that we'll look at is, was it core merchandise versus fashion, what was the seasonality, how deep did we go, how wide did we go, what sizes did we sell, what fabrics did we sell it in, what silhouettes that we sell it in, which stores do we sell it in, both the size of the store and the location of the store, which week in the year, the point in the product's life cycle, what color, what patterns and many other attributes we'll analyze it. And I would say most retailers are probably kind of in the process there or at least have 99% of the focus there. The reason why I wanted to show this slide, and it really answers the question for those of you who asked me earlier, what enables us to be differentiated from a fashion perspective, it's the rest of this chart over here. And I think 2 things I wanted to highlight is really just, first of all, the volume or the number of disparate data sources that come into in form our merchandise process for a future season assortment. And the second is how all of these data points come together seamlessly into one congruent process for a single decision-making sort of process. And so the kind of stuff we'll look at is just above the postmortem here, you can see is digital data. We'll subscribe to a number of sources of digital data intelligence, a lot of it incorporating AI that help us to predict where future trends are going. We'll take a look at current trend and what's selling in our stores currently by all of the stuff that's sitting in the postmortem, we'll look at current trend by all of those factors. We'll look at what our trend teams are telling us, and I'm going to dive into a bit more detail in that in a moment. We'll look at our own web and app traffic as well as our social media insights and how our customers are engaging with us on those platforms. We'll look at a bunch of research, both internal research and external research. One of those is the RLC, which is market share. I'm going to go into a bit more detail on that in a moment. We have our internal products development departments and so they will feed into the process. Our merchants travel the world looking at retailers and trends all over the place. They'll bring that information back home. And then, of course, at any point in time, we've got a number of tests deployed into our assortments for future seasons, and so that also feeds into the process. So lots of disparate data sources there, and it's all of that, that comes together in a seamless process for a decision on a future assortment that I really think is the secret sauce of this business, and it's a process that I think is very difficult to replicate, and that's why we are sustainably differentiated on the fashion value metrics. Just -- I said I'd go a little bit deeper into the research and the RLC aspect of what I've just shown you. So this is -- I've chosen just to show you a graph from the Mr Price Apparel division in this example. And if you take a look at the white shaded area, the vertical access represents the size of the market. And you can see that everything on the left-hand side of the graph really has a larger share of -- or larger [ rands ]. So it's a larger market, so to speak. And towards the right-hand side, the market, the [ rands ] in that category gets smaller. All of the red and the black lines represent a category in the business. And so the line that runs -- that separates the black and the red is basically the average market share for the division in this case, Mr Price Apparel. Anything above the line means that there's a category that we are over-indexing in market share. In other words, in that category, we are taking more market share than what the average is for the division. Anything in the red means we're under-indexing in market share, and it means that there's a lot of opportunity there for us. And so the reason why I wanted to build this slide in was for 2 reasons: number one, is to talk about growth opportunities. If you take a look at everything that's in the red, outside of store growth and all the other growth mechanisms that I'll chat about a little bit later, you can see that there's loads of opportunity just to grow comps within each of the respective businesses if we focus on the red lines. And so as we build a seasonal assortment, we'll look at the stuff with the higher rands opportunities on the left-hand side, and we'll focus on those. But at the same time, we look to defend the ones in the black as well. Perhaps the final point on our merchandise process is that it really is just the coming together of science and arts. On the one hand, the [ science ] that the planner brings with that postmortem. And on the other hand, it's the art and it's the qualitative side of things that comes from the buyer. And when those 2 elements come together is where the magic really happens. And so those are decades-old processes for our business that really just helped to set us apart and help us with our differentiation. The third area I wanted to touch on in terms of enabler for the things that allow us to be differentiated from a fashion and value perspective is our trend capability. Our group has been going for around 4 decades or so. And within that, our trend department has been established sort of 2, 3 decades ago. And so our processes here as well are really well established. I wanted to use a live example for you. And so I've used the historic example. So this is about 2 years old. But some of you who might recall about 2 years ago, we had a trend called the Corset's trend. Effectively, what it was is basically like underwear's outwear. And so you can see that on the left and the image, you'll see that's somebody on a catwalk. And you can see that she's running a body suit, and it's kind of got that Corset's type. And so our trend team, we have trend people for the different departments in the business, but they would start off by analyzing what's coming off the catwalks and a bunch of other sources of data, and they would start to form a high-level view of where things are going 18 to 24 months ahead. So it's quite far ahead. It's not going to be commercially viable yet if they had to go and put that into our stores straight away, it would flop. They then start to build on what they've seen coming off the cat walks. And again, we'll use a number of sources of digital data. Some of them that scrape website data from retailers from around the world that we can procure and shape in any way that we choose. Also, other platforms that help us to predict trends, including AI, to help us see what is going to be coming in the future. We've then got processes that overlay some social media insights. So as a basic example, you can see Kim Kardashian here wearing something similar in terms of styling and that just becomes reinforcement of the whole sort of view of the trend department as well. If Hailey Diva, she is a big fashion influencer, is wearing something as well of a similar ilk, it just builds on to the importance. I've really shortened the process just to kind of show you the key points. But the net result of all of that is that they will then deliver to the merchandise teams a trend documents. And then that trend documents at the beginning of the season, as we're planning the season, they'll say to the buyers, listen, we think that you guys -- these are the new fabrics, these under the new silhouettes, the new colors, the pattern, the prints, hardware detailing, any features of the merchandise, this is what we believe are a must-have for the season. And then finally, they'll then physically sit and work with the merchandise teams as well as the marketing teams to physically build it into the assortments in a responsible manner, and then with the marketing teams to make sure that it is shot in a manner that is inspiring for the customers. And so in this example over here, you can see that ultimately where we landed about 2 years ago was -- this is an actual store window that we had and we've got the Corset styling there headlining things at ZAR 69 was our opening price, yes. The fourth area that I wanted to touch on in terms of the enablers, something that's Praneel touched on towards the end of his presentation, which is just our current trade agility. And I thought there was no better way to land the prints than to say that more than 60% of the orders that we place with suppliers are changed at least once. You might say to yourself, well, that sounds really inefficient. But what happens is on a Monday, the merchants will come in from the weekend and they'll analyze what's sold in the previous week. And once they've done that, they'll then look to manipulate the future assortments based on what they're seeing in the previous week. And so it really is, again, comes back to that word agility, but were not for the agility that we have in terms of the number of times that we change the orders, we wouldn't be as fashion forward as what we were as what we are. So agility in the way that we run our merchandise processes and the way that we work with our suppliers as well is absolutely key. And again, all of these things are interrelated because if we owned our own factories, manipulating the orders and changing orders also wouldn't be possible. And then finally, I wanted to talk a little bit about our customer diversification. Praneel did show similar information set out in a different way. But I want to highlight a couple of different points. So this is MAPS -- an extract from MAPS. And as Praneel shared, we are the most shopped retailer in South Africa. When you break it down into the 4 buckets, as I have here now. There's a couple of things I want to point out. The first is that Mr Price is the most shopped in few of the categories. The top left-hand category being largely the grand customer, but -- households earning less than ZAR 5,000 a month. The top right being customers who are in -- households at least that earn ZAR 5,000 to ZAR 10,000. The bottom left ZAR 10,000 to ZAR 20,000. The bottom right, over ZAR 20,000 a month household income. The second thing that I want to point out on this slide is just where Shein sits on the slide. And you can see that they fit relatively low down, but the area that they indexed the highest is in the bottom right category which is the ZAR 20,000 household income and above. And the reason why I wanted to highlight that is because often the correlation gets made that Mr Price is the most exposed to Shein because of -- by virtue of our price points and our fashionability. And while we are definitely exposed. As you can see, we have the most amount of shoppers in that segment. I would argue that retailers that have exclusive or the most exposure in that bucket are more at risk. And we're fortunate that we have good coverage in all the other areas. Probably the final point to make on the whole Shein matter is that over the next quarter, as many of you will know, there are supposed to be some changes coming to the regulation. Customers should be charged VAT and duties. So we hold our breath to see if that transpires, I believe it will. And once that happens, it's -- yes, the jury is out as to whether they are able to sustain the kind of growth trajectory that they've had over the past couple of years. And yes, you can make up your own minds about that. But certainly, the value will definitely deteriorate once those duties and VAT start to get charged. And then finally, just on the customer side of things, we've spoken about us being the most loved fashion retailer, the most loved brand. And one of the ways that we can measure that is just by highly engaged this customer is. Almost 7 million followers on Facebook, 874,000 on Twitter, more than 0.5 million follows in TikTok. We have 155 million visits to our websites and our app every year and almost 3 million Instagram followers. Most of these is actually the highest out of all the retailers in South Africa. And if it's not the highest, it's very close to be in the highest but, as I said, most of these are the highest. I'm now going to just dive into each of the trading divisions and I'll start with the largest division, Mr Price Apparel. And some of this you know already. We are ranked as the #1 most valuable retailer in South Africa. It's as we've said already, the most shopped retailer in South Africa. They have the highest brand equity out of any fashion retailer in the country. And this business also had 12 consecutive months of market share gain enabled by that process that I've just taken you through. Just to give you a view of the scale of this business, we thought we just dropping some trivia here for you, but this business sold a T-shirt every second the stores are open. So the pair of denim every 2 seconds, these stores were open. Sold enough ladies outfits -- sorry, to -- outfit everyone at the 60 Taylor Swift's Eras Concert tours. And I can see the propeller heads here are trying to do the math. I haven't figured out how much that is yet myself. And we sold enough dresses to close 3 out of every 10 women over the age of 16 in South Africa. Just on the fashion value differentiation that I spoke to earlier in that process. I have a rail here, which is why I'm wearing this fighter pilot's mic. But we have a number of different -- and afterwards, you welcome to come up and chat with them, myself or with Kevin, who's the Managing Director. But there are a number of styles here that are going to be coming into our assortment in the next couple of months that I would argue our competitors probably won't have. I say probably because I can't tell in the future. But just because we are differentiated on Fashion & Value and because of that trend process that I've taken you through and that merchandise process, we have ilks of merchandise like this. I won't get into the detail of it now. But it's highly unlikely that you'll find this kind of merchandise in our competitors, particularly the value retailers for that matter. So Mr Price has 660 stores, trading density a little over ZAR 41,000 a square meter. And as we said earlier, a highly engaged audience, over 4 million followers on social media. I say that digital is the new store window, and this really is the case for this business. 50% of the customers that make a purchase in the store actually and research it on our online website first. And so what we sale online is just the cherry on top, but it's actually the strength that our website has to grow our physical store sales is what's really key here. But those that do decide to make a purchase online, 2/3rds of them will have it delivered to a store, to have it collected. And once they go to a store to collect it, 15% of them will actually make another purchase when they go to collect their order. So truly omnichannel business as you can see, how the online and the digital world really work well together. While we are a private label business, another way that we differentiate ourselves on a consistent basis is just the kind of collaborations that we do. Just top 3 examples here for you, the one on the left with a collaboration we did with Refuse. Cyla Gonsolves in the middle, we did an exclusive range with her. Kay Yarms, a very big influencer in the makeup space is our scale, which is our brand of makeup. She is our brand ambassador. And so brand collaborations while we are private label are another way that we can put ranges forward to our customers that our competitors can't copy. We spoke a little about the fashion value matrix. And you can see here on our fashion value matrix, the table, fashionability on the vertical access and value on the horizontal access that Mr Price -- it's clearly in its own space in the top right there. And that's the beauty of this model is that we differentiate ourselves through fashion and value. And as I said, I've spoken to you a little bit about how we do that. One of the pieces of research that we do every year, in fact twice a year, it's a piece of internal research that we do and I called the value for money research. And I'm showing a bit of detail on this because I'll go into it in some of the other divisions as well. But one of the questions that we ask our customers is, do you believe that Mr Price provides the same or better value than it did in the previous year. And so asking the Mr Price Apparel customers that question, 96% of them believed that, that is the case, which is an incredible stat that our customers believe in us, particularly in an environment where inflation is as high as what it is, for them to say that we're offering the same, if not better value than the year before. I think just talks to the strength of this brand. Put it worthwhile just diving a little bit deep into Mr Price Kids as well because we've had a number of questions and -- yes, about this. And this business really is going well. From a standing start, we're now at 44 stores. We opened 10 stores in the first half. We're planning to open another 11 stores in the second half. Of the 660 stores that Mr Price Kids merchandise is sold in, the 44 stores that are the stand-alone stores now contribute for 20% of the total sales. Really just talks to how all these Mr Price Kids stores are working. So 7% of the stores -- just under 7% of the stores are selling 20% of the merchandise. So this Kids business is really working as expected. And I think as Ant mentioned a little bit earlier that when we exit kids from the mothership store, the adult's business is able to expand into that space beautifully, and it's trading to expectation as well. So we continue to look for space here. We'd have more stores opening, if we could find us space quicker. But we have a hunting list that's with our landlords. They're actively working with us on that space. And like I said, if we can find the space, we'll take it. What are the growth opportunities for this division, just looking forward? Well, first and foremost, it's always about comp. And as I showed you in the graph a little bit earlier, the RLC graph is that there's a number of categories in this business where we are under-indexed, that have higher rand value, and so we'll continue to strategize on those every time you build a seasonal assortment. Mr Price Kids -- Mr Price in total, there's opportunity for store growth, only at 660 stores relative to some of the competitors 1,000 to 2,500. But within that, Mr Price Kids, as I said, is a big vector for growth for this division. And then finally, we'll continue to invest in revamping our physical stores as well as continuing to invest in our digital channels. Mark will talk a little bit about that further on just now. And so yes, we'll continue to do all of these things and hopefully, the result is more of those market share gains that I've shown you already. Getting into our second division, Mr Price Sports, and if you take a look at the middle of this graph, you'll note there that Mr Price Sports has the highest brand equity out of any other sports brand in the country, which is an incredible feat for this business. And we're going to a little -- go into a little bit about the why this is the case, in the slides that come. That value for money research that I spoke to you about. This is the sports customers answer to that question, 82% of them believe that Mr Price is offering the same, if not better value than the year before. And again, an incredible feat in a high inflationary environment. Another standout for this brand is the strength of our partnerships, sporting collaborations and so on. I'm going to go into a bit of detail on that in a moment. This has been quite topical. And we've had a number of questions on the role of brands in the sports business. And so I wanted to just dwell on this slide a little bit. And first of all, just to talk to the structure of how Mr Price Sport works from a brand perspective. So on the top level there, you'll see our own brands, our private label brands, Maxed, Maxed Elite, Journal, Terrain. These guys are heroes. They're front and center. They have a spot line. They'll never represent less than 80% of what we put in front of our customer, in fact probably far higher than that, but 80% is the threshold that we set. Below that, we've started working on some exclusive brands, 2 of them, they have been Everlast and Slazenger. The great thing with exclusive brands is that we're still able to control margin there, align to what our private label margins are. And in the case of these 2 brands as well, we're actually able to design and merchandise ourselves to the taste level of our customers and make it in our own factories as well. And then on the nonexclusive brands, you can see them on the bottom row there. I want to just give a little bit of rationale as to why we have brands that support our private label brands. And the best way that I've used to explain it in my own head is to use what I call the Florida Road effect. For those of you who know Florida Road and Durban, it's a popular restaurant venue. And at one point in time, Florida Road would have probably had one restaurant. And when a second restaurant and a third restaurant came along, that might have been a logical assumption to assume that maybe business for the first restaurant is going to start dropping because you're splitting your customers over 2 venues. Actually, what seems to happen is that you start to get known as a destination to -- as an eatery. And so your customers actually go up. And so as you get to 5, 6, 10 restaurants, restaurant #1 business actually has improved. And very much in the same way, we, as Mr Price Sport, are wanting to be a destination for sporting groups. And as I said, that doesn't mean that our own brands will never not be the hero. They always be the hero. The rest of the brands are supporting it, but they're an important supporting act because if we want to become a destination, you've kind of got to give the customer choice on the one hand. And on the other hand, it really helps to accentuate the value of our own brands, which I'll illustrate in a moment. So Mr Price Sports has 177 stores, trading density a little over ZAR 25,000 a square meter. Also a highly engaged audience on social media at 570,000 followers. And while they've been online now for many years in the past year, a really good trajectory in the online space, 20% growth in visits to their site. Also very much omnichannel this business, 47% of orders that are placed online are collected in a store and 35% of their customers prefer to shop both online and in store. So just a really great omnichannel experience for these customers. Actually, for Mr Price Sports, we fulfill the online orders out of a store. And in October this year, we're going into a centralized performance facility alongside Mr Price Apparel. And with that, we expect mass lift in the service levels that we're able to give the customers. And so as a result of that, expecting some mass lift on the e-commerce side of things for this business. Competitive pricing make sporting, apparel and equipment accessible to and a good fit for the value-focused customer. I wanted to just share 2 examples and so I feel like a very mark sales agent here. But I wanted to use this example. So -- and you're welcome to come up after. So I've got a branded -- let me get the right example here. I've got a branded hockey-stick over here. Hockey sticks are generally the quality of the hockey stick or the performance of a hockey stick is largely gauged by the amount of carbon that is in it. So this branded hockey stick has a 20% carbon contribution in the makeup, and it's selling for about ZAR 1,199. I'll take another branded hockey stick, which is another brand that's got a 40% contribution of carbon makeup and sales for ZAR 1,500 understandably because it has a higher carbon makeup. And then you've got the next one, which has a 70% contribution of carbon in it and it sells for ZAR 799. It really just shows the -- yes, we're going to give you a choice. We've got the brands for you. What these do is highlight the value of our own brand. And yes, the performance can be there as well. It doesn't necessarily need to be an inferior product. In fact, in this case, it's actually a superior product. I do have some other examples here on the sports side in terms of the outerwear, but if anyone is interested afterward, you're welcome to come up and check with me and I'll show you some more examples. I said that collaborations, partnerships, sponsorships are really important for this brand and they really are. Our athletes have just returned from the Olympics. And I think the message to our customers is that if Maxed and Maxed Elite is good enough to win an Olympic Golden, well then, it's good enough for the rest of us. We actually have the Olympic kit on display outside the next year, and so if you haven't seen it yet, outside at the sports end, you can see it all hanging there, but it really is a beautiful product. And there's no wonder the guys performed so well at the Olympics. And then -- on the right-hand side, our sponsorship and partnership with the Comrades Marathon. And again, as Nigel said a little bit earlier, if our shoes and our Maxed and Maxed Elite gear is good enough to win in and to win Golden, well then it is good enough for the rest of us as well. And so these kind of partnerships are really key for us. What are the growth opportunities for Mr Price Sport? I've touched on the whole brand side of things first, and there's definitely an opportunity for us to grow the branded side of the business. We've set the threshold. We won't go above the 20%. The reality is it will be probably be far lower than that. But we just needed to build some guardrails in place. The second area is to diversify our customer base. Mr Price Sport, the ilk of merchandise that we have is skewed towards a more moderate taste level. There is an opportunity for us to bring in more junior silhouettes, fabrics, colors and so on to complement what we already have to broaden the target market and the customer that we currently have. And so aligned to that as well as an opportunity to bring in more athleisure. So that's the nontechnical merchandise. So it's the after-sport stuff. So any of the big sporting brands will have kind of the technical stuff and the nontechnical stuff. This business is under-indexed in the nontechnical, the athleisure stuff and so another great opportunity for growth. And then space expansion, its largest competitor has over 340 stores now. We're at the 177 and some great runway for space growth for this business as well. Next up is Miladys. And -- I said to the management team of Miladys a couple of months ago when we were sitting in the strategy session, said -- name any -- bring any brand into your head, Roma, Vodacom, Toyota and straight away, whatever brand you choose, try and correlate that quickly with the target market. You probably have to think for a little bit. But if I say to you, Miladys, even though you don't fall into the target market, you're probably going to come to a quick decision that it is an older fuller-figured female. And that's what went into your mind, you'd be spot on. But the point I'm trying to make is, I don't know how many brands are able to have such a strong correlation with the target markets even for people outside of the target market. One of the reasons for that is that this business has been going for 77 years. It has the second highest brand equity in the market. The customer really loves this brand. It's a customer, 92% Net Promoter Score, which is exceptionally high from a Net Promoter Score perspective. One of the things that differentiates this business from the rest of the group is a high contribution of credit far higher than the other divisions. And so an opportunity in the short term as the -- as we've kind of hopefully seeing the tail end of the benign part of the credit cycle. 266 stores, it's trading density a little higher than Mr Price Sports, it's just under ZAR 26,000 a square meter. This business also launched online in 2020 but they're also alongside Mr Price Sport or be going to -- we'll be going to a centralized fulfillment facility in October. And again, because they're currently filling out of -- fulfilling out of a store, we expect a really good improvement in service levels for this customer. And so I'm looking forward to what that change is going to be in the next few months. Next month, in fact. So what differentiates this business. I think, first and foremost, it's important to point out that it's the only local fashion retailer that offers size of 32 to 50 across this entire assortment. And no other retailer does that and you might have from retailers doing it for certain elements of the assortment, but sizes 32 to 50 across the entire assortment, you'll find -- we cater for all women of all sizes in Miladys. One of the key growth areas for this business is our private label brand Wonderfit. And again, I'm going to act like a very mark agent and just jump around. And I'm going to pass that around, if you wouldn't mind, maybe you can get through it by the time I end this presentation. Wonderfit is really just -- it's a private label brand that developed in-house at Miladys, but it really just represents elevated quality, even elevated comfort, elevated fabrics. And so the example that I am passing around, if you just squeeze your foot into the heel on the insole there, you'll feel that comfort is a memory foam, that level of comfort and quality that we talk about when we say Wonderfit, that goes across many of our categories, swimwear and underwear and elsewhere, and so a great opportunity for us to expand that in time. We also have some exclusive brands offered within this range. Playtex has been one of them. Playtex has a really high brand affinity with the Miladys target market. And currently, it's only available in Miladys. Bata Comfit being another one, and I've got some examples for anybody who would like to come and see that after this. What are the growth opportunities for this business? 50% of Miladys' customers are currently are a white female, and so that's not congruent with the broader demographic of South Africa. And so we see a really great opportunity to grow this brand with the black market. And so from a merchandise perspective and with our marketing teams actively working to making sure that we become more relevant into the black market. Just internally, and from a margin perspective, there's a great opportunity for this business as it gets closer alignment with some of our other divisions to lock in with their supply chains to get the benefit of economies of scale that would ultimately bring: a, better margins for this business, and b, better customers -- sorry, better lower costs for our customers. This business in particular because it is so credit-dependent will definitely benefit from the drop in the interest rates that are hopefully around the corner and also from the recovery in the consumer market. And then, of course, Wonderfit, as I've spoken to already, it's represented in some categories in the business, but we're on a focused drive to make sure that we expand that into as many categories as possible. Power Fashion. And yes -- no, we're not allowed to have favorite children, but if there was a favorite child, maybe this would be at the moment. This is just an incredible business. It's grown market share for 29 months in a row consecutively, which is just an incredible feat. We recently opened the 300th store in West Street in Durban. And I think testament to the number of stores and the kind of merchandise and the kind of marketing that we're doing over the past year or 2 that the brand equity has grown from seventh place to fourth place also, which is just -- I mean, these are the kind of trajectories that you'd expect over many years, not over a year or 2. Who is the customer though? It's LSM 2 to 5, 18 to 45 years old, mainly female, she's a value seeker, largely customers that have household income below ZAR 5,000 or are receiving a grant. So very clear on who this customer is. That value for money research that I was speaking about a little bit earlier, I mean this is -- I feel like I've said incredible many times, but this really is an incredible stature, 99% of their customers believe they offer the same or better value. A large part of that is aligned to how we're changing the kind of merchandise we put in the stores with more what we call opportunistic stockpiles. And that is sourcing merchandise from retailers across the world where they have excess inventories or directly from the factories where they have excess inventories, and we secured at prices that are well below what the market value is. And so as we put this forward to our customers, they're really seeing that value, and that's why we get a number as high as 99%. This is just unbelievable. But for those of you who've been into a Power store, you'll remember that there's those red bins that's kind of run down the middle. And out of those red bins, we call them our treasure bins. Out of those red bins, one in every five pairs of ladies underwear in the country is sold out of those bin from Power Fashion. One in every four pairs of girls underwear and socks is sold out of those bins in Power Fashion. Which is just -- it's mind boggling to think that, that is happening out of just our 300 stores. I actually have a bunch of samples of those girls underwear, but to make things not awkward, I'm not going to pass them around. I had contemplated it. But the examples that I've given here that I do have upfront are sourced from an international retailer where typically they would sell -- I went on to their website, they sort of sell between ZAR 200 and ZAR 300, in those value bins, they'll sell between ZAR 10 and ZAR 20. So you can understand why we sell so much of them and a great margin for ourselves and of course, great value for the customers. Actually, maybe just so that it's not -- what about underwear. I have another example here from Power Fashion and maybe just to keep things a little trivia going, that this is a piece of knitwear that we pass on this slide. This time, we can pass it around and just have a feel. So this is sourced from a Northern Hemisphere retailer, a well-known retailer. You all know it. The value of that at the international retailer, they sell it for ZAR 720, if I do the exchange rate calculation. Maybe to answer in your own mind and this is for boasting rights or maybe you get a fee drink at the bar tonight, closest to the pin, who can guess what we sold that for in Power Fashion gets boasting rights. Maybe you can put your hands up at the end and whoever gets it closest will get the branding right. So remember, to ZAR 720 at the international retailer, I have a guess what we said it for here at a really good margin. So Power Fashion has 306 stores. Their trading density, a little over ZAR 29,000 a square meter. Huge growth in the social media following in the last year, 46% growth. One of the unique things about this business is that they have a highly engaged audience on WhatsApp, about 200,000 customers a month engaging with them through this channel, asking for copies of the catalog. But this brand really gaining traction. One of the key growth areas this year is as customers are asking or doing searches on Google for store locations of Power. And you can see we've had a 66% growth in customers searching for store locations for Power over the past year. So how are we achieving differentiation in this business? Well, just talking to the supply chain, and I spoke about agility earlier, but they sourced from 150 suppliers across 9 countries. Key to this is exclusive and strategic relationships with key retailers around the world, including the likes of the jersey that's midway that you're passing around. One retailer in particular last year gave us 1.5 million units of merchandise alone, and we continue that relationship with them and many others. But that all said, we are a South African retailer, and we procured 27.7 million, almost 28 million units locally last year. That alone in Power Fashion is more than the other listed retailers in the country in totality. So just to give you an idea of the scale of the units that we procure here. We have the growth opportunities here for this business double or triple or more the amount of stores than we currently have. And so we're opening stores at a rate. We will continue to grow our private label brands. They're a key component of this business. But on top of that, we'll continue to chase those opportunistic by us. That is the excess inventory from factories and retailers from around the world. And that's where our customers really do see that value. And even if we can't buy finish merchandise, it's excess fabrics that we buy that we then CMT ourselves, that's a key component of this business. As this business continues to scale, so will the operating leverage grow as our fixed base -- our fixed cost base is largely fixed now. But as we grow sales, we should see some really good improvements in that regard. And then lastly, integration. This is obviously one of the acquisitions, and there's a number of acquisition opportunities. Many areas, we started getting stuck into already, one of those, and probably the most significant being the supply chain. We've started that journey already from a systems perspective. But over the next 2, 3 years, looking to be pivotally integrated into the supply chain as well of the broader group. And with that, hoping to unlock some margin opportunities as well. And then finally, the newcomer to the division or the sector at least is Studio 88. And here, you can see the makeup, 399 stores in Studio 88, 198 in Skipper Bar, 160 in Side Step, 180 in John Craig. The Specialty division made up of a number of different brands and probably affected that we're going to look to wind down over time. And so the focus is going to be on the first 4 areas. But in total, now 915 stores and trading density almost at ZAR 43,000 a square meter. Similar to Mr Price Sports, this business is structured with its own label brands, which you can see on the bottom row. It's exclusive brands. that you can see in the middle row and then the nonexclusive brands in the top row. The exclusive brands, there are some big hitters in there. I think we've shared it before, but Ellesse is around ZAR 1 billion sales a year. But there's other big ones in there as VW, Playboy. There's demand for these brands from our customers, and that can only be found in the Studio 88 Group of brands. And then on the top row is brands that are nonexclusive, that you can get at other retailers but many of them are -- we're the top seller of that brand. So Adidas, Studio 88 Group is a top seller of Adidas in South Africa for out of any retailers, Nike with the second. And many of the other brands that you can see there, we are at the top or very close to the top if not the top. The location strategy is one of the things that differentiates this business and has allowed it to build the kind of market share in dominance that it does have. And so kudos to the founders and to Bruce, the MD, who's been there pretty much from day 1. But while I think many retailers are sort of focusing on the spotlight and the big suburban malls. These guys were focusing in kind of the more outlying locations, and that's where they started to clean up from a market share perspective. And so that has stood them in good stead over time and will continue to stand us in good stead going forward. Where are the growth opportunities for this business? I think I'll combine point number one and the last point there together, that there definitely is opportunity to improve margins for this business through better stock management and increasing the stock turn. One of the ways that we will be able to achieve that is through integration into the group forwarder supply chain. That journey has commenced at a very early level. But over the next couple of years, sort of the short to medium term, expect some proper integration there and with that, unlock some margin opportunity as well. We'll continue to grow the private label brands as well as the brands that are exclusively available in this business. Online is another area of opportunity. Skipper Bar and John Craig will launch online shortly, but all the chains also looking at building their versions of the app. That work has commenced already. And then space opportunity. None of the brands exceed 400 stores. In fact, Studio 88 has just under 400, but the rest are half or less and half of that. So a great runway for growth for these brands as well. And I think that is it. I'm going to call my colleague, Clint Larsson, he's going to talk to you about homeware sector. Oh, any guesses on the [indiscernible] price?

