Omnia Holdings Limited (OMN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Presentation] Good morning, everybody. I'm hoping you can hear me loud and clear. Good morning to our shareholders. Good morning to our stakeholders, our Board and our staff and management that are on this call. It's a proud and pleasing moment for me to share with you our year-end results and thanks for making the time to be with us. I'm going to share with you a few thoughts on our ESG strategies and how we've performed in that regard. And then I'm going to move through to our business update. Stephan, our Financial Director, will talk through our financial results in a bit more detail, and then we will look at the future and how we're thinking about things and what we're looking at for the future coming years. I just want to start off by saying it's with deep regret and sadness that we report that we've had 2 fatalities in our business in the last financial year, one in Sasolburg and the other, unfortunately, on the dangerous roads that we all travel on. And our hearts go out to the families, the loved ones and all of our people that were saddened by this -- by these events. Our business is deeply focused on safety. Safety is embedded in our business, and we take the learnings and this incidence extremely seriously. Having said that though, our RCR scores have improved. All of our people and our management continuously look at lead indicators, look at learnings from the lead indicators that we analyze around safety. Besides RCRs and safety, we look at first aid incidents and we look at our environmental scores. Pleasing to report that in the current financial period, we have had no major environmental incidents. You've seen us provide a chunk of extra disclosure on other ESG matters that we consider, so we've been measuring and getting better at hazardous waste and how we reuse and dispose of that. We've also been focusing heavily on reducing our carbon emissions. In the current financial year, we've had an uptick in carbon emissions, and that was due to certain changes we made with our catalytic converter in our EnviNOx system. That has now been sorted out, and our emissions will go back to the lower levels that you've seen in the prior year. We also focus and look at water and the efficiency of water in our plants. You will read further on in our deck that we mentioned a reverse osmosis plant that we've built in Sasolburg, which will increase the utilization of recycled water. We try and measure that, we try and improve that, and you will see that all of our stuff -- all of our measurement points have improved. I'm not going to go into all of the detail, but the amount of recycled water being used, the efficiency of water per tonne. And then finally, the level of energy we're using in our plant is also something that we've been focusing on and reducing and being more efficient with it. You will see later on in our deck, we talk about an investment in a solar plant at Sasolburg. And really, we manage the use of solar energy, steam energy, self-generation energy to ensure that we limit the impact of disruption caused by the utility provider in South Africa. We're able to self-generate as much as 40% energy in our plants ourselves. ESG is a key part of our strategy. So I think why don't I start off by just talking about what we measure in our plants. What we're particularly proud of is how ESG is underpinned in the value proposition in our businesses. So in our Agriculture business, you all would have heard us speak about the Nutriology concept. Our teams, our agronomists, our agriculture folks are focused on being efficient with water, macro and micronutrients. Our humates business, our microbials and kelp business are all focused on enhancing the efficacy of the water and the nutrients that's put onto these crops. And what we're able to prove and show our farmers is the enhanced yield we can deliver. What you can see is what we do in agriculture is actually underpinned with a very, very strong focus on ESG. Similarly, in our Mining business, we've mentioned before that we use recycled used oil. We reprocess that. It's good for the environment. It's good for small businesses around the communities, around those mines. And it actually provides us with a more stable emulsion that works better in reactive ground, and it's good for the environment. There's a few other initiatives that I've raised there. I think what is pleasing for me is that our Chemicals, our Mining and our Agriculture business have a number of products, services and strategies that are based on very, very sound ESG principles. We have won 3 awards in the current financial period, the first being in Indonesia, a good -- from the Indonesian government, a good practice award in terms of our mining practices. We've also won the CAIA Responsible Care Award, BME business won that. And finally, the Best Sustainable Diversified Group in Africa from CFI. We're particularly pleased about this focus, and we will continue to focus on doing what's right for the environment, doing what's right for communities and doing what's right in business overall. We've set some targets, and I think it's important that all businesses have some longer-term targets in ESG. And we've shared these with you before and said, overall, what we're wanting to do is actually improve our energy usage and efficiency, improve our water usage and efficiency and actually reduce our carbon emissions. And I think not only do we want to do that for our own plants and our own processing production facilities, we also want to do that for our customers and we want our products and our services to actually enhance the world we live in. So if I can move on to the business update. And I think just before I start that, let me say that this is a particularly humbling and great set of results that we deliver as the Omnia business yet again. When I step back and I look at the journey we've been on over the last few years, I'm particularly proud of the Omnia team that's been able to deliver such great results in a volatile, in a disruptive, in