ZAR 115.

How much?

ZAR 115.

You're cheating? No.

[indiscernible].

Okay. We'll give it to our Chairman, yes. ZAR 120 is what that was sold for. [indiscernible] yes, I can't be held accountable for that.

Good afternoon, everyone, on behalf of the homeware sector. Somebody had to get the pre-lunch session and at the risk of having multiple hungry people in the room, I'm going to do the best I can to keep it within the 30 minutes that I've been allocated. And the other thing I won't do is show a product, I'm going to trust that you engage with the team in the back of the room the expo room. And I also won't be talking through merchandise process, which Don has covered. But suffice to say, those processes are consistent throughout the divisions, which enables our merchants to move from one division to another or from one sector to another without any trouble. So let me get straight into the sector stats. The homeware sector contributes 17.1% to group sales, but watch the space. Mr Price Home currently at 11.3%. Sheet Street at 4.4% and Yuppiechef at 1.4%. And in the last financial year, operating margin for the sector was 10.5%. And as you can see, our medium-term targets of between 13% and 15%. So we've spoken a lot about a structural change in the sector. Post-COVID, we know that recover the group held a very high market share of close to 40%. And since the onset of COVID or once we came out of it, we've seen in excess of 300 stores open in the homeware sector, not only by existing competitor set, but also new entrants that have entered the homeware sector. We've also seen traditionally apparel retailers creating combo stores by giving space to homeware within their stores, and that's increased the footprint as we've seen in supermarkets also introduce homeware. And we know that it's more margin rich than what we see in groceries. But despite this expanded footprint, we've seen the South African market only grow at 3.4% in the last 18 months. However, things are changing. If you look at what's happened since the beginning of January 2023, to where we are now at the end of June 2024. The black line shows how the rest of the market was growing, and the red line shows how the Mr Price Group homeware sector is growing, and you can see we lost market share through the early stages of 2023, quite significant amount of share. But you can see those lines getting closer together. And interestingly, in the last 6 months, that market share loss has subsided quite significantly. And in fact, Mr Price Home has achieved market share gains for 3 consecutive months. And most importantly, in June, we saw a crossover of those lines for the first time where every division in the homeware sector gained market share. But critically, and we've spoken about this at length, it has all been achieved with better margins. We don't want market share with distressed margin, we want full margin business. And despite the turmoil of the last couple of years, we continue to hold the highest market share in South Africa's homeware sector. So how are brands positioned? There's been a lot of discussion particularly around Mr Price Home and Sheet Street. So I thought it's good to show you exactly how we position these brands across the 3. We have 603 stores. And of course, all 3 divisions do trade online, but just to show you how we position them. Mr Price Home leads on fashion value, Sheet Street leads on price value, and Yuppiechef, as we saw earlier on, is an aspirational value chain that is at this stage in a niche branded appliance part of the business. The Mr Price Home customer is an early fashion adopter. So when there are new colors or new patterns or new fabrications or new silhouettes, they expect to see it first in a Mr Price Home store. However, the Sheet Street customer is a later doctor of fashion. So if we see something new that is introduced in a Mr Price Home store, it might be a bright yellow is an example, and the geometric print, you will typically see that surface in the Sheet Street store 6, maybe even up to 18 months later because that customer waits for that adoption into the late majority in the marketplace. Yuppiechef conversely -- well, the name says it all. They want it early and they want it now. So if there's anything new, and it's a new appliance, they want it now. So they're early trend adopters. Who do the division's target? Mr Price Home targets the mid- to high LSM customer, where Sheet Street targets the low to mid LSM customer and of course, Yuppiechef is the more affluent consumer. And how do we position our ranges? Mr Price Home is dominant across multiple categories in the home, whereas Sheet Street dominates in textiles with a focused offer across categories in kitchen accessories and furniture. Yuppiechef in the interim is a kitchenware specialist with curated homeware and that will continue to grow. Both Mr Price Home and Sheet Street are predominantly private label businesses where we see in Yuppiechef, they have specialist brands that dominate. However, we are growing private label in that business. So what do our locations look like? Where do we target for these businesses? So Mr Price Home will typically go into your more primary locations where there's high foot traffic. And although there is overlap with Sheet Street. Sheet Street will also look for secondary locations. So if you take a gateway and you've got a crescent outside, it's within the node. It's a secondary location with high foot traffic, but it typically comes with lower rental that suits the Sheet Street model. Yuppiechef for now is targeting your suburban or your superregional shopping centers that also have foot traffic locations. So what are the differentiators for the sector? Well, our 3 brands cover every category across every room in the house. And within that, we have a good, better and best pricing matrix, which means we appeal to all LSM groups. One of the key differentiators is that since the inception of Mr Price Home, our 5 largest suppliers have reliably supplied to the group for more than 20 years and our top 10 suppliers for more than 15 years. It means that all 3 businesses are able to leverage these long-standing relationships, and because of the volume that we drive through the business, we're able to deliver the best value to our customers. Getting into Mr Price Home. Well, what is their purpose? It's to make beautiful homes affordable and accessible to all. We're passionate about making life beautiful, firmly rooted and I believe that good design shouldn't cost extra. So some of the wonderful accolades I can share with you about the Home division is that they have been the most loved homeware retailer in South Africa for 15 consecutive years despite the term all I spoke about in recent years. They have the highest brand equity in the homeware sector. And they are the most shopped homeware retailer in South Africa since 2009 and very proudly 40% of the products are locally produced. But to give you a flavor of the personality of the brand that has enabled these statistics, we have short video to show. [Presentation]

So if we move on to who is the Mr Price Home customer. So we appeal to a broad spectrum of trend-conscious and value-minded customers in the middle to upper income segment and they love to express themselves through their homes. How do we describe these customers? Well, there's a whole bunch of them. There's an enterprise and go getter, there are these movers and shakers the accomplishes and the overachievers. What differentiates Mr Price Home? Well, it had long standing in-house design capability and it coordinates looks across all rooms in the house and across taste levels. Now it's the only retailer I know that does this across all rooms. So when we talk about taste levels, for decades now, we've worked out exactly what -- there are 3 predominant taste levels that exist within the South African consumer. The first is what we call the classic customer, and that is typically your florals and botanics and your more pastel shades and what we would describe as pretty patterns. Then we have an urban customer who's younger, who wants brighter colors, wants geometrics and abstract type prints. And then we have a rustic customer who wants more neutrals and naturals and more earthy tones. And the contribution of these customers has been well understood, and we move them through the trend journey as trend shows us from one season to the next so that the product doesn't become stale, but within their lifestyle, they get newness every season. And that's all enabled by in-house design. Mr Price Home leads by a long way in collaborations with local artists and designers, and I'll talk to that a little more in a minute. They have an extensive width of assortment across all rooms in the house and are the best priced in the market relative to any other fashion value competitor. Mark spoke earlier about the EDLP model. It's what we stand firmly on, and we support that with our surprise and delight promotions that we run every week. We don't discount. We don't get into that 40%, 50% of distressed sales. And Mr. Price Home is proudly South African accreditated and which supports local job creation. So this is a busy slide, but it gives you a flavor of the collaborations that have been done over time. And they are by far the largest support for local designers. And this has been running for 12 years. And to date, 80 collaborations have taken place, and that will continue. The South African consumer loves it because it brings something new to the market. You're not sure when you're going to see it again, and they love the fact that we support local talent. So what is the value positioning of Mr Price Home? If you look at the fashion value matrix, the top right-hand corner is where you want to be. And as you can see, they lead by a long way on fashionability and compete very strongly on value. And 85% of consumers recognize that Mr Price Home offers the same or better value than last year. On to the omnichannel experience, currently 232 stores with a trading density of just over ZAR 27,000 but what is interesting is that whether you're in a small store in a small town, there is a kiosk in that store. So if you want to shop the full range that's on offer either online or in the megastores of Gateway, you can go into the store, you can click and a couple of days later, you can collect it at your local store. Mr Price Home was the first mass market homeware retailer to sell online and to launch an app. And e-commerce is currently its largest store. They have 569,000 Instagram followers, which is the highest in the sector and 20 million people on average per month access their digital platforms. with 1.6 million social media followers. So what are the growth opportunities? Well, don't talk to it in the apparel sector, it's about growing comp growth, and it's about supporting and growing the under-indexed category. So I just want to talk for a minute about what that actually means, because it sounds great that we want to grow these underindexed categories, but how do we actually do it? So we have a very detailed process in this. And what we do is we grade all of our stores from grade 1 to 5, and they graded based on the store size, the store turnover and the store location. So as we go through the 230-odd stores, they will either be in Grade 1, all the way down to Grade 5. So your super regionals will be Grade 1 stores. And as you move into smaller suburbs or smaller shopping centers or to smaller towns, the stores will get a little smaller, the turnover will be a little less, and that will be graded accordingly. So when we want to test something new and we look at these under-indexed category and we say those are the ones that we're going after. The opportunity there is to expand with. But how do we know what the customer acceptance is going to be as you look through this huge profile of stores across the landscape of the country. So we have what we call a test grid. And that will cover -- it's more or less 10% of the footprint. So in this case, it would be 25 stores. And we'd make sure that we cover from Grade 1 to Grade 5 stores, and we make sure that we cover the width and breadth of the country, because we know that within those grades, they are like stores. And then we'll monitor the clearances of this product that we put in that we know very little about. And as we see the clearances, if it clears only in Grade 1 stores, we know we can scale it into those 20. If it clears down to Grade 3 stores, we know we can scale it quickly into 150 stores. But if it clears right through that test store band, all of a sudden, the entire national footprint will get this new range of products. So on the one hand, we manage risk. And on the other, we create a huge opportunity. The other growth opportunity is to grow GP through low-cost sourcing. Well, we do our best not to grow GP through RSP inflation. So how do we do this? We fight hard with our suppliers, we look for new factories. We need to look for new countries of origin, but we also look to optimize our supply chain to make sure that we drive down the cost of goods sold. And in the merchandise mix, typically, you'll find opportunistic stock that's margin-rich or we'll grow accessories, that's margin rich, but it's the combination of those that will grow GP. So with 230 stores, we know that there's still lots of runway for Mr Price Home to open stores. And provided they meet the thresholds that we set and the feasibilities these stores will continue to open. They will responsibly continue to grow credit, and there's lots of runway to grow lay-bys. And then finally, the new stores will adopt the beautiful store of the future design, which will support the brand strength. Moving on to Sheet Street. So what is their purpose? Sheet Street's purposes to help South Africans create a home they can be proud of on a budget that they can afford. And quite amazingly, 67% of products defined in the Sheet Street store has been sourced from South Africa. They have the third highest brand equity score in the homeware sector, and are considered the heritage brand. They've been around since 1990. And who's the Sheet Street customer. Well, we appeal to the low to middle income customer age 25 onwards. You are family-focused responsible fashion followers, as I said earlier, and they shop for price value. Having said that, this customer is very savvy about how they spend their money and they still want what they buy to look good. They look for convenience through an expansive store footprint. I don't want to travel far to find a store and Sheet Street has a large footprint. And of course, they have now introduced an online channel. This customer is budget conscious, and they're looking for functionality and durability, which is exactly what you'll find in the Sheet Street store. So in terms of value for money, interestingly, the average price point in a Sheet Street Store is below the market in categories contributing 86% of their turnover and 97% of their customers that Sheet Street provides either the same or better value than last year. So what is the brand's differentiators? Well, Sheet Street's customers recognize their brand in more categories than any other homeware retailer. They have the widest choice of color and you get more for less than you would expect to pay in a Sheet Street store. And of course, they're focused on small space living, which let's face it, that's the majority of the South African population. On to the omnichannel, 354 stores with a shade under ZAR 28,000 square meter density, and this is optimized by the fact that they have a fairly consistent store size, which enables a wide store footprint. They launched e-commerce in 2020, and research has shown that 23% of shoppers are influenced by social media before spending. And to that end, Sheet Street has got 1.2 million social media followers have last year had 1.6 million video views across their platforms and almost 40% of their online orders were clicked and collected at store. So what are their growth opportunities. It's to grow these under-indexed categories that I talked about earlier with the same methodology that I described. It's to exit nonprofitable space. Now this comes in many forms. You may have stores that are slightly over spaced, you may have stores that are not giving us the return because the rentals are too high. We'll relocate those stores into the same node, so you don't lose the customer, but at a rental that makes more sense and it will extract profit for the division. And then finally, if need to be, it will be a store closure if the store is not profit making. We'll shift the product mix to incorporate non-comp merchandise categories. So for those in the room who remember last year, we said we were testing this in Sheet Street in Q1. We folded exactly that test methodology that I spoke about, and the business is already scaling into the appropriate band of stores based on the learnings, and I think your June market share gain is indicative of what's going on. Store rollout per hunting list, as I said, provided the thresholds are met, Sheet Street will open stores, and they will grow their GP in the same way that I described in terms of low-cost sourcing. They will increase the contribution of price disruptors. Now this is quite different from under-index categories or from non-comp merchandise, this is opportunistic process, which Don described a little earlier. So it could be overruns in a factory. It could be cancellations from international retailers. And we all buy the stock on two conditions. The first is it needs to come in significantly lower priced than its peer in the South African market. And secondly, it must carry at least the company average GP or better. On those conditions, it will come in and Sheet Street is already well on its way here and will grow the contribution of this and lots of runway to grow lay bys. So moving on to Yuppiechief, they are the go-to retailer for the most wanted premium kitchen and homeware brands, and I've listed quite a few. Interestingly, 12,000 premium options are available on the online channel in a Yuppiechief store and 89% of products that were rated by the customer received a 4-star rating or higher. They pride themselves on high touch service through the omnichannel offering, anyone who's bought something from the Yuppiechief or no, when it arrives, there's a little fridge magnet and a handwritten note and the customers love it. That personalization means a great deal. Who are the customers? Well, Sheet Street appeals to a broad spectrum of higher LSM customers from first-time homeowners who are foodies, entertainers, homemakers and gift givers, passionate food enthusiast and constantly seek new tools. And of course, the homemaker looking to create a beautiful home, and we are in the process of growing their homeware offering. What is the differentiation? Well, it's curated quality ranges of brands as well as private label. Yuppiechief is known for innovative product. That image on the screen that you can see is what is called a smart garden or if you want robot vacuum cleaner or window cleaner, the Yuppiechief is the destination of choice. They have over 0.5 million newsletter subscribers and have a highly utilized gift registry. And then they have another arm called Edison Stone, which is a sourcing arm to distribute into Yuppiechief and in some cases, into other retailers, but it certainly is an enabler for exclusive brands into Yuppiechief and as the business scales that will become a greater contribution of the assortment. They also support local brands. So you can see a number of them listed on the screen, and these are all brands which resonate with the South African target customer. So on to omnichannel, Sheet Street currently has -- sorry, sorry, what, has 21 stores with a trading density of ZAR 44,500 and they will launch an app next year. And we know this will enhance marketing capabilities, because it means you can send push notifications to your customer. We know that increases basket size, and we know that the app customer conversion rate is higher than the web-based customer. And it builds loyalty, because the app-based customer tends to shop more frequently. So what are the growth opportunities, as I've said, to grow private label to increase the width of homeware and to grow the gifting assortment. The Yuppiechief is known for gifting, but there is still lots of to widen this offer. We will integrate them into the merchandise planning systems of the group to enable this growth and for these additional stores. We plan to grow this to 55 stores in the next 5 years. The launch of the app will accelerate online growth and then further integration into supply chain to unlock GP will be pursued. And then finally, the business will introduce credit.