a rising commodity cycle and in an environment where everybody needed to do things differently. Yet again, the Omnia team has demonstrated their agility, they've demonstrated their commitment and they've demonstrated their discipline to do what we committed to do, whether that be capital allocation, whether that be margin enhancement, whether that be cash generation or whether that be doing what's right for the environment and the societies we operate in. Having said that though, the macro environment has provided a number of challenges for us. And in those challenges, we as Omnia have found the opportunities for ourselves. Let's start off talking a little bit about the global environment. We've seen the impact of Russia and Ukraine, firstly, on governments and countries focusing on food security and actually being very concerned about getting agriculture inputs. That's driven a higher demand globally. It's driven -- and that demand is still continuing in the next financial period. It's driven a number of uncertainties around the supply logistics. So while there's a higher demand, we saw disruption in ports, container shortages, supply chain logistic shortages. So that created additional challenges to actually supply the inputs and the products to our farmers and our mines. And yet again, our agriculture teams and our explosives teams are focused on the end customer, focused on the demand and actually ensured we've been able to supply our customers, whether they be mining or agriculture customers. We've also seen a sharp increase in commodity prices towards the tail end of the year. Let me remind all of our shareholders that we have a very long working capital cycle. So Omnia buys feedstock like ammonia and other inputs fairly well in advance. So we have -- we anticipate these cycles. We produce and we purchase based on demand that we see in the market. So this rising commodity prices has impacted us in the tail end of the year. It has impacted our revenue. It has impacted our working capital. And I'll talk a little bit through that just now. Obviously, locally, we've seen more disruption. So for all of us that live and work in SADC, we've seen social political issues that's disrupted supply chains. We've seen road disruptions, rail disruptions, port disruptions. And added to that, we have the challenge of instability around utilities, which is electricity and water. We also sadly have seen what's happened in KZN. That province has had a number of difficulties, whether it's a social political issues of last year and then the floods, which we've seen this year. Through all of that, we've protected our people, we protected our products and our plants, and we've done what we could do to help those communities. Clearly, we hope for stability in that region. A number of the ports are located there, Richards Bay and the Durban port, which is key for the infrastructure and the logistics that's needed across the country. So having said all of that, you hear me speak about a fairly negative and volatile macro, support coming through from commodity prices, which we will talk a bit about later. But overall, Omnia, which you saw last year and the year before, performing well in an environment that requires us to change and to deliver agilely from a supply chain manufacturing and demand perspective. So just talking a little bit deeper about the commodity prices. And we put on a chart here which actually talks to the ammonia and the urea price for almost a decade. And what you can see here is we've been through a period of fairly low average prices. We're now in a period of high prices, a higher volatility, which you see coming in at the tail end. That has impacted our working capital. It has impacted our revenue, which we'll talk to you about a little bit just now. And we do foresee that at some point, these prices will normalize. However, if they normalize, they might not normalize all the way to the lower average we've seen in 2018, 2019, 2020. Going back to prior years 2012 to 2016, you can see those average prices were slightly higher. And maybe we can talk a little bit about this further on, and we'll show you how this has impacted our business and how we thought about it from a balance sheet perspective going forward. So our story and our flight plan is -- it's really proud to show you that we set out 3 years ago to stabilize, fix and grow our business. And over that period, we've stuck very disciplined to that program. We focused on reducing our noncore asset base, and you see this year as disinvesting from Umongo. You saw us disinvesting from Oro a year ago. You see good cash generation coming through the business, good operating margin and ultimately resulting in increases on our capital and our equity. We still have a business that at year-end was ungeared with a very, very strong cash position and balance sheet. And I'll talk a little bit about later about how we thought about that and how we thought about the dividend declaration. However, the story and the flight plan is incredibly pleasing. What we're reminding you of is we said we still have noncore assets. We're reminding you of where we will invest and I'll come to that in the closing. And I think what we're still proud of is that although we've made huge strides in operating margin and return on capital previously invested, there's still a lot more to come. There's still more we can do to produce more from our plants, to increase our margins and to deliver more from capital previously invested. And you'll see that coming through. I think I really just want to compliment the management team and the folks at Omnia for this disciplined execution. And we see it coming through a number of the metrics that we follow and watch on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. How did we go about doing this was really our operating model. And today, yet again with different issues in the macro, we see how the synergizing of our supply chain, our manufacturer and our demand from agriculture and mining has really enabled Omnia to diversify, to think about when it produces fertilizer, when