Good afternoon, everyone. I hope you had a good long little lunch break and opportunity to also go and have a look at the stands. I also hope that you took some time out to look at Mr Price Cellular stand because that's what we're going to get into now in the session after lunch. I'm really excited to present to you the Financial Services and Telecoms segment, really my favorite segment within the group. It's one of the coolest divisions that you can come across within the Ms Price Group, if I do say so myself. All right. Let's move forward. So looking at the Telco segment. In terms of how it's made up. So the Financial Services and Telco segment currently makes up, and you would have seen the slide, 3.1% of retail sales. And that really talks to the Telco business. In terms of how that's made up from a divisional perspective, Mr Price Money contributes 53% to the profitability of the Financial Services and Telco segment with the Master Price Cellular business contributing 22% and the Insurance business contributing 25% of the operating profit. That's really been quite a strong story around diversification in the financial services and telco space. When we started the business a few years ago, well, if I go back maybe 10 or 12 years ago, we really had started financial services in terms of a credit offering to our customers. Thereafter, we saw the opportunity to move on into the insurance business, which was a great adjacency. And after a few years, the opportunity then to move into the Telco business, which I'll talk to you just now about how that's related back into the business. So all in all, the segment gets to an operating margin of 24%, which is the highest operating margin in the group. If you strip out the Telco segment, which we spoke about at the June presentation, the Telco op margin at 9.8%, you can then imagine that financial services, credit and insurance, obviously, have a much higher op margin than the average 24% for the sector. In terms of how the sector is made up from a customer-facing brand perspective, within financial services, we have Mr Price Money, which is the credit book, which you're quite familiar with in terms the store card, Mr Price Insurance is a cell captive, which we have a very special relationship with GuardRisk and Mr Price Extras launched most recently from an innovation perspective to the customer segment. In the telco space, we initially started off with Mr Price Mobile on the right, one of the first clothing retailers to go into the MVNO space, mobile virtual network operator space, there was quite an attractive space for us to enter, and this was leading edge. I'm talking 2014, 10 years ago. Cell C was the only network operating in an MVNO space at the time. And we were one of the first retailers actually to take on that model. Great opportunity from a margin perspective in that model, and it allowed us to bring value to customers based on price points that we were able to control in terms of giving value back to customers in quite a I'd say, undemocratized data and airtime landscape that's dominated by quite a few big players. And then the ability to use the halo of the brand, right? We saw that earlier this morning that through organic concepts, we've been quite successful in leveraging the Mr Price group brand and no different from a Mr Price Mobile perspective. A few years thereafter, we then decided to go into the Mr Price Cellular space and the differentiation really is that Mr Price Cellular is an MNO, mobile network operator. So for example, if you walk into our store, you see a kiosk in the store where we're retailing devices and other accessory products on behalf of other retailers. And you would have seen that in our competitors for many years. So we were probably one of the last growth or the last clothing retailer to enter the space. The space was quite crowded at the time when we made the decision to enter into it, but we thought there was an opportunity for the customer using our knowledge of the customer and what she wanted and be able to put that together for her in a very curated design or assortment is what helped us get really good traction that Mr Price Cellular business over the years. When we initially started, we started with 10 store-in-store concepts. And very quickly, we managed to scale to where we are today in over 500 store-in-store concepts and over 40 stand-alone store concepts, which I'll talk to you about just now. And then more recently, with the acquisition of Power Fashion, we were able then to access the price value customer from a cellular telco perspective. They also have in store concepts in about 80 stores, which we'll touch on a bit later. Moving on to what the product looks like. So Don was able to show you a bit of the product. My products here are more virtual. So from a credit perspective, really, the main reason the credit store card lives is to provide access to our customers to the merchandise. So very much to be able to support customers being able to access merchandise at price points via their affordability that comes through from the store card. So a tender type really more than anything else was how this business initially started. And we started with the traditional store card, so a 6- and 12-month rolling facility, a book that we built ourselves with an in-house data team, both our scorecards also over the years and got them quite specific in terms of the customer profile that we were after, because we were quite intent in terms of how -- intentional in terms of how we manage bad debt. So the 6- and 12-month facility is substantially probably 90% of the portfolio at the moment. And a few years ago, coming out of COVID, we decided that we needed to access the younger customer segment. So we had lots of requests from customers, younger customers who were either new to the credit market, so they didn't have much of a credit profile or they were just younger customers. And we then started up a 3- and 4-month facility term called the start-up facility, and that's really a great opportunity for us. It gives us the ability to access data for customers on a 3- or 4-month revolving facility. Smaller terms, smaller limits allowed the customer to understand financial inclusion and how financial education impacts their credit scores and then able to migrate them and they're already up into the 6 months and 12 months facility so that they're able to access a higher credit limit and continue shopping. More recently, in the last year, we then launched the bigger buyers product, which was after an innovation phase that we had gone through in the Financial Services business. And the real crux of this really was to move away from revolving credit and really offer a 24-month fixed paydown facility. So more facility that customers could use for bigger ticket items like couch, for example, where we get to average credit limits of about ZAR 10,000 on the bigger by facility. In contrast to the 6- to 12-month facility where the average limits are closer to 3,800. So that really talks to the product set within the credit business. Moving on to the insurance business. Again, as I mentioned, quite a good adjacency for us. The Mr Price Insurance business has been probably under the radar for most -- for all intents and purposes. So you don't see it when you walk into stores, for example, but we operate quite a significant insurance business through a call center. It's micro insurance, both in the long-term and short-term space. And when we initially started the business, it was really about creating an opportunity to look after the credit customer. So we launched the lost card protection and the customer protection plan, which was very much linked to the credit base because we had known customer data, she had an affinity to the brand and we were able to upsell these products to look after instances of either fraud on an account or if there are instances of risks to the balance. A few years after that, we did another innovation phase, and we launched what we called the second gen products. And here, we went away from just the traditional store card and looked at what did the customer actually need from a micro insurance perspective. We knew that she couldn't afford high premiums on a monthly basis, but she needed to be covered. And that's when we went into the Life Matters plan. So it's simple life cover of up to ZAR 100,000 to ZAR 250,000 premiums, some is a little less ZAR 30 in a month. Really talking to a one up from funeral product. We also launched the A2B commuter personal accident product, and that talks to our customers when she's in public transport in a taxi moving from point A to point B. It covers her for any accidental or any accidents on the way. We also launched the 360-degree program, which was quite a comprehensive cover that looked after customers from a hospitalization, critical illness, death and disability, again, micro insurance for micro premiums. And more recently, we launched the device cover product. Obviously, it was a natural progression after we started the Telco business to start offering device cover and again phenomenal value to the customer premium start from as little as ZAR 30 a month for device cover and covers your major risk incidents there. All in all, from an insurance product perspective, they are conveniently billed to the store card, so quite easy for customers pay when they're paying their store cards on a monthly basis and really an opportunity for us also then to access cash customers via the debit order, which I'll talk to you a bit later about. And then the value-added services was just an opportunity for us to add extra value to the customer, knowing that the VAS market is quite a big market in South Africa. I'll talk to you about some of the stats just now. But some of the big products that index with our customers really well is prepaid electricity vouchers, person-to-person money transfers. I'll give you some stats just now. Showmax vouchers. And then the big one, airtime and data, which is quite a commodity these days for all customers. If we pause a little bit more and talk about the credit market, so I'm going to spend 2 minutes just talking to you at a high level about what market in South Africa looks like. All in all, 25 million consumers in the credit market making up ZAR 2.2 trillion in debt from the May '24 experience CDI data point and as you can see in the pie chart, a significant portion of the ZAR 2.2 trillion comes through from secured lending in home loans and vehicle loans, the black and the red piece of the pie chart. And then the 25% is made up from unsecured credit. So the personal loans, clothing retail accounts and credit cards. So the clothing retail loan market is 2% of the total market at ZAR 43.3 billion. And within that 2% of the credit market is where we play, the Mr Price Book at ZAR 2.5 billion, accounting for 6% of the clothing retail markets. If we just move on to talk about the landscape. So what have we seen in the credit landscape over the last few years. I think flowing on from the discussion this morning in terms of what the macroeconomic situation has been over the last 12 to 18 to 24 months. We've seen quite a large increase in originations and applications for credit in the market. You would have seen the same from the banking sector and from other sectors in terms of credit, but the challenge really being about customer affordability. So the strain that customers feel financially and their ability to then try and increase their wallet using credit tender types really being a risk to the sector. Also at the same time, high interest rates over the last 24 months, really like ramping up the risk of bad debt. In terms of our posture and our response. We also noted quite a significant increase in credit applications over the last year. In June, at our year-end presentation, we said credit applications or requests for credits were up 40% on the prior year, again, talking to the customer demand. And the new kind of nuance we had seen with the younger customers are now looking at credit more seriously than they had done in the past. We did maintain our credit posture of conservatism, which we've spoken to you about before. Our approval rate at 18.7% is more or less in line with some of the other clothing retailers. And I think the big the big point for us is we wanted to make sure the book was as healthy as possible and also getting the book ready to be able to take advantage of a turning cycle, which I'll talk to you about just now also. So from a health of the book perspective, we do a benchmark exercise, and the Mr Price credit strategy shows that the good-to-bad balance ratio at 6.6% is much better than the market at 3.2%, almost double better than the market. Moving on to the insurance landscape. So we spoke about insurance being quite a commodity for our customer base. The research shows us that over 40% of South Africans have a funeral product. Most of them have more than one funeral product. And that really -- the new trend in that space also has come through from flexibility in benefits and premiums that customers are after. Digitization is also quite a big trend in the insurance market at the moment and the drive to insure tech is something that everyone is incorporating into their strategies. Our response really has been about looking at how we can access cash customers. So I spoke to you earlier about the fact that we were quite conveniently billing insurance products in line with the store card, gave us a great base of customers to sell to, but the big opportunity now through the access to debit order products as a result of the cash customer base, and that has recently been launched and also helped us attract a younger customer. Also, we've partnered with a digital insurance platform. We don't want to build all the tech ourselves in this specific sector. We know there could be significant investments from that perspective. So we've partnered really well in being able to provide an insurance platform that digitizes the onboarding of customers all the way through to the claims stage. And then the product development life cycle continues in terms of trends that we see coming through. The VAS market, I spoke to you about just now, quite a significant market, ZAR 35 billion to ZAR 40 billion per month in terms of transactions. And in that mix, about 9.7 million customers transferring money monthly to themselves. And then we also hinted earlier what the informal market looks like. A lot of these person-to-person money transfers operates outside a traditional bank account. So these customers have a need money to friends or family in different provinces without going through the traditional banking system. And here, we have the ability of a customer to go to a store in Gauteng, put some money into a relative in the Durban, who lives in Durban, and then she is able to access that money transfer via our store network. That's also taken off quite nicely, and I'll talk to you about that just now. But the other big player within this VAS market is prepaid electricity and airtime and data, which have become quite commodities. And the big thing with there is about the convenience factor. So quite good in terms of driving footfall into stores, but also good as an impulse buying. So while the customer is at the pulse desk, our ability then to upsell our basket with these products are quite good. Our response, we launched the money transfer service in partnership with ABSA, and again, talking to the partnership approach and not building everything ourselves. And in the last year, we've seen more than ZAR 58 million transferred from a money transfer product perspective. Prepaid electricity voucher is also doing really well in terms of store card and cash customers. And what really helps also is the omnichannel strategy. So customers are able to purchase is not just in store, but also online. In terms of differentiation in the financial services sector, so convenience is a big thing. And also the ability to access merchandise, we said was important. So we launched the One Card program a few years ago coming out of COVID and that really allowed us to give customers the opportunity to cross shop between different retail chains with 1 store card as opposed to just shopping in the brands that we had originated the card in. From a value perspective, coming out of COVID also, we spent some time on innovation, and we launched the Mr Price Insiders Rewards program. I've got a slide just now that I'll talk to you about the Insiders Rewards program and how that works the credit customer. But the biggest call out there is customers are able to get 50% of their monthly spend on the store card back in free data. So as an example, if a customer shops for ZAR 1,000 a month, on average, she gets 500 megs of free data every month on her Mr Price Mobile SIM card. So when I spoke about the ability to bring the Telco sector and the Financial Services sector together, that's really what we've been able to do with the Mr Price Rewards Insiders program. From a choice perspective, multiple tender types, insurance products that were relevant to the customer. And then quite a big thing for us. We've been through quite a big digital journey over the last 3 or 4 years. and starts all the way from the onboarding process from an omnichannel perspective. So we've been able to grow customer acquisitions through WhatsApp chatbots, online through call center, in-store as well as through the cellular store, and you would have seen at the expo, there's a digital application process. From a QR code perspective, customers are able to start their credit journey, so quite a big investment in the digital and also in terms of multiple payment types. Self-service also has become quite a big thing for our customers in financial services. So their ability now to resolve queries that they have has actually transferred to 30% self-service, whereas in the past, we would have 100% of customers either phoning through the call center or going into store. Now she is able to self-service by the online chatbot platform. And the store card customer also is quite a big e-com shopper, 31% of store card sales contribute to e-comm. So in terms of who the customer is from a demographic perspective, she is black female. She's aged between 36 and 41 years on average. The average credit limit is about ZAR 3,800. And to pause on that, clothing retail is really the first point of entry into the credit market for most South African consumers. She enters the market via this product, builds a reputation over time in terms of a credit score and then she migrates to other credit products like personal loans or credit cards, average income, ZAR 10,000 per month and 34% of the base have credit cards. So talking to the indexing into credit cards, we don't see a significant cannibalization from a credit card customer. If anything, when you look at the Bureau data, you actually see that she has balances on her credit card. And she has balances on retail store, and she maintains both those balances talking the utility that she needs from an affordability perspective. In terms of the average transaction, and this is what gets us excited is that the credit transaction is 49% higher than the average cash transaction. These customers have approximately 2 sim cards, which we love to hear because we're able to give them more value in terms of offering her SIM cards. 76% of consumers have other retail accounts. So not only the Mr Price clothing account, but she does have other retail facilities, 85% smartphone penetration and 58,000 with Mr Price Mobile SIM cards. Just in terms of customer insights. So this is one area of the business where we do have access to structured data just by the nature of having a credit offering. So our base of 1.4 million customers. We know who she is. We know how often she shops. We know what she shops, we know for who she shops. So we were able to build quite a data-driven model in terms of using recency, frequency and value of spend. And then we're able to use that data-driven model into our rewards program and we talk about how we reward customers for shopping on the store card. The other behavior that we've been awarding recently -- rewarding recently also is the payment of accounts, so not just in terms of shopping up but also being able to pay off her accounts. I told you I would speak to you about the Insiders Rewards program. So yes, as I said, we actually did quite a bit of research before launching this. And what do we know? 73% of South African consumers belong to some form of loyalty program or the other. Most retailers offer some program. And in 2020, we came across the opportunity to actually leverage existing assets within the group. So prior to 2020, the MVNO, Mr Price Mobile was operating as a profit center, selling prepaid and postpaid packages to customers. But in 2020, we said, let's bring the assets that we have in the business together and create the reward that I spoke to you earlier about in terms offering free data for customers as she shops. That's one item -- one reward area for the customers on this program, but there are various others also. In terms of some of the key highlights from the insides reward program that the last year. We've delivered 1.1 million reward moments in the financial year, 7% additional customer shopped year-on-year, 31,000 customers with the mobile SIM have owned 13 terabytes of free data for shopping on the account and the biggest ROI for me is that the rewarded customers are shopping 10% more versus customers who were not rewarded. Obviously, a continuous research loop here in terms of how we continue to refine that insiders rewards. So in terms of the growth opportunities, what does the financial services opportunities look for us, look like for us. So you have heard quite regularly over the last 5 to 10 years, this fintech around. And there's obviously various models of fintech that we've seen being landed in the market. But really for us, how we see fintech, it's really a convergence of retail, banking and technology. So the ability of bringing all those 3 together to be able to provide products to the customer when she needs it and in terms of providing a payment mechanism for her is really key for us. So in terms of the projects we've got going in terms of the landscape. Our financial services modernization product project is something that we started last year sometime. And really, that project is about making sure that we have the right tools and right systems in place to be able to scale this business together with strategic banking partnerships. And I used the example earlier about ABSA from a money transfer perspective, ABSA as our sponsor bank. Again, we're not -- we are really looking for that partnership approach where the partner brings licenses of functionality and then we're able to leverage our retail platform and customer base to unlock products of value. Other opportunities in credit really is around how we take credit to acquisitions and what we're thinking about there. And obviously, business cases will be built over the next the next short term. A key part in terms of taking credit to acquisitions is landing the financial services modernization project. And then once that is done, we'll be able to look at capability to take to acquisitions. The other opportunity, I think I spoke to you a bit earlier about is in our net bad debt. We've set quite a metric at 7.5% or 8.5% net bad debt as our key metric. But within that metric, there are opportunities between the different brands based on the customer LSM. So there are some opportunities in the short term that we will be looking into, together with the change in the cycle, right? So we spoke about the opportunity for what could credit look like in an up cycle where interest rates are lower, customer affordability is there, and that's something that we will consider. Moving on to the Telco segment. So Telco, I think we spoke to you about the 3 brands, the Mr Price Cellular brand really talking to the fashion value customer segment aligned with the Mr Price Halo brand, providing cellular advices, accessories, airtime and data, the power fashion customer, the price value segment of our metrics, talking to cellular devices, accessories and airtime and then Mr Price Mobile also bringing in Onbiller and SIM-only products to the customer. In terms of differentiation for the Telco business, pricing is quite a big thing for our customers. She's very price sensitive, which is quite a big lead into our strategy, 58% of devices are cheaper than the markets based on comp shops that we do regularly and 32% are in line with market. If you've had time to go to the expo, you would have seen the SALT device. So we launched our own private label brand last year in December. Again, understanding what the customer wanted was quite key in this launch. We looked at the features of the smartphone device that she was really after, but obviously couldn't afford the top-tier brands, and we were able to bring really good specs to these devices, but at really value price points. So the price ranging of ZAR 1,499 to ZAR 2,999, really the sweet spot for the customer and a short space of time, got to a 5% contribution of device sales. And I continue to encourage you after the session also to look at those devices and the expo. In terms of the experience, so we launched our stand-alone stores, and we've grown to about just over 40 now. Quite a nice digital experience in the store if you visited, quite fresh looking, funky and keeping in line with our customer. You will see that there's opportunities for our find your fit app if you're looking for a good match between you and your cellphone that you can do within the store space. You can also start a credit journey in that store from scanning a QR code, and then you're able to also buy your device after your credit facility is granted and the whole host of extra products available in that stand-alone store. Also alternate tender types have become very important to this customer. Obviously, we spoke about affordability being an issue. So we have launched alternative tender types like buy now pay later, third-party providers. Again, we've partnered with businesses who are taking the risk, but providing us the access to the sales. And then from a Mr Price Mobile perspective, differentiation comes through the MVNO. I told you when we started, we had started the journey with Cell C in 2014 as they were the only telco that was offering the service. But we've now just gone live with Vodacom as the secondary MVNO provider. We're the first retailer on the Vodacom MVNO platform, it's been something we've been working on quite hard for the last year and the ability for the customer to access the quality of that network has just been phenomenal for us, but within the value price segment also. In terms of the customers, I won't spend too much time here, but other than to say the Mr Price Cellular and Mr Price and Power Cell customers very in line with the Halo customers. So Mr Price Cellular in line with the Mr Price Apparel customer and Power Cell in line with the Power Fashion customer. With Mr Price Mobile, we've seen a bit of a trend into the male customer, which has been a new kind of trend for us. In terms of the offerings, so we spoke about the digital in-store experience. This is picture of what one of the standalone stores look like. And then we spoke about the SALT devices also. So we're in 43 new -- 43 stand-alone stores at the moment. and 507 store-in-store concepts across the red cap divisions and also operating from an e-comm perspective on the Mr Price app, which is the #1 ranked omnichannel app. In terms of some of the accolades we've won over the last couple of years, Vodacom Onbiller of the Year award, Telecom Retailer of the Year award for market growth and Huawei Appreciate award for higher sales. In terms of Power Cell, again, differentiation here into the price value segment. So for example, where we see average device prices in the Mr Price Cellular, stable of around ZAR 1,400 in the power cell space, you're seeing average device prices of ZAR 350. So quite a big differentiation from a customer perspective. Presence in 80 stores at the moment and dedicated service and store model with the opportunity to grow to more stores. And from a Mr Price Mobile perspective, again, the MVNO, 1.5 million SIM activations since launch and positioned, as I said, as a differentiator through the Mr Price Money Insiders program. From a growth perspective for the Telco segment, the expansion of the footprint is quite important to us. This year, we'll land 25 new stand-alone stores and 10 new store-in-store concepts. The increase of the private label contribution from SALT, really a big thing for us. We spoke about private label being allowing us to access greater GP margin, and that's exactly what this is about. And then white labeled accessories to be launched also later this year. So once the devices are landed, the next kind of big area of opportunity is white label accessory. Also, we will consider an alternative to prepaid device financing. That's a business case we're working on at the moment. And then from a Power Cell perspective, launching the SALT devices into the stand-alone into this Power Fashion stores, right product for that customer. That's what we're really focusing on now and prepaid device financing and the store footprint expansion. The big focus for the mobile MVNO really is to migrate the customer base to the Vodacom platform and then the ability to access better GPs through the merchandise mix in that space. Great. So I've given you the overview of financial services and telecoms, I'm sure now you understand why it's my favorite part of the business. It's all about the margins, which look really great. I'm now going to hand you over to our Director of Fund, Liziwe. And as she comes up, we're going to get kicked off with the video. Thank you. [Presentation]