it produces explosives, when it sells on a wholesale or a trade basis and how it manages its overall balance sheet, working capital and margins. And yet again, you see all the businesses working together, improving operating efficiencies, growing the customer base and all the metrics going in the right direction. So a very pleasing outcome underpinned with a clear operating model. There's work to be done. So I think what you'll know about me that we've never ever fully arrived. There's always more we can do. We believe there's more value we can unlock from our shared services. There are still businesses that can work better together. And over the coming years, you will see us do more to increase our margin by having our businesses work together, synergize and leverage some of our core skills and core plants more effectively. So let's get to the real story, which is the financial highlights, an incredibly proud slide to put up yet again. Our revenue, up 30% to ZAR 21.4 billion. Our operating profit, excluding Zim, up almost 80% to ZAR 1.7 billion. Our blended margin up significantly to 8.2%. Our profit after tax also up. Our EBITDA up to ZAR 2.5 billion. Our headline earnings per share, and I'm probably not going to go through all of them, also significantly up. Our cash position incredibly solid at year-end ZAR 2.4 billion of cash on our balance sheet, ungeared, a great position to be in a rising commodity cycle. That's allowed us to have our balance sheet work harder for ourselves. And this year, which we told you we would do last year, we've deployed more money into inventory and stock to prepare for our farmers, to prepare for our miners -- mines, to have security of supply, and also it allowed us to be very strong during this rising commodity cycle. Broadly, we've deployed an extra ZAR 1 billion into inventories in the current financial period while still maintaining such a strong cash position. And you will see in the detail how we were able to do that. Strong net asset value. I think Stephan will talk a little bit later about how we've converted over the last 3 years a large chunk of intangibles from Auto and Umongo into cash and how we've strengthened the core of our balance sheet and the foundation of our balance sheet. And yet again, the Board has declared an ordinary, an ordinary dividend of ZAR 2.75 a share and a special dividend of ZAR 5.25 a share. I will talk a little bit later on how we thought about that and how we got to that result. So I think a really exciting chart and something that we're extremely proud of at Omnia. So I'm going to go into a few of the metrics that we've been watching for the last few years and just talk through that. Firstly, EBITDA, a nice growth in EBITDA. If you take out discontinued operations and hyperinflation, our EBITDA has improved by 57%, up to 2 point -- just under ZAR 2.5 billion, another great performance from an EBITDA perspective. Operating margin. This is another metric that we as a management team look at fairly carefully. And what we've tried to do here again is split out the discontinued operations and split out hyperinflation. And 2 key highlights here is, one, our gross margin has gone up from 21.5% to 22.7%, so an uptick in gross margin. And overall, our operating profit has increased by 123%, ZAR 952 million if you strip out hyperinflation and discontinued operations, really a great performance from a profit perspective. Stephan will talk through both the discontinued operation adjustments and the hyperinflation adjustments in his section of the pack. The next metrics that we look at from a performance perspective is our margins. All business units have increased their margins. The Agriculture blended margin overall has gone up to 10.9%, a great performance in the Agriculture business, supported by good agronomy conditions, supported by the agility of our supply chain and our manufacturing teams, mapping the demand that's needed from both agriculture and explosives. We also have seen the strong demand for wholesale explosive products with all of the supply chain disruption. And our team, where possible, met that demand. Our supply chain agility, which allowed us to buy ammonia both from the local producer and also from the offshore market, put us in a good position with our own rail wagons to have supply and to meet the demand for agriculture products, explosives products via BME and wholesale sales that the year demanded. We saw strong growth in our biological products, specifically in Brazil. And obviously, which we mentioned at half year, the fixed-term contract in Zambia was not as profitable as we like it to be, so that's brought our result down a bit. From a Mining perspective, the Mining business went through a bit of change last year. We've changed some of the leadership, and we refocused that business on margin and the customer. And we saw a nice uptick in the margins, still not where we'd like it to be, and there's still more to come from a mining perspective. The mining sector was impacted by the inclement weather. So the heavy rains obviously caused the open pit mines to flood. And while that's good for agriculture, that has a negative impact in the mining sector. And I think the international part of our Mining business, while we've secured some good new business in Canada, we're doing well in Indonesia, it's still been slow to execute on that due to the COVID restrictions as one country goes into -- comes out of a lockdown, another one goes into a lockdown. So there's still a lot of value we can unlock from our mining international business going forward. From a Protea perspective, I've been particularly pleased with that business. That business has performed well. Some very nice consistency coming through there, ZAR 142 million of operating profit, margin going up. That business has refocused itself on customer segments, on specialty products. It's changed the mix of products that we've sold, good cost containment, good capital, working capital management. We know that Protea has got a great brand. So a nice consistency coming there. And what I've said