This is why we do what we do. I've watched this video more than 10 times. Each time I watch it, I get goosebumps. When you see the diversity of our associates, their reasons as different as they are representing the diversity of the teams that we have in the organization. You can't help but just one to be here. Mark, in your section, you said we'll talk more about this. I don't know what you are talking about public culture and that the people section. So what I heard was forget the time line that Matt gave you, you have as much time as you need to talk about people. Sitting down listening to all the presentations, at some point, I thought -- I think my job is done. Actually, we don't need a people section. For Nigel to open up with a slide you can't copy culture to Stewart and Lori talking passionately about just what's important for them, their associates, the purpose, the passion to Mark talking about culture and everybody else, culture, people, skills, we have a special place. We have special people. We have a secret source, not just in our people, but in how we do what we do. I'm thinking -- I don't think the people section is needed. But now that Mr. Blair has given me more time, we'll just -- we'll go where we need to. So good afternoon, everybody. I am mindful that this is the graveyard shift and there's drinks waiting after this. So I hope that will do justice to this slot. You saw when Mark put up the 6 pillars of the strategy that people was one of the pillars. And here, we have an integrated people strategy that we put together. I'm not going to cover the whole strategy, but we thought we'll pull out just 4 key themes that we know its shareholders, you'd be interested in, and the discussion can go wherever else then it needs to go. I'll start with the first one organizational health index, and there's a bit of a story here to tell. Even before I joined, when Mark put together that strategy, he had a vision for what he wanted to see in the people function. One of the outcomes was he wants the Board and the organization to have independent data that would tell us how healthy the organization is in terms of our associates, based on an understanding that if you have associates who are engaged, they are going to be productive and you get the outcomes that you need. So one of the first conversations we had when I started, he shared the straight document, he shared what he had under the people pillar. It took us a while to build it, but this is our third year now of having an organizational health dashboard, you'll see the 8 areas that are covered. And any people function, there's all sorts of data sets. And as an organization, it's your responsibility then to pick the data sets that are relevant to the strategy that you are driving, which is what's represented there. What you don't see, though, is the reporting, we thought we'll show you just what the categories are the reporting that sits behind this that starts at divisional level, it rolls up to sectors, and then we have a group view. So at any given time, when we sit in our conversations, we are able to look through the organization of the number of divisions that have been shared earlier on, 32,000 associates. You know that your people agenda then is absolutely aligned when all the divisions are able to produce that amount of data, look at people through the same lens which then drives the decisions that need to be made in order to improve the health of the organization. So this you can almost see as an internal score board that says we have a strategy, those are the elements that we know will tell us whether we're winning or not. Are we winning or not. When we went to the Board now in August reporting for quarter 1, the OHI, we call that in short, it was the best organizational health score overall at group level that we had delivered since we started this journey over 2 years ago. All those elements were green, except transformation and transformation, you can understand 2 parts. It's beginning of the year. It's only quarter 1 reporting, so we know that we have time to make up. And then the second part is a challenge at top management, the other levels we know will be able to score. And Net Promoter, there's some improvement that's needed at every other element, strong performance in line with the parameters that we had set, we'd never delivered a result like that before. Then you look back and you say, you've put a strategy, you have measures of success. They didn't start off being green, right? You work hard. Our conversations are quite targeted conversations, and I've learned when you work with CAs, it is what's the score? What was the target? How did you not get to the targets? How are you going to get to the target? Being a psychologist, we can tell stories. There's no stories with the CA. So what are the 3 things you are going to do to get to the target? And that's great because that focuses us to make sure that we do what needs to be done to improve those and the results are also coming. So that's the organizational health dashboard. I've put Top Employer there because when I look at Top Employer, in my mind, it's an external measure of success or if you are not successful, then it's not success. So internally, you have your own data. Externally, you have independent people looking at your people practices and policies and telling you whether they are -- they measure up to your other employers. Top Employer, also a journey, decided in 2022 that we want to at least have a sense of where we feature. And the goal at the time was just enter, let's get baseline data and then you can decide. But secretly, we were hoping that we would get certified. Everybody wants to win, especially in this organization. Results came, devastating results. So with Top Employer, how it works is there's over 20 dimensions that they measure and they look at practices you have over those 20 dimensions, and it's a whole verification process. So really hectic process, you must show documentation, there's interviews. So proper audit processes are followed there. And our results in the first year, we got to 36.5%. Entry level is 60%. Now you understand how big the gap is. But working with the team that we work with, even that shocking results was not an issue, it was like right. We have the baseline data. We know where the gaps are. We're going to put a focus plan to get us to where at least we need to be, which is accreditation. But because the gap was so big, when we set our target, we ended up saying, okay, we'll live with a 25% improvement at least for the following year because you know now where you're starting. Last year, we got our results, and we got accredited. So you move from 36% overall to a 60.7% in 1 year. Tell me that, that does not show dedication, absolute focus and making sure that you are able to change the dial. Year 3, accreditation. I think we will continue. My sense is we will continue to improve the outcomes of top employer. You must just watch the space. I think the announcement will happen in the next couple of weeks. So in terms of your scoreboard, processes are put in place, measures are put in place, focused action across the whole organization to drive to an outcome. Now we are at a point where our internal scorecard and our external measures are starting to say you're moving in the right direction, and that's what you want. Before I move to the next slide, I just wanted to talk about engagement. You'll see it's one of the areas that we measure, but I've pulled that out specifically because most organizations run engagement surveys. We do that as well. We know that globally engagement levels are dropping. In fact, that 72% was Gallop's global number for last year. This year's number has come out. It's dropped to 70% for us as an organization to year-on-year improve from 68% to 73% engagement. We know that there's something special in this organization. Everybody spoke about our culture. They spoke about our secret sauce. They spoke about the passion of our associates. That's how you see where that comes from. In an environment where we spoke about all the macro factors that are really working or at least have been working against many organizations and associates as well. So really proud of -- we have a strategy, we have a plan that drives execution there, and we are able to measure success. When we don't succeed, we don't give up. We roll our sleeves higher and we make sure that the teams are focused. So that's the organizational health, and Nigel is here. He knows we take this to the Board via our sales committee on a quarterly basis and great discussions happen because you sit with the Board that has a full view of what's happening in terms of people in the organization. Second topic is transformation, personally a topic that is close to my heart because I know how if you drive this well as an organization, it just benefits organizations. Being in retail, we also know that the retail sector as a whole has not transformed as much as it's needed to, unlike other sectors that have taken this and really transformed. We've had many debates and conversations both with the Board and our ExCo to say our stance is, which we could at, say, is it compliance? Or are we doing it because we know that fundamentally, the organization is going to benefit? And we're saying it's not compliance, transformed organizations and the research all over the place, create associates who are engaged. They see people who look like them and in different levels of the organization, they know that there's opportunities for them in those organizations as a result. They are better at problem solving because you bring diverse perspectives, they are better at understanding customer needs and delivering those because of the diverse inputs that you bring, especially in the type of business that we are. And ultimately, all of this delivers value to you as our shareholders. This year, we made a decision that our employment equity committee is going to be led by a business owner. So Kevin sitting there at the back, who is the Managing Director of Apparel, Chairs our Employment Equity Committee. And a few colleagues sit on the Committee with me plus other people in the organization. You can't get progress if this is something that sits on the HR agenda, but the business does not own it. And the conversations we've been able to have and what we're putting in place to make sure that we don't just meet the targets, but we just excel because we understand the business value has been great. You can already see also, if you look at percentage of new hires that are ACI, 99%, percentage of promotions that are ACI, 95.6%. Those numbers don't deliver themselves. It's deliberate strategies and a commitment from leaders to make sure that our teams are transformed. We saw that in that video that was playing earlier on. Senior management levels, there is definitely a shift. Are we there yet? We are not there yet. But there's a significant shift to what our senior levels look like compared to 3 years ago. So this one, is one to watch that I'm really excited about. The next one, succession, okay. I think I have many favorite children. I also want to say that's a topic that I'm also excited about. But excited about this because as leaders, our responsibility is to make sure that we build processes and systems that deliver the talent that's needed, and we never find the organization in a place where there are roles and there aren't people who are ready. If there's an area that we should be losing sleep over, it's this when it comes to succession. And for us, succession is not just Board succession, ExCo succession, it's at all levels to say how do we make sure that, a, our succession plans have successors who are verified? I'm sure you also know that sometimes you can have people on the list. And when the opportunity comes, the person is not ready, either because they were not the right person to start off with or no development has taken place. We've spent a lot of time with our senior team and our leaders to say, firstly, how you identify successors is a science. It's not because the person has just performed in that role or they have good values or you have a better connection with them. There's an element of performance there's an element of feedback from the line manager. And then we have a battery of assessments that we use, right? Personality, leadership, problem-solving ability to deal with complexity, emotional intelligence, whatever is needed in that role, you want to know now what that person is able to do and what the gaps are. So that's the identification that's important. Because once you have all of that information informing whether the person is a successor or not, at least you know that you're starting off with the right individuals. People are not born ready for these roles. So we also then have a responsibility as an organization. Once we understand what their gaps are, be clear to communicate and they put together their individual development plans, and then they at least make sure that those development plans, at least through those, the gaps are closed. And sometimes development doesn't have to be a training program attending a course. It could be coaching because there's a gap in a particular area. It could be expanding the person's role because all they need is an additional skill. And all of those are available in the organization, and we make sure that at least people know that. If succession was not an area that the organization had done well, you can look at the roles at the bottom, right, in the last 18 months. And this is a big, big shift for us. Seven senior roles. These are Managing Director level roles, became available for different reasons. And out of the 7, only 1 has been filled with an external person, and that's Natalie, that Mark was talking about who starts next week. Every single role we had at these levels was filled with somebody internally. If Praneel, sounded a bit biased towards Money, you can see, right, he's Chief Financial Officer now, but he was MD of Money before he got promoted in August last year. What also is great is you're seeing the movement here. And in fact, all the MDs are here except for Roxanne, who is on maternity leave. Any part of movement into these roles. You can imagine the ripple effect it has on the rest of the organization as these opportunities now become available? And that is also part of our secret sauce because we say it to people. We are a big organization. We are a growing organization. We want ordinary people to come and do extraordinary things. And if you are ambitious, you are a performer, this is a place for you because the world is your oyster when it comes to career opportunities. When they see these movements and understand what those mean to them. Then you have people saying, "I know I can start in this organization as a casual like Kev did, and there is no limitation of where I can go. I know I can start in this organization on a learnership or an internship and a learnership because I didn't have money to go to university and that's the only job I can find. But through this organization, I can get a qualification because we partner with the SITA on qualifications that they fund when the learnership is complete, I have something that I can keep with me and our learnership pool is an easy pool for us to recruit from when opportunities are there on a permanent basis. And we look at associates then at different levels to see what do you need? What are the gaps? How do we make sure that we close those gaps? So that homegrown statement is something that's really close to our hearts because we know the people who succeed here who understand the culture, who love this organization, if they -- that's what they choose, the opportunities will be there. So really proud that we were able to do this. And as you can imagine, the conversation never stops because the bench now is a bit empty, right, because we had all of those people lined up. But the exciting part is there is a process and the methodology in the organization to already identify these individuals. We then have 2 other categories of people. I spoke about succession at all levels where we have hypos, there's a way that we identified, that also includes assessments, and we have watch list. So our watch list are typically people who are in specialist or maybe junior management positions but show really good potential. They just don't have the experience yet. And we put them in a pool that then allows them to be able to start getting the experience that they need. So at any given time, the conversations around who's sitting in that pool, what's happening with the individuals. And those conversations are also owned by the people in this room and the people who report to them. So that's succession can we go to leadership? Leadership, as you know, really broad topic and leaders in my view, are critical because they are -- you can almost say influencers, right? But we spoke about culture earlier on, which is really important but it's associates at the end of the day experience the organization through their leaders. We can have a DNA, we can have good people processes. If the leaders behavior is not in line with that, the associate experience is not going to be a positive one. At least we know how our associates are experiencing the organization because that's what the engagement that they tell us, and we run that on an annual basis. The second part, why leadership becomes important is we spoke about frontline obsession and our customers are important. We don't have a business if we don't have customers or even look after them. The customer experience that Clint and Don and all the divisional people focus on, can't work if we don't share a similar experience with our associates. Because at the end of the day, the people who deal with these customers are not Clint and Don. It's the front line. It's the call center agent. It's the person in the store, right? So if their own experience of the organization is not a positive one, how do we expect them to then extend a positive experience to the customer. So you can see the link now, right? So your leader holds everything, including culture. They create the experience for your associate who then creates the experience you want for your customer, and then everything falls into place. So leadership is really important. We have a leader DNA. Mark spoke about just a broad DNA for associates. And a leader DNA is very specific about what does leadership mean in this organization? What type of behaviors do we want you to have as a leader in this organization? And then we'll give you the support that you need, but the expectation is clear. The point that I thought I should also address here, we've had a few shareholder calls talking about the REM reports and the leadership and transformation. Actually, there are 2 areas that always come up. And on the leadership, the sense is, while leadership is like vague, what do you really mean? Is it qualitative? Is it just as people feel? And for me, it's not qualitative at all. It's 3 things that we measure. One is how you treat your associates, which is through your engagement score and how you drive the culture. So engagement scores becomes the measure. The second one is a transformation measure, which is for the opportunities that came up in your division in that period. How have you used them to address under representation? And number 3 is succession. What succession do you have? And can you see how it links to all the topics I spoke about? What succession do you have in your division? And what are you doing about it? Because if that's not crystallized in the organization, it becomes difficult then to drive some of these initiatives. We have a new short-term incentive scheme that we shared with the associates because you want to drive accountability. So leaders who are leading people and have a component of their short-term insurance -- sorry short-term incentive linked to leadership will be measured on those. If you have a team, it can be because you are a good leader, and we like you. It's those 3 things. What's your engagement score? What's your employment equity number relative to the target that we set for you? What does succession looks like in your department? And you can imagine if that measure goes right across all the leadership levels, you start seeing different changes then in the organization because that's where you drive the accountability. The last piece is org design. Mark spoke a little bit about it. The operating model is changing. We initiated changes in 2021, and this work continues, right? As we refine the operating model, we look at what the design looks like. And at the same time, we're supporting the organization through the changes. In closing, I just wanted to share 2 pieces maybe of a personal reflection. One is, in the 30 years that I have worked at the risk of giving away my age in largely retail organizations and financial services, I've gotten used to CEOs and leaders talking about their culture, it's special. I've never met a CEO who doesn't think that their culture is special. And you have those conversations. And that's why it wasn't a surprise when I interviewed for this role and Mark and I were talking, and we spoke actually a lot about culture in a similar vein that hit it today, which is one of the reasons why it was appealing for me to come here, right, because you feel like there's a connection. But at the back of your mind, you're thinking, ah, every CEO is going to tell you that. So let's go there and see. And part of my onboarding included sitting with Laurie and Stewart, almost similar conversation that was on that video. So I'm glad you were able to see it. For an afternoon, both of them and for people who have built the size of business that we have and how successful it's become, you'd expect that they'll talk about all of that. 90% of the conversation was our people, our culture, what's special about this organization and what their story is where and what was in their hearts at the time that they started this business that they wanted me to just understand. Now you can't sit in that conversation with the 2 of them and they can get a bit animated especially, Laurie, and not feel a sense of absolute responsibility because then you realize, this is not just another CPO job in a listed organization. This is a job where you are trusted, not me only with this ExCo team and the board to continue the legacy of the core founders and not lose the essence of what they wanted to see in this business. Then the center of responsibility dawns, right, on you as much as the sense of deep feeling like blessed because we are chosen. Mark earlier on said you spoke about you have a responsibility for as long as you are in this role so that when you hand over the organization to the next person that it's in a better place. That responsibility sits on all of us, on all of us that you've got -- we are writing these chapters, right? These are the chapters we are writing. How we write those chapters also must be in a way that honors that legacy. So feeling absolutely privileged because of that and not taking this for granted at all. So the other reflection, though that I had is in the 30 years I've worked across the industries, having had every CEO say that their organization is special. There's only 2 organizations I've worked in where that sense of culture is not just what sits on a piece of paper or in Board meetings and Mr Price is one of them. When you walk through that front door, you feel it when you see people, how they deal with you, like you can't not feel it. Later -- earlier actually -- this week -- This is my final comment. I met with a young person just joined us comes from Joburg in the people team, she's relocated. So we're talking about just career prospects, the role that she's in. And she was saying, I can't believe that there are organizations like this one where people -- she's been with us for 2 months -- are genuinely helpful where there's no toxicity where people want to support. But my guard is up, and I'm not sure whether I must let it down. So I had a conversation then with her to say, no, no, no, this is the organization. They're not going to change. That's just how the teams work here. And that makes us really special. And that is what drives us to do what we do. When you go back to that video and the goose bumps and it gives you like rugby South African team vibes because that's what I got as well, you understand why, right, because of what's sitting in this organization. And to have every other speaker talk about culture, the way that they did I hope that gives you a sense of just what sits in the system. Thank you. Kim?

Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. So I think there's 2 things that I wanted to say. The first is that everything that everybody has told you about today, all the sexy stuff anyway, that's thanks to my team. So I don't think I need to present much more. No, and then secondly, Liz said that you want to leave here with the legacy where you are comfortable that you've left it in a better place than what you found it. And I can assure you, I joined the group in 2019. I certainly like to believe that the technology space is in a better place than how I found it. So I want to talk you through, firstly, what we define technology as? So to simplify it, we've broken it into 3 separate areas. So firstly, there's infrastructure. So infrastructure in our world is really anything that you are hosting your environments on, so your servers, whether they're on-premise or in the cloud, cybersecurity, networks and hardware. The application there is really the software that we have in the business. So either the users are interacting with it, the customers are interacting with it or it is talking to each other. And then lastly, innovation. So I'll go into more about the innovation later. So I want to take you through the progress that we've made on these different layers since 2019. So firstly, on infrastructure, we used to spend a huge amount of our time and energy as a team managing our infrastructure. And that isn't the strategy in the long term. So what we did was, firstly, we moved the majority of our infrastructure into the cloud. That enabled us to have a far more efficient, scalable and cost-effective option to run our systems. We also migrated what we did host into professional data centers like Teraco that remove the responsibility from my team and also meant that we didn't have to manage data center environments at our head office. And we also implemented enhanced disaster recovery solutions, which obviously are critical for the kind of risks that businesses face today. At a network level, we upgraded our networks. We managed to implement much larger links to every single one of our stores and to our head office that reduced costs. That's obviously improved our redundancy and our monitoring. And as a result, we're now able to guarantee our uptime, which obviously keeps us trading. And then lastly, on the cybersecurity front, we developed a 5-year cybersecurity road map. This is an area of concern for every business, regardless of what industry you're in. And we recognize that we weren't going to be able to get from zero to hero in 1 day. So we developed the road map and the road map effectively define the skills, the tools and the resources that we would invest in as we went along that 5-year journey. That road map is quite flexible. So although we had defined our maturity from year 1 to year 5 we need to be open to what's happening in the market. So as threats exist and as things become more prevalent, we can move things around in terms of our road map and make sure that we respond appropriately. If we look at the application space, so those of you who know retailers, most retailers in South Africa started with homegrown systems. So they built them themselves. This meant that those systems didn't typically have enterprise architecture, scalability or security in mind. And when I joined, I managed to find environment that had 399 different applications. That is a massive amount of software to manage and a lot of complexity to manage as well. So effectively, those applications had been built for every users demand and every use case that the business could think of and with very little thought for how that was going to be managed in the long term. So it was a very complex application landscape. The decision to go with an ERP was made before I joined the Group, but certainly a good decision. And so the ERP is much of an interesting journey as it was, it has managed to, it was the first step, really, but it has managed to reduce the complexity in that landscape. So today, we sit in at just over 100 applications. It's still more than what we would want to manage, but it's certainly getting better. And the strategy is to move off of our legacy environments onto off-shelf solutions that basically brings thought leadership. If we build things ourselves, it means that we're limited by the IP of my team or potentially others in the business. And if we take things off shelf, we can basically leverage opportunities. If you think of in the financial services space, and off-the-shelf solution would be able to allow us to unlock new products and whatever that suits us and whenever we are ready for that rather than to build it from scratch, which takes a lot more time and inevitably designs in limitations. So what we've done is we've developed a modernization road map for every functional area of our business. So by that, I mean finance, supply chain, e-commerce, real estate, every single area. And that 5-year road map just reflects really where we need to implement brand-new technology or applications where we need to refresh or upgrade or update or also where there's net new opportunities that we haven't embarked on before that we need to bring technology to support. Those road maps are significant, and those road maps require a significant capital investment. So those road maps will take as long as it is that the capital becomes available. So what we're trying to achieve really is we are trying to migrate our -- if we look at the triangles, we're trying to effectively invert that triangle. And we're trying to migrate from the first version to the second version. So at our infrastructure level, infrastructure is always the core of everything that you do and the foundational layer in which the data and the business sits, but we don't want to spend our time managing it. So by modernizing and automating as much as possible, we spend less and less of our time managing that layer. At an application level, we will always have them. We need to just introduce newer applications that are modernized and that have security and scalability and agility built into them. And then really, what we're trying to do is unlock our resources. So we're trying to unlock our resources to focus on innovation. And by innovation, we're talking about exploiting big data opportunities, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation and more. So I have 2 areas of the business I look after. The first one is Technology, which is really what I just spoke you through, but the second one is the team called Advance. And Advance was really created to enable us to be better as a data-led business. So to enable us to gather our data into a single place and to give insights and analytics to the business that they can use to make the best decisions possible. So the advanced team effectively has 5 functions. The first one is business intelligence. So business intelligence is made up of the data warehouse itself as well as the reporting tools that sits on top of that. We have the data science team, so that really is just data scientists, i.e., mathematicians, who spend their time building algorithms to help our merchants make the best decisions. the RPA team that stands for robotic process automation. So that team really is about automating manual and repetitive tasks that we don't need humans to do to unlock their value and let them do something else, artificial intelligence and machine learning. So there's 2 ways that we exploit these. So either they are embedded in applications that we've already purchased. And so we really just utilize that in a way that we use those tools. Or we purchase them specifically for a focused area. So for example, Don spoke earlier about the trend process, we've specifically purchased an AI tool that gives us insight in terms of the trend process. And then insights and innovation, it's really a special project kind of space where we can take skilled resources that understand our business and are very analytical and apply them to either a current sort of challenge in the business or an opportunity, and that opportunity could be unlocking revenue or cost savings that isn't necessarily limited. So if we look at the journey that we've had to date on the business intelligence side. Back in 2019, we ran multiple legacy on-prem data warehouses, which we're very clunky to manage and took a long time to synchronize. And we moved that to an enterprise cloud warehouse solution. And that sort of enterprise cloud data warehouse solution has, again, has unlocked massive scalability. It's allowed us to move our processing much faster and is actually more cost effective. We then deployed an enterprise data visualization tool on top of that. So that's effectively the reporting layer. So within that, we manage about 450 reports that the business uses on a fixed basis. They do have data democratization, so they can analyze the data as and when they please. We have about 20,000 views of those reports monthly and about 1,000 users that are using the tool across the business. And then also what that's done is it's increased our capacity. So instead of spending our time managing the infrastructure to support the data warehouse and making sure that things are up and talking to each other, the team is able to spend their time on the analytics and supporting the business needs. So in terms of future focus areas, we want to unlock more value for the store base. So we want to build store dashboards that gives them insight into their own performance and again, how they're tracking against their KPIs. The more real-time that data, the more effective they are in their response. The onboarding of our new divisions. So all of the acquisitions have data flowing into our data warehouse already, which enables us a level of group reporting, but they haven't necessarily got all of their data in there and they therefore haven't unlocked the opportunity to use all of our reporting. So that's one of the projects that we're busy with. I'm going to come back to product affinity on another slide. And then sustainability, a critical area of our business and something that obviously relies very heavily on data and analytics. So we're working on that. And then another tool we're working on is just on the new store location analytics. So using a lot of our data from our internal data from our location strategies, but also from our competitive landscape so that we can enhance those location strategies. For the data science side, as I said, it's a team of people effectively that are writing algorithms to support business process decision-making. These guys spend time once we moved across to the data warehouse, the cloud data warehouse. They spent their time rewriting our calculation engines and this reduced run time significantly, which means, again, that we can put the data in front of the teams in more real time. There are some of the tools that they're focused on, largely has been in the merchandise space. And some examples are, for example, we've got a markdown recommendations tool. So what that does is it looks at the products in season. It looks at when a product should be considered for markdown and it also considers what quantum of that product should be marked down and at what price point so that we optimize the margin. So you can do that manually, obviously, but if you've got the engines running, it can kind of give what we call the merchants the smart start. So the idea is not for the data science to do the job, but the idea is for the data science to do some of the hard work and the maths and give the merchants a starting point to work from. They then add on top of that, the data sets that they've got access to and make their final decision. Something like the sales forecast in engine, similar, it will look at, obviously, the demand and the sales and the forecast sales for each store by day. But it takes into consideration things like public holidays, grant payment days, et cetera. So it factors in as much data as we are able to access. And then again, the merchants can apply their minds on top of that. So the plan is to extend a lot of the skills that we've got in the space and the work that we've done across other areas of the business, not just focused on merchandise. And from a sort of maturity model perspective, if you look at that graph on your left-hand side, we believe we are somewhere pretty between the predictive and the prescriptive analytics. So predictive, meaning that we believe that we can write the algorithms and use the historical data sets to make predictions about what the future might look like. Prescriptive is when the users just accept everything that we tell them without interfering with that. I'm not sure that we are ever going to get there, but we're hoping to get closer. And then another exciting addition for us is that we're looking to partner with other organizations that have the capability to do big data computing but also have the skill set from a data science perspective because we can then give them problems to solve, they can go away and work on those. And then we can have a look at the solutions and then embed those and that IP back into our business. It also creates an opportunity to build a pipeline of skills for us. Data scientists are quite hard to find. They're in huge amounts of demand. And so any way that we build relationships or opportunities to bring youngsters that are interested and have the skills in, we will do so. Moving on to automation and artificial intelligence and machine learning. So firstly, on automation, that we'll, on the left-hand side, that just indicates some of the different areas of automation that you can tap into. We do play in all of those areas of automation. Camille earlier referenced the chat bots that we've been running in Money for quite a long time. We've got a lot of process automation running. So automation really makes sense where our business process is well defined and quite mature, but there's a lot of manual steps, and those steps do not actually need a user to do them. They are quite easy to -- they're quite repetitive and quite easy to replicate. And so we've implemented bots across the shipping team, the real estate team and shared services, which is our group finance function. And in the last financial year, we saved over 1,600 man days just by automating certain processes. We anticipate by the end of this financial year, that will be over 3,000 man days that are saved. And obviously, the idea there is to unlock people who've got other skills and talents that they can do things that add more value to the business. We're also looking at more back-office processes at the moment to automate. And one of the areas we're looking at is automating processes which make the customer experience more seamless. So one of the examples is that if we have promotions running in the group, those promotions get loaded into a system at the head office, that -- the information of their promotion that needs to get down to every single store, and we need to make sure that it's been captured accurately. So what we've got a bot doing is the bot runs every day, checks all promotions that are loaded at head office. It then logs into every single store in our group. It checks that, that promotion is effective at the point of sale, and that enables a seamless customer experience. From an artificial intelligence and machine learning perspective, we've got quite a lot of different use cases on the go. The first one refers to more of an internal use case. So we've got a tool that we use to manage calls into our call center. So -- not the Money call center, but the sort of tech call center, and we get a significant amount of calls. We get about 12,000 calls a month. And what this tool does is it's got self-learning built into it. So if stores live calls, for example, for a particular problem, as we resolve those calls, the sort of knowledge engine builds and the machine learning gets applied and we can actually resolve those calls as and when they get logged, and it enables the store, for example, store associates to sort of self-help and self-learn which takes some of the pressure off our team. Our demand and forecasting tools all run AI, our trend monitoring, as I mentioned. We have product design tools where we start with AI so we can give a sort of baseline theme almost into the AI design tool and then our designers will work on top of that. Again, it's a smart start. A huge amount of these tools running in our e-commerce platform, particularly for our search engine optimization and recommendations for detection. Sentiment analysis across social media. We use a lot of tools to help us with that. And then in cybersecurity, there's also a huge amount of these tools running. And then the last area of advance is the insights and innovation. As I mentioned, it's dedicated resource focused on sort of problem solving for anything that we come up with. One example of that is shipping container optimization. So there was an opportunity to review the way that we optimize the containers that are on the ships that are bringing our product in to look at rates and to look at routes and to see if there was ways that we could optimize across the group, and we have identified opportunities that will bring material savings to the group over the future years. And a second opportunity, for example, that we've looked at is using AI to enhance our product descriptions and attributes. So if we look at the merchant process today, we are relying on an individual to look at a product and we are relying on them to capture the attributes that they see, touch and feel and they're limited. They're limited by what they can interpret and they are limited by how much time they can give to this process. If you put that same product or an image of that product through an AI process, there is no limit to how many attributes the AI tool can potentially derive from that product. And those attributes can be added into our merchandise tools, which then helps the merchandise process. But also into our e-commerce and our customer-facing tools. So if your searching our -- for a product and you specifically are looking for I don't know, some sort of button hole or whatever the case might be. If that attribute is being captured, you'll be able to find that product, whereas if we had just captured what we were limited by with the merchant team, it probably wouldn't have got to that level of detail. So some future focus areas. We're investing in intelligence, also we like to believe. So further enhanced use of our AI and ML capabilities. I don't think there's any limit to where that may take us. We want to automate our strategic allocations process, which is critical for our group. As I said before, we're going to partner for innovation in big data analytics. We've got a large amount of projects in terms of integrating our acquisition businesses across various areas of the business, whether that be supply chain, in a people function or in just the data analytics side. We're looking to build a supply chain control tower, which gives us much better visibility across the supply chain, starting from the source of the product and bringing in external factors where the patterns, et cetera, that gives us more predictability about delivery. We're looking at extending our human capital management feature set. We brought into a tool. We haven't yet optimized and utilized all of the functions. And then also, Praneel referenced some of it earlier, but there's a lot of plans for the financial services side of the business and a lot of opportunities to unlock additional revenue products in that space. And then also on efficiency, more enhanced reporting, but really, it's about focusing on exception reporting. So getting to a point where we can manage our business by exception and where we've got people spending their time managing and understanding the exceptions and within the rest of the business to run on the tools. We are looking to invest in an inventory management system, our new inventory management system, which unlocks the future need for a point-of-sale upgrade. We're looking at product life cycle management and assortment planning products or tools. And then also there will always be further robotic process automation tools as well. So if that doesn't sound as sexy as you were hoping, we weren't going to give away the state secrets today. So -- but yes, that's everything from me. Thank you. I hand over to Mark.