before in our focus is to manage that business to model and to make sure that, that business delivers the returns we want. Obviously, what that's led to is a nice increase in our blended margin at the group to 8.2%. We continue to manage capital tightly and well, and I'm going to go through a few slides on that. We promised you that we will clean up the balance sheet. We disposed of Umongo last year to Azelis. We did that at a good price for us and a good price for Azelis. That brought in a chunk of cash and also improved our cash balance at year-end. And we continue to watch and manage our working capital, our capital expenses and our free cash flow tightly. And you'll see us talk about that in future slides. I guess I've said earlier on that we've still got more to come from our current invested assets. And we wanted to give you a sense of capacities that we've still got in our plants. And maybe I'll start on the far right. We've told you that we've invested in additional capacity in our Australian plant. So we've broadly got 40% to 50% capacity available there to sell that off. We've seen some nice good sales from Vietnam in the last few months. It has been -- it's been slow in India due to all the disruptions and the port delays. We've set up an office in the U.S., and we will start distributing there a little bit more firmer going forward. And we've just registered an office in the EU to move all of our registrations into one space. So I think we are incredibly positive about our humates business. We've got a great product, great trials. We can demonstrate the delivery of that product. And our team is doing a good job to sell off all that capacity. We will continue to expand that business, and we'll continue to invest both in distribution and manufacturing in that business. We also commissioned in the current year a CALP processing plant, which will enhance the margin in that business. And I think what we've said before is that there's a huge demand globally for biologicals and greener products in the agriculture space. We believe this is a great asset we own. You will see later when Stephan speaks, good margins, good GPs, good operating margin and great market growth that can come from it. I guess the plants on the left to that, the ANCN, OmniCal and PGAN are largely explosives plants. And you see that we can -- we've still got spare capacity there. So we can run those plants harder, which will be good for our returns, good for our margins and good for our future profits. And then 3 more core plants, the nitric acid plants, the nitrophos plant and the granulators have also got capacity. And our teams have been focusing hard on optimizing. I think what I can tell you is we're not just focusing on increasing capacity, we're focusing on maximizing the value out of these plants and the integration of them. We know that our nitrophos plant provides us with an incredible cheaper source of phosphates. We've seen that the price of the phosphate rock has not correlated directly to the price of phosphates generally. So that plant stands us in good stead and there's an immense amount of value we can continue to unlock out of that plant in coming months and years. So working capital, this is a big story. So I'm going to slow down a little bit here. Firstly, to say that we have -- we still continue to manage working capital well. The teams have done an incredible job in a rising commodity cycle to manage working capital the way we have. There were 2 things that we did in the current year. The first is we increased stock levels. We increased that for 2 reasons. One, the prices went up, so the commodity prices went up, and it resulted in the stock prices going up. But we also increased volumes and capacity where we saw the need and the demand growing from our customer base. That was managed very, very carefully with our teams. In some instances, it was raw feedstock. In other instances, it was stock that was held all the way down at the customer, the mining house or the farmer. The second thing our teams did in the current environment was to introduce supply chain financing and supply chain optimization. That's resulted in an increase in our payables by almost ZAR 1 billion. We've done that fairly carefully and in a considered way. And we think this is a really great outcome from a working capital perspective. You can see with the rising commodity price and the increase in stock levels our working capital level has not gone back to the extreme highs that we saw in prior years. If I just pause for one more second, a lot of you ask -- will ask us about our volumes. And we have got a slide further down in the deck that actually gives you a sense of how our revenue has moved, how much of our revenue is priced and how much of our revenue is volumes. And you will see that all of our businesses, the Agriculture business, the Mining business and the Chemicals business actually increased volumes, so our revenue was not just driven by commodity prices. Similarly, our stock levels are not just driven by commodity prices. It's driven by us increasing some of our stock holdings in certain strategic parts of that value chain. From a capital management perspective, yet again, our teams managed capital well. I know we keep pointing towards a 5 -- between a ZAR 500 million and ZAR 600 million capital budget, and we keep not hitting that. We keep spending less. Some of that is timing. So in the current environment, our head of manufacturing optimizes the shuts and optimizes when capital gets spent. So I think what we're learning more and more is that the capital itself doesn't have a financial cycle, it has a working cycle. So sometimes you bring a plant down and we spend the money, or we bring a plant down and we say we'll spend the money a little bit later or do something, do a bigger shut at a different time. So it's not linear per year. So yet again, we had good capital management. We invested in some mobile units that have gone to Canada. We've got a second emulsion plant built in Canada and a detonator plant going to Canada. We've secured some good new