Fantastic. Thanks, Kim and Liziwe and Praneel. Matt, I think we're still on target to end at about quarter past 3. I was allocated I think 45 minutes for this final slot, but quite frankly, I think there's been a lot to absorb, and there's absolutely no point in replicating or duplicating what you've already heard. So I'll go through it quite quickly. Just a couple of key points that I really want to stress. But hopefully, you enjoyed this morning session and the early afternoon session. And particularly hearing it from the senior people in our organization. I told you earlier that they looks are matched by their talents. And hopefully, now you can see why I said that. But I must say I think you can see why I rate them so highly, but certainly, their thought process, and I think the level of comfort investors would get is we have to go a level deeper than ExCo into our Managing Director and Director levels I think you'd get exactly the same sense of comfort. So whatever Liziwe was talking about developing leaders, succession planning, things are going really well on that front. Spoke a little bit earlier about the strategic pillars. You can see them down the bottom there. Nothing's changed. We did present the slide, I think it was at the half of the year-end presentation recently. But this just talks to the strategic outcomes that we're after. So because we have spoken about that before, I'm not going to go through everything because as an example, profitable market share, I think Clint was actually talking about that, that we're after market share with good margins, that came up at earlier discussion. Growing comp sales, I think you've all been left with a very clear view of what opportunities exist in our various trading divisions. Space growth, I will touch on that in a minute. But as you go through that list being customer obsessed, we spoke about the brand equity customer engagement and the brand pillar owner is one of the areas that I did say I wanted to bring into a more central leadership position. It's fragmented in the divisions. And as we do that to consider things like do we take loyalty into a different place? Do we consider implementing a CRM system and how we use the customer data that we've got? Bearing in mind the fact that you're less than 10% credit means we've got limited data on our customers, but there's a whole cash customer base that we need to get more data on. We spoke about diversified offerings, differentiated fashion, I think you've got a good understanding of that, and how everything we do is focused on value. And everything that we also do, and therefore, the focus is making sure that whatever area of new opportunities we look at that we're actually investing time in things that are scalable. And we have to resist -- Antoinette was talking a little bit earlier about being very proud of the things that we didn't do. Well, the same applies to this. Don't waste time on small things that aren't scalable and concentrate your efforts on the big things that will move the needle. And then under operational excellence, I think Kim gave an excellent overview of the kind of things that we're looking at and the skills that are actually in the business that we don't really talk about that much publicly but I think we're doing so much really clever stuff and innovative stuff. And it's not the last year or 2, have been doing it for a number of years. that we have to do a better job of telling that story, and I think this is the start. There is more to come on supply chain in ESG tomorrow, so I won't speak anything under that. Praneel did talk about under Slide 5 -- tier 5 there, operational excellence and us looking for efficiencies, and that will be unlocked through process reengineering and the like. And that's the role that we're in the process of defining now. And then top quartile returns, we've spoken at length about that. The targets we've spoken at length about, and I think just put things into perspective as well. You know that when we're giving targets, we are a conservative management team. We're not going to give things out there that aren't achievable. But when we do set targets, I think just bear in mind when we set those targets and what frame of mind we were in as a result of the economy and looming elections and load shedding and all the rest, that as these benefits start to be realized and we'll have to just assess what time is appropriate to start communicating revised targets, if any. So this is the part that I'm not really going to also go over in too much detail. We split our business into opportunities in comp growth and non-comp. I think those have all been documented. And on the bottom left-hand corner on the comp growth that really talks about the ownership changes that I was referring to. And one of the things that I didn't mention 2 minutes ago under those changes was also group-led e-commerce thinking which is also fragmented around the divisions right now. But I'm going to talk more on e-commerce in a sec. But just to go into a couple of key messages on geography. And I'm talking Africa versus South Africa. You can see the scale or lack thereof that we've got in Africa. Let's just round that off and call it 8% of the business. That's obviously not getting the lion's share of our efforts. And in fact, we're going to be concentrating on the 92% and making sure we deliver on everything and all the opportunities around that. So it's the home of our primary operations. we even run, I suppose, the African operations from our central base as well. But I think what we've just spoken about in terms of the opportunities that we've got in South Africa, and there are numerous, we'd rather be concentrating on the 90% and not the 7%. It doesn't mean that in Africa, we won't consider a franchise opportunity if it comes along, et cetera. But for us, the really 2 scalable markets or some sense of scale would be Namibia and Botswana. And quite frankly, other territories have proved to be quite a bumpy and unpredictable environment. with limited scalability. So some of you remember 4 or 5 years ago, when I was appointed, a couple of the first things I did was closed down Australia, closed down Poland, closed down Nigeria, they were distractions, delivered cumulative losses anyway, it wasn't even small, low level profitability. But I think that focusing of the efforts was a journey we started 5 years ago and something that we will definitely carry on doing. So yes, certainly not the lion's share of effort into Africa. Tender type, I think the only real data point. And those of you that were around a number of years ago, and I'm going back in a number of years, I remember talking to you about, well, how big could credit get? And we kind of thought we'd probably have to cap it out at about 20% of our total sales. And I think at the time, we are probably approaching 16% or 17% somewhere around there, but you can see how it's pulled back over time. And that's not to say, and it's just on the back of what Praneel was talking about in the Money section doesn't mean that we -- I mean, it's 10% of our business is still a lot of money. It's ZAR 4 billion. So I think as time progresses, that can creep up a bit. We don't want to change the nature of being a really cash-generative business. But the point here is, and just to reinforce what Praneel was saying, in this improving cycle, the data has to be showing us first that it's appropriate to open text, and we'll take that. The data has to talk to us first. And of course, as we do that, we do know that generally, basket sizes in credit is bigger than cash. So there's obvious upside to that. And in addition to considering credit in the acquisitions that Praneel spoke to as well. I think there's been a lot of talk about channel. So I'm going to talk about [ bricks ], and I'm going to talk about e-com. And I think the real takeaway here is that it's -- our investment is going to go behind the things that matter to our customers. So we've got to be very careful about being caught up in this big e-com play because we've got a customer set, when Don was talking a little bit earlier, he was talking about how many shoppers actually go research online and the huge percentage will then come into the store and actually purchase. So being an omnichannel retailer is critical to us, but you can't take away that need for the shopper to be in-store in shopping, and it's particularly important for our customer. I'm not saying it's not the same for other competitors' customers, for our customer, we need an e-com presence but our shoppers have told us that they want to be shopping in store. We started e-com in 2012. So been going 12 years. And where we're sitting now as a group is just over 2% contribution, and that's not from spending, and it's not from investing. It's not from doing smart and innovative things. That's at the end of the day, the customer will dictate where they want to shop you. So obviously, in the store environment, they're getting a lot there that they can't get online, but they're using online for an informative process and to see what fashion is, to see out what value is, and they're probably comparing us against a whole lot of shop competitors at the same time as well. So certainly, as we go forward, as much as I was talking about Africa versus South Africa. So if you just take online into that, and online is growing faster than [ bricks ]. Take online's contribution at 2%, take Africa at 8%. Together, they contribute 10% of our group sales. We're going to be doing work on e-com, but the lion's share of our efforts is going to the 90%. the data has to be showing us first that it's appropriate to open tax, and we'll take that. The data has to talk to us first. And of course, as we do that, we do know that generally basket sizes in credit is bigger than cash. So there's obvious upside to that. And in addition to considering credit in the acquisitions that Praneel spoke to as well. I think there's been a lot of talk about channel. So I'm going to talk about bricks, and I'm going to talk about e-com. And I think the real takeaway here is that it's -- our investment is going to go behind the things that matter to our customers. So we've got to be very careful about being caught up in this big e-com play because we've got a customer set, when Don was talking a little bit earlier, he was talking about how many shoppers actually go research online and the huge percentage will then come into the store and actually purchase. So being an omnichannel retailer is critical to us, but you can't take away that need for the shopper to be in store in shopping, and it's particularly important for our customer. I'm not saying it's not the same for other competitors' customers, for our customer, we need an e-com presence but our shoppers have told us that they want to be shopping in store. We started e-com in 2012. So been going 12 years. And where we're sitting now as a group is just over 2% contribution, and that's not from spending, and it's not from investing. It's not from doing smart and innovative things. That's at the end of the day, the customer will dictate where they want to shop [ you ]. So obviously, in the store environment, they're getting a lot there that they can't get online. But they're using online for an informative process and to see what fashion is to see out what value is and they're probably comparing us against a whole lot of shop competitors at the same time as well. So certainly, as we go forward, as much as I was talking about Africa versus South Africa. So if you just take online into that, and online is growing faster than bricks. Take online's contribution at 2%, take Africa at 8%. Together, they contribute 10% of our group sales. We're going to be doing work on e-com, but the lion's share of our efforts is going to the 90%. And when you start going through all those opportunities. And when you start going through all those opportunities that you've been hearing about for the last 4 or 5 hours, I think you can get a sense of scale of exactly what those opportunities are. Just looking at store profitability. This just gives some insight into the process that we go through. to make sure that we've got a robust feasibility process and that we've got a post autumn that really looks at the performance versus expectation, and I think we've done a pretty good job. And I think the way that we have to evaluate it is, for one way, is obviously to look at store returns, but actually look at the number of closures we have. And as a group, we've got a minute number of closures every year, which means that we've been very conservative about the selection process going in. So this is just a scatter graph showing how we're performing versus the internal threshold that we set on a return on operating assets and also the inverse is this specific store feasibility because -- in this case, feasibility could have been way higher than our threshold that we put in place. So we'll do this in a whole grid of stores. We'll talk about the store footprint as well because Nigel was talking about that we were opening stores while others were sitting on the beach. So yes, there might be a view that a lot of the good space has been taken up. But I also think that, that's a view that is definitely valid, if you're looking for more of the premium trading locations, super regionals, et cetera, et cetera. But we've got a group of stores and you look across our brands and our stores can translate into many, many different areas. So we're definitely not dependent on the super regionals in those large store formats. So if you wanted to put numbers to it, we're looking at somewhere between 150 and 175 stores a year. And when you're sitting at 2,900 stores now, that will translate to about 3,700 stores in 2029. So I think really, really positive. So if you picture a scenario that there's a lot of opportunity in our comp growth scenario, and we've still got decent space growth opportunities ahead of us, then I think that starts emerging as quite a nice picture. Generally, the way that e-commerce has played out in South Africa, total contribution to sales has increased from 2.9% to 4.7% since 2020. But certainly, the e-comm performance here has lagged the E&Ps. And I think there are some structural issues in South Africa as to why it's not higher, and I think we're all pretty aware of those but data costs and addresses to deliver items is certainly one thing. But we've also [ internally ] used third-party fulfillment and pickup points and they're not exactly being grabbed on to by consumers. They tend to still come into stores, and that's just -- it's reinforcing our position all the time. This is a statement that obviously if you read it up front here, that's from Euromonitor a year or so ago and really talks to what our position has been for many, many years and that certain consumers enjoy a physical shopping experience, and once again, I'm talking to our customers. So how are we thinking about e-comm overall. First of all, I think it's a channel that's really struggled for profitability in the greater marketplace. And that could be South Africa, it could be international players. And we've also known that marketing costs for e-comm, especially e-comm-only players is very high. And once you pull back on the marketing, the sales come off at the same rate. So we've been very focused on making sure that the channel is profitable for ourselves and in fact, has been almost since inception. So chasing top line at all costs is not something that we're after. It's going to be profitable top line. We've spoken about click and collect and the translation of how that happens into stores. And of course, we're still very mindful of customer experience must be good online. Delivery times, the load speed of pages, et cetera, et cetera. I think we have been focused on that and still got a bit of work to do. Don spoke about the import duties being addressed. So let's see how that plays out as well. But I think from our perspective, whilst e-comm central ownership and in fact, a revised e-comm strategy or a revised strategic process, I'd rather say, is very unlikely to end up in Mr Price Group forming one platform with all its brands on the same platform and hoping that, for example, a power customer, in extreme example, will shop a Yuppiechef product. It's very difficult to do when you've got a cross-section of brands. Our customers are retelling us it's not their preferred mode of shopping and they want to be in our stores. They want to feel product, they want to see the value and they want to compare items because we've got great with the top product. So I think it's -- and in doing so, my stance on e-comm, I'm actually feeling very comfortable about the road ahead. And it comes back to, as a value retailer, we think very clearly about where we're investing. We can certainly ramp up investment in e-com. It's going to challenge as profitability. And we all know that the e-com model, even overseas, which is very developed, is going through a bit of a structural shift as well. You probably saw last week, Asos now thinking about charging for returns because it's not profitable, and we all know top and tailing and how that works. So I think we've got to make sure that we're investing our efforts in the 90%. It's going to be the greatest place of return for us but recognizing that there is an omnichannel requirement for our customers. Anthony spoke a bit about this much earlier, but -- and when you also spoke to the capital allocation framework, it's critical that it does guide our investment and it's a framework that we hold ourselves to account. And in fact, external -- our investment committee is very involved in the final decision at the end of the day. So I won't read them all out, but you can see the acquisition considerations. And I think they've been adequately dealt with this morning and then also, organic considerations. And I think the organic is -- as Anthony was saying earlier, it is the environment where our special people can bring their special skills to life. And also, I think you've seen some of that today. But I think, certainly, under organic, and when you start to look at all those customer stats and our brand health and all those kind of things, I think you've got to realize or it'd be hard to argue against that we've got some amazing brands in this Mr Price table. First of all, the halo effect of the Mr Price brand itself. And you hear about customers and you could even go back to times when we launched Scarlett Hill, for example. Our customers were writing, tell us -- not in writing, post on social media that Mr. Price is looking after and they're now going into makeup and then also all those things that Antoinette said, service stations and when's this coming and when's the liquor store coming. So amazing following, and it's in the hearts and minds of South Africans. So -- but that's been built up over many, many years. I'm feeling right now that Power Fashion or the Power brand is on the very early stages of building up a similar cult following. It can probably translate into other things, but that will be part of our thought process going forward, too. But I think between, particularly, and it's not -- it's paying all due respect to the other brands that we've got in the table. But I think the Mr Price and Power, when you're thinking massive scalability over the long term, I think we've got 2 absolute gems there. Okay. So I'm just going to then leave you with this. That's the current and that's the medium terms in terms of what's going to contribute to our sales growth between the existing business organic, which is Kids and Cellular and the acquired business. So it doesn't -- sorry, acquired businesses. So it doesn't include any further investments or areas. So it's unknown businesses. And then it shows you split between growth in the core, how -- what we have to do to accelerate growth in Kids and Cellular and then acquiring on the acquired businesses and delivering value and what the priorities are there. So that's what I said, that I wasn't going to repeat all that detail. And these slides will be made available to everyone. So if you are missing any detail, you will certainly have access to it. So I think when you start -- you page together all the conversations that have previously happened, clear opportunities in each of our divisions and an improving economic cycle and the fact that through efficiency and reengineering, there's an opportunity. In addition to -- that is not just sales growth, there's also margin opportunity. It starts giving you a sense that it's not one thing that we're betting our future on here. So I think that's very important. And certainly from our perspective, and you've seen in the quality of our team, I've been through a process of the last 2 years reducing my direct reports. In terms of org design, 2 of the big changes we put in there was effectively Don and Clint in the Group Retail Director roles. It's probably a final tweak now and I've touched on where I think those things are going to be and then it's really on to the fulfilling of the vision. And in that regard, Antoinette was describing the I think it was 4 years ago, the process that we went through to start thinking about the market and where the opportunities were. And we're at the very early stages of now thinking about the next wave. So -- and that's exactly what we're going to do. We're going to start with a blank piece of paper, and we'll be going through the opportunities, knowing that there's absolutely limited distraction. We've got a great team in place. The opportunities are really clearly identified that we've got a vision to fulfill. So I'd just like to leave you with that comment and once again, thank everybody for their participation and to my team for the work that they've put into this. I think we've left you with a very clear synopsis of where our future lies.

Great. Thank you.

Okay. So it's open floor for questions. There is a mic going around the room. So happy to open up to a few questions in the room before we go online. Do you want to start, [ Jeanette ]? Just wait for the microphone.

[ Jeanette ] from [ William ] Capital. Maybe just on acquisitions. So I think in the past, you've mentioned like restricted to South Africa, is that still the case that you wouldn't -- that you'd exclude foreign markets? And then maybe just a sense of ticket sizes. What's the max you're willing to look at, if you are considering acquisitions?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I'll hand over to on Antoinette to answer that one. Yes, look, I anticipated this question. And I think we've -- if I reflect back on that first sort of round of research that we did a number of years ago, we didn't sort of preannounce. We didn't get ahead of ourselves and partly because we couldn't because we were in lockdown. But I think the process really worked well. And I think for a management team, we will be quite clear about things that we think strongly about, first, before we start sharing it with the market. So I think we've got to learn from the last process, and I think it was actually -- I think it worked well for us. And as I said a little bit earlier, we're now at the start of the next research phase. So I think it's sort of premature for me to talk about the sort of brief that we've agreed on. And look, I suppose in our future, there's definitely a mix of organic and acquisition. I think it's -- in fact, both. And part of the sort of deliberation of the thought process that we're going through right now is because you acquire a really small business, you might get a lot of the potential growth ahead of you still but you're traditionally inheriting a business that hasn't got infrastructure for that growth. And certainly, the potential of maybe having to delay some of that growth because you've probably got to go through a management process change. So that's -- but if you get that right, and I suppose, Power Fashion is a great example, in fact, changed the entire management team. Now they're well on their way, 29 months of market share gains, that's the real story. But we've had other ones that haven't gone that way. So we're not quite final on our thinking, whether it's acquire a business 100%. Surely, it is working very nicely for us. It's locking in shareholders, engaging with shareholders but we've still got the lion's share of the shareholding, but it's all about retaining current management. So [ such that it would ] carries on working for us the way it has to date. But there is another potential model, and that says is your thought about taking a smaller stake in a bigger company. As we do that, we didn't have to then start thinking about, well, what does that mean? What is -- what size of company? We haven't applied our minds to that yet. And what is that stake relative to the growth that lies ahead of that business? So you do know that accretion is like very important to us because you're just really substituting cash returns for a couple of percent more. That's really not going to get us to the -- to our ambition either. So we're not quite sure on where that's going to land. But I think the deliberation between 100% small and a smaller sake of a bigger business. And then relative to that, well, how do you now think of what stake is that, how we're going to fund it, and what debt levels are we interested in taking on if it goes into debt, if we're going to debt for it. So yes. So I think it's pretty much the process has started to get into play. But I think we'll wait for the right opportunity to start sharing our thinking at the appropriate time.

So the last 5 years have obviously been incredibly tough from a macro point of view. You haven't made it easy for us to understand how the 2019 business has performed over the last 5 years versus the add-ons. And I appreciate their core and a lot of the growth comes in. So could you help us sort of frame what the margin compression has been like in the core business, assuming things rebound because that frames the opportunity versus how much is the mix effect from the new businesses? I don't know if you're willing to share that. And then there was quite a big delta on the acquired businesses and the medium-term targets on that chart. It's pretty exciting stuff. Can you just frame in our mind what do you think medium-term target is? And just -- am I right in saying it's like 3 or 4x on sales relative to where we are now? Is that the right way to think about that chart on the black bit?

Look, I'm not going to comment on the specific numbers in each of those categories. I think and let me just deal with the question on the acquisitions first. I think, by and large, and I'm talking in aggregate, and I don't have the numbers at the top of my head, what growth is without the acquisitions. But I think the way things are trending at the moment, I think 2 out of the 3 are really working for us. So we showed the ZAR 977 million operating profit. The revenue is added to us to our business. But for me, the -- if you just go back and you think about the process that we had for each of those businesses. In Power Fashion, we actually had a seller who we knew was exiting. So we are prepared for that. But -- and I'm just going to openly share our learnings during this process as well. I think what we underestimated at the time was the control that, that person had in the business, and therefore, the strength of the management team to make decisions in the absence of that strong figure being around. And when that person wasn't there, our teams struggle to make decisions, and that's since the change that we've had. We've got Studio 88, which I spoke about, which the current management team all still there. That's going ahead very nicely. And I'm talking about relationships, and I'm talking about performance. To me, the disappointment has been Yuppiechef. I think it's a great little business. We acquired it for the right reasons and had acquired it again because it looks after sort of a nice place in our portfolio. But I think we were effectively let down by a management team that I think had sort of grown up in a very small entrepreneurial business and couldn't quite make the step to fit into a larger corporate in the plans that we had. And as a result of taking over that team and with a particular style, we also then -- when the founders left, appoint someone internally to keep that team intact, to keep -- to sort of soften the gap between a small entrepreneurial business and a corporate like ourselves. And that didn't work either. So I think we're on the right path now. You all met Mark Hill. A lot of the opportunities in Yuppiechef relate to product and planning. And because it's not quite at the level that we need, we can't really be in a position to accelerate store growth right now. So I think that side of the business, obviously, added to our overall operations very nicely. But at the same time, as much as it's been a positive, we've had some things going the other way in the rest of the business. Over the last, I would say, a couple of years, Miladys has struggled a bit. Sheet Street has struggled, probably the most because of the -- I think as customers struggled financially. And I suppose, together with home, there was just a lot of sort of movement around in that sector. Mr Price Apparel went through a dip and it was around that period that we spoke about that [indiscernible] not being in place, the disruption from ERP and so that took a dip but that was back quite nicely this year, and I'm feeling actually really confident about that business. Money actually performed very well through the cycle. I'm not unhappy with that business at all. So I'm not giving the absolutes in terms of what you call compression, but there are a lot of moving parts in the last couple of years with a lot of disruption. So we tended to focus on what are the opportunities lying ahead. Some businesses, we've actually got a soft base now. And I think the picture that we're trying to paint that is there's opportunities, but also doesn't necessarily mean that all businesses are going to get back to the place that they were before. Of course, we're going to try very hard, but I think we need to be realistic when -- especially I suppose, in the homeware sector and the impact that it's had on someone like Sheet Street, I think to get back to whether we would be a big challenge.

Just to follow up from Dave's question. Just with regards to your acquisitions. I mean, if you back out the margin there, it's sort of 9%, then thereabouts, whereas your core business is probably closer to about 16%. Does that gap ever close between the two? Or where could we see those acquisitions deliver? I mean, is it a 10%, 11%, 12% margin? I assume a lot of the makeup of the margin of Studio 88. So I guess, what initiatives are within that Studio 88 business to get that margin higher?