business there that we talk about in our deck. We've also invested in a solar project in Sasolburg. And we continue to spend capital on maintenance. We continue to spend capital on expanding our -- and protecting our core and then on growing our core. Those are the 3 areas. In terms of growth capital, at this stage, it's all organic. So we've deployed some capital into our Canada JV and some into our Indonesian JV. There's more to put in there, and we've planned for that. And we hope in the coming periods, we will find something more substantial in the Australian market on the explosive side and look at that quite carefully. So yet again from a capital perspective, good capital management and resulting in very disciplined cash generation. That leads me then to the cash slide. And what you can see here is the cash generated from operations, ZAR 1.9 billion cash paid for tax and CapEx and the disposal from Umongo coming in on top of that and then the dividend from last year that went out, which puts us in a very strong cash position of ZAR 2.4 billion at year-end. I'm going to hand over to Stephan to talk about the income statement, balance sheet and the margins a little bit. And then I will come back and talk about the outlook and the dividend. Thanks. Stephan?

Thank you, Seelan, and good afternoon to our shareholders and stakeholders. Maybe just before we jump into the numbers, the first topic I want to tackle is the top-of-mind issue, does the size matter? Maybe just a bit of feedback towards the end of last year at half year. At our previous discussion, we've actually submitted our objection to SARS that has been seeing through. We've also made the ZAR 207 million payment early December to SARS. And then development since then, early this year, SARS just asked for additional information, which the team has provided for, and we've sent all of that through to SARS. And we expect to hear from SARS around about the end of September at our half year results. Maybe just a bit of a process going forward. Once SARS responds towards the end of September, Omnia may elect then to object. That will be via the legal route. It's likely to be referred to the ADR or the Alternative Dispute Resolution process. That takes about 90 days, whereby SARS and us can settle the matter. In the event that we can't settle the matter, then we will follow the legal course after the 90 days. We will in parallel with that also execute on the MAP or the Mutual Agreed Procedure, and that's just due to the double tax agreements between South Africa and the SADC countries. Also just the disposal of Umongo and the effect on our financial results. So first of all, Umongo gets disclosed as a discontinued operations. The effective date was the end of January. So Umongo gets consolidated into our numbers up until the end of January. Then basically, the effect on our income statement, Umongo gets disclosed on a one liner asset discontinued operations and the prior year numbers get restated for that. From a balance sheet point of view, the prior year numbers are fully baked in. And in the current year, the numbers were making up until the end of January, and then it's excluded from that point forward. From a cash flow point of view, the numbers get included on a line-by-line basis. Then if I jump into the details. From a revenue point of view, as Seelan mentioned, our revenue is up 30% to ZAR 21.4 billion. And that's on the back of strong volume growth in our Agri and Mining business, 7% across our Agri business and 9% across our Mining business. And that resulted in a 27% increase in our gross profit, up to ZAR 4.6 billion. Seelan also quickly touched on the operating margins and the effect that Zim and the hyperinflation effect on the gross profit margins. If we strip out Zimbabwe, the operating -- the gross profit margins increased to 22.7% versus 21.5% in the prior period. From an expenses point of view, distribution and admin expenses were well managed. We see an increase in the expenses. That's due to the increase in volumes as well as a couple of ones of that I can mention specifically from an insurance point of view. There was repair and maintenance. And we spoke about the increase in utilities as well as logistic charges. Then from other operating and expenses point of view, a big driver is the foreign currency movements where a big chunk of that is unrealized. In the prior year, there was a gain sitting in other operating income, which run around this year to a ForEx loss. The number in the other operating expenses for the year is ZAR 120 million ForEx loss, whereby ZAR 73 million of that is unrealized. Then if I move us further down the income statement, the movements from a monetary gain and loss from a Zim perspective gets disclosed separately. And that all then gets baked into operating profit with a strong performance for the year up by 40% to ZAR 1.6 billion. The operating margin up to 7.4% versus 6.9%. Previously adjusted -- if we adjusted for Zimbabwe and the flows in Zimbabwe, the operating margin was up to 8.2% versus 4.9%. Then if I move us further down the income statement from a finance point of view, a significant reduction in our net finance expense, and that's twofold. First of all, in the prior year or prior period, we extinguished our debt, which doesn't come through in the current year. And the cost coming through the finance line in the current year is mostly associated with the interest charges that we accrue for on the SARS matter, and the relevant lease liabilities. From an income tax point of view, there was an [indiscernible] income tax. From an effective tax rate, that's a more normalized rate sitting at 28% for the current year. And the big driver was due to the sales loss in South Africa businesses that was utilized during the current year based on the strong performance of the business. And then from a discontinued operations point of view in the current year, the net effect of the number is ZAR 260 million relating to a Umongo versus the prior year of ZAR 776 million whereby ZAR 50 million related to Umongo and the balance related to Oro-