Yes. Look, I think -- so I'm not going to give targeted guidance for acquisitions per se. So it would have to fall into that broad sort of sector position that we had. I don't expect the acquisitions to get to the same operating margin as our existing businesses. I think that we are stretched too far. And we haven't modeled it yet because we haven't been through an integration layer yet. So the opportunities in Studio 88, I think were actually covered by Don in his presentation. It was continue doing well on the brand side of things, but making sure we've got opportunities in brands that are only sold by Studio 88 exclusive to us, and making sure we do a better job in private label at higher margins and store growth is a huge opportunity there, too. The opportunity that comes with leverage depends on what -- where we set towards the supply chain, for example, and supply chain and so we have had some benefit on margins by Studio 88 being introduced to some of our suppliers. But the other side of things is what happens to transport and the whole logistics side of things as well. So Don and his team are currently working with the Studio 88 guys to sort of unpack exactly what their benefit is, but that will be another potential improvement to margin. Don, is there anything that you think we left at? Yes.

And just one more question for me, just with regards to acquisitions. Is that going to be limited to groups that are perhaps -- or companies that are perhaps on a strong footing? Or could there be certain companies that you'd consider that are maybe fix me-ups in terms of maybe evolving to a better margin?

Look, so I said that I had -- or I could foresee in the near future, capacity once some of the things that we are working on are structurally sorted out. But what I really don't plan to do with my capacity is start spending it on a fix up. It's just too negative, and we've got better opportunities to seek out. So in fact, and we have published our criteria somewhere before on that issue when we lost it, but it doesn't involve fix ups. And in fact, we stayed away from those in the past as well.

Let's move to some online questions. To just -- with regards to merchandise trends, so Don, maybe just to start with this one. "The trends in fashion have become short-lived and especially with social media viral trends where consumers could rush to purchase viral items. How is your sourcing buying process being adopted to reflect these changes in light of your processes described this morning?" That [ Satiya ] from [ MAB Capital. ]

Thanks, Matt. Yes, I think it's what I showed on the slide earlier, is that our supply chain, our current trade processes and our merchandise processes, the thing that's -- that underscores all of those is agility. And so while we might have called a trend for a future season, we're not necessarily locked in because as you monitor all the inputs that I shared, social media, current trade, we're able to react accordingly. And because we don't own the factories, and we've got the agility in the supply chain, we're able to be very agile. So that stood us in good stead up until this point. And it will stand us in good stead as things continue to change fashion as an ongoing changing world. And all of our processes are structured in a way for us to be agile that allow us to move with the times. So the trend that you're talking about now is no difference to changes in trends over time.

Thanks, Don. While we have you, and another question from [indiscernible], just relating to Power divisions. "Does Power Fashion not benefit more when economic conditions are tough, i.e., when retailers have access to excess inventory? As South Africa's economy recovers, will supply become an issue since the majority is sourced locally?"

I think in the value space, certainly for Mr Price and Power Fashion will be the same. They'll benefit from when times get tough when at the bottom of the cycle because customers are looking for value. But when times get good as well and there's more disposable income, they benefit from that as well. So good times and bad times and Mr Price has proven that in their model and so Power Fashion is no different. In terms of the opportunistic stock. The vast majority of our opportunistic stock actually comes from international sources, and so we're not exposed from South Africa's economy improving in that regard. And in fact, as the scale of Power Fashion grows, it gives us access to inventories that we wouldn't be able to take as a smaller retailer because there's a lot of parcels of stock out there that are large that we can access as a smaller retailer. And then probably, the final point to note as well is that it's not always just opportunistic stock in the form of finished product, but often we find excess fabrics that we can get at really rock-bottom pricing and that we will purchase and convert it into finished product ourselves. So yes, there's definitely no negative exposure in terms of South Africa's economy improving.

Thanks, Don. Thanks, [ Satiya ]. I see that you have sent through a few other questions, but we'll come back to online in a minute or two. If we could take a few more questions from the room.

Mark, maybe just you've highlighted throughout the day, quite a few, there's one or 2 business units where there's GP margin potential to improve. You've mentioned operational leverage quite a few times. But it does seem as if you look at the group guidance that you guys are giving that from an operating margin point of view, you're already in the middle of that guidance. So it almost seems as if that group guidance is conservative or kind of soft, given some of the individual pictures that you've been painting for the different divisions.

No, look, I think it's a good observation. I did say that a, I think we're generally a conservative management team. And when you look at the buildup of our strategic planning process and the timing of that and then obviously, the timing of releasing the margin guidance that we've given, let's face it. It is in a negative environment. And although we only reported in June, these numbers we looked at relative to information that was, I suppose, available and surface through our strat planning process that emanated sometime earlier than that. And it's in a bad cycle. So I think we're going to stick to those targets right now, but we look at them continually. I think at the appropriate time where we think guidance has been soft, and therefore, we need to revise, I think we'd be foolish not to because then we're just shooting ourselves in the foot, but I also don't want to get ahead of it and start posting things out there that haven't been well thought through, haven't been through a formal process. And by that, I mean through the divisions, due process, I don't want to come onto the helicopter view and just drop in targets until we've actually built them up.

Paul?

Yes. Paul Steegers, Nedbank. So historically, Mr Price had one of the highest return on invested capitals in the retail sector. Obviously, the economy has been poor, but you've also done the acquisitions that we know about, which have lower returns at the moment. You've given some metrics on store openings going forward, seems pretty robust with phenomenal paybacks, 2 years max and high returns, as I can see. If the economy improves as we all hope, why do you want to make more acquisitions? I mean, are there any burning categories that you really think will add to the group now because otherwise, you should just open stores with those returns and improve because -- I mean, unless you think you can get an acquisition that makes 25% post-tax return on invested capital then go for it, but I think it's unlikely.

Yes. Thanks for the question. I think it's a case of, I think there's room for both. And although we're probably quite bullish on space because of our model and because of the reach that we've got in the store model, that I think we can do that and look for growth through acquisition. So I suppose when you're looking at your ROICs and what the target does deliver, it's wholly dependent on how you can scale that business over time because if you can get it at a good value and you can then -- you still got lots of runway, then you're back in the category that we've got, well, which is just more stores at really good returns. So I think there's 2 ways to an end result. And I think we are guided by our vision. So we do want to scale more, leverage central cost and infrastructure more. And I think we're now at the place where we actually got the capacity to do that.

So just before we go to your question, do you mind if we just do 2 online questions, just to give the audience here a chance. Nick Webster from HSBC. Nick, I think we've been through the question on acquisitions. So just moving back into merchandise process, maybe just to start with you, Clinton. Don, chip in. "You talked about global retail trips. Do you have any particular partnerships or companies you liaise with, or can you expand in a bit more detail around how you manage the process on those trips?"

Yes. We don't liaise with any of the international partners. It's more to go and examine trend. So what it will do is it will confirm what our trend team is showing us, and it will give us a good idea of how big the trend is being called. So whether it be color or patent or fabrication, they're more confirmation trips. And we go to a wide variety of stores so that we get good overlap on where the trend is going, but certainly not collaboration with any individual retailer.

You want to add to that, Don?

Yes. It's -- there's also not one destination, and that's why we said global means we'll go to -- they have different countries and different destinations and different retailers that they would look at relative to Ladies and relative to Kids. And even within a border category like Ladies, there's different destinations, countries, retailers that we would look at for a junior customer relative to a more moderate customer as well. So it's not a one-size-fits-all approach.

Don, while you have the mic, just back to a question from [ Satiya ], around Studio 88. 7% private label is quite low, do you have any target on what this could grow to over time?

No, we don't have any specific targets. Suffice to say that we do see it, as we said, as an opportunity. And it's not just the private label. It's also the exclusive brands as well that obviously deliver superior margins because we're not competing with other retailers on those. We don't have any specific targets to say that now.

Sa'ad?

Just quickly, is there anything that's keeping you awake at night, your divisional team, going into the next year, that you're worried about?

Just Liziwe and her need to become a CEO. Yes. No, look, I think certainly as the head of the business, there's a lot that fills our minds when we're not in the detail. I think they really relate to org design and filling gaps and capabilities and culture and all that kind of stuff, which we really covered today. I think we're in a really good place. I think there's some skills that we can add and some positions that I've covered, and I think we're also pretty hopeful that the economy is going to improve, and there's going to be no hiccups from the GNU and all that kind of stuff. So I think we're all feeling a bit confident, but I think we also need to see it play out first. So to the extent that there's a talked about recovery and it doesn't materialize, then I think that's one thing. But I think at the same time, well then it talks to the research that we're doing to find more growth other ways. So it's probably that. I think from internally, is there anything else that's causing a problem for us? Nothing really springs to mind. So I really think it's about -- and it's me as the leader that I have good faith that I've got the right team in place to deliver all the things that we need to deliver, to have the capacity to take advantage of the opportunities. And when there is an opportunity that it's well thought through, well modeled, well considered and therefore, we're placing the right bet. So I guess that then leaves open. Well, where is this next growth going to come from. So right now, it's a black hole. But I think one thing we do quite well is we think forward with architecture in mind. What will this -- where will the shape come from? Where will the opportunity arise and we've got to align the process that we've got to unearth that. And I'm fairly confident we'll do it.

Just one more question. On the exclusive brands, is there any risk that you could lose those relationships or brands to a competitor? And how long do your contracts or agreements last?

There's always risk. But at the end of the day, why would a brand want you to keep their brand with a retail group? They want it performing and they want it growing? And that's what's happening in the business. So it would be an illogical move for the brands to want to do that, and it hasn't happened yet. And so that's not something that's keeping us awake at night. Yes. So what is the second question? That's it.

[ Ahtumile ]?

Just a quick one for me on Power Fashion. I think I mean it was done phenomenally well. And if you can just -- I mean just simplify it for us why it's doing so well? I mean, I think when you did the acquisition in 2021 or 2022, you speak to the other retail CEOs and CFOs, and they said it was a really horrible acquisition. And then now we look 2 years later, it's a really good acquisition and everyone wishes that they had bought Power. So if you can just simplify for us, I mean, why is that business doing so well? And what's driving that double-digit top line growth we continue to see?

It's quite a ridiculous comment that if you're not in the detail and haven't done DD yourself to throw a dirty comment like that around. And I'm not saying it's from you, it's from -- for a minute, but it's a comment that was out there. But look, it was never a bad buy. We did DD. We thought it had huge legs because when you consider South Africa and the consumers and the value space that it was in, and you also study overseas who's done well in the value space. To us, the opportunity was absolutely clear. What we couldn't do was take advantage of the opportunity soon enough because Roger had to change his team, that was the catalyst that then opened all the opportunities that we're speaking about now. So I think one thing you know about our group, we don't throw stones unless we know the detail and we're in the know. So as a result, we will disregard comments from others that are throwing stones.

Well, it's definitely not from me, Mark. And then just on core apparel, I mean, at the risk of running a sample size of one, a lot of people are saying, I mean, they're seeing quite good improvements from the core apparel business over the last 6 to 9 months, 12 months. I mean, the product that is coming through there. If you can just talk about some of the -- like more tangible stuff. And I mean, just the sustainability because if you are bearish on core apparel, you can say it's just base effects. And as soon as you're all -- roll through those top line growth will come down materially. So if you could just help us a bit more, understanding what's really happening there as well and why it's doing so well?

The honest answer is that there's nothing significant that's shifted. The blip that we had was the spike and load shedding that we didn't have power to trade, we didn't have backup power and the ERP changes. Those are 2 significant things that caused that -- it was about a year or so of market share losses. Prior to that, just post-COVID, that division had gained over ZAR 1 billion in market, in fact, it was a lot more than that. And now in the past 12 months or so as we've got over that ERP hurdle and the load shedding hurdle, it's back on to its old winning ways as well, close to ZAR 1 billion market share gains and -- it's just doing what it does. That's the model. So nothing shifted. It's just doing what it's always done. But you've kind of got to just remove that blip of the ERP and the load shedding.

Yes, thanks. I think there's probably one thing I would just want to add to that and that with all this disruption, it also wasn't so much what we were doing per se versus what was going down in the competition. So we've also been through a phase of quite a few competitors, and in fact, there's a bit of a market thing in general of through this disruption being totally overstocked. And as a result, the market is decimated for quite some time on them liquidating that stock. So as that happened, and of course, it's hopeful that these kind of things never repeat, and I'm sure they're hoping the same because they don't have to damage their own margins. But you can just picture that higher prices being severely discounted to manage stock in a very severe way. Actually, brought prices closer to ours in some cases. So that was the third thing in addition to what Don said. But -- and I also think at the time when we are sort of going through that underperformance, call it, underperformance. I think that we are quite clear in communicating to the market that, "Guys there's nothing wrong with our merchandise offer." But these are the factors, and with David, I think it was David, actually commented some 6 months ago that, "Mark, you're looking so confident now, what's happening here?" And it is because the guidance that we had given to the market played out in the way that it did. And yes, so look, there are some base effects. There's no doubt about that. We're in a market that's very tight at the moment. There's a [ sleight ] for market share. But I'd rather be backing the horse that's been gaining market share and has got the following and all the brand recognition and the things that we've spoken about, I think that you can't question the power of that brand and what it means to consumers. So yes, I think the business is in a really good place.

Yes, a question from the room. Darren, do you mind just using the mic, so we can just get the online people to listen, thanks.

Just 2 questions. The first one, if you could elaborate a little bit on 300 [indiscernible] stores that have opened over a period and what brands they were. And then in terms of your target of being the -- I don't know how you define it, but the main retailer in Africa. What are you -- the largest, what do you measure that on?

So I'll start with the competitors that have rolled stores post COVID. We've seen [ Pip Home ] open a number of stores. But more importantly, some of the competitors that, as I said, were traditionally apparel retailers have started putting homeware into the space in their stores. So of course, that feeds the RLC. It's less about -- if you take an example of one that's got a national footprint, it's got 300 or 400 stores, and they're now putting homeware in, it's another 300 or 400 doors that made available, albeit with a smaller component of homeware. So that's happened across 2 retailers around the country. And then, of course, there are new emerging players in the market. So although they're not in the RLC, when you take a business like Mr Price Home, that's with the widest offer in a particular category. As soon as a new player comes into the market, the chances are they going to cannibalize home more because they've got a wider offer than the competitor that sits in the RLC.

Yes, in terms of the vision of being the most valuable retailer that is really looking at market cap and it was market cap there, therefore, essentially South African businesses. That's the answer to that. And it is in the food and drug and the general retail index.

Ya'eesh you got a question? Do you want to grab the mic there from Darren?

Ya'eesh again. Just a quick one with regards to how you've perhaps prepared as a business for what could perhaps be a strong festive season just considering the consumer liquidity events that have started from about the 1st of September. From a stock point of view, how have you prepared? Especially considering the current backdrop, where trend growth is probably anywhere between 2% or 3%. So have you prepared knowing that?

Yes. Look, obviously, in the planning ahead of seasonal well ahead, we make sales calls that we think are appropriate at the time. that then gets into our normal sort of ordering process. So I suppose, I think if I'm reading the question correctly, it's a tight market, but there's 2 parts and other things coming into it, how big could festive get. So all I can say is we think we've made an appropriate call. But in that appropriate call, we haven't now gone and placed more orders because we think there's a windfall coming in 2-part, okay? So I think we all think there is something coming and the early numbers do indicate that. But then just what a wonderful opportunity to sort out stock turn and clearances and all those kind of things. And we've got -- retailers rarely run out of stock. I think the last time I remember running out of stock was when we came out of hard lockdown and we had stores that had literally nothing in them. I think we'll have definitely have the stock to trade. I think certainly in fact, I was chatting to [indiscernible] this morning. In the last couple of weeks, strangely, and we don't really have the answer to it at this stage is that the stock is flowing through the port. So I mean, [indiscernible], we're about to close off at the end of September. So we'll have to consider how that affects the stock at the end of December. But what a fantastic potential risk mitigant as well that, in fact, it looks like we haven't got any problems of stock being at stores at festive, it looks like that's really going to happen. So if there is a trade up and there's opportunity coming and consumers get into a more sort of confident head space, then helped by the port and also, I guess, just the call that we made [ summer ], I think we should be in a good place. In making those calls, sure, you guys didn't really go into that process because that's another detailed process all on its own. But you do go into the product opportunities and the underrepresentation and all that kind of stuff. So even if the economy is bad, you're still betting on gaining share in areas above others. So we certainly didn't make a call that was reflective of very poor retail environment. I think a bit bolder than that.

Thanks, Mark. Do you want to add, anyone to add, Don?

Maybe just to add that, as Mark said, we haven't gone and built a -- we haven't gone to build our sales call on the 2-part system. Our sales calls were actually built before the 2-part system. But one of the things that we went through earlier is our trading agility and because 50% of our stock is procured locally, and through [indiscernible], we are able to trade in season as well. So if demand does start to creep up beyond what we've called, we know that we can trade that. It's what we do well, and we set up to trade into that.

Just acknowledging [indiscernible] question on transit port issues, but also international shipping routes. We will deal with that in more detail tomorrow from [ Banner ]. So if we can park that question, put tomorrow and [ Banner ] should answer that through the presentation. Guys, we've probably got about 5 minutes left. Are there any more questions in the room? There's nothing more coming through online and to last couple of opportunities. Okay. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today and to our audience online. I appreciate that you haven't had the chance to be with us in person. So thank you for staying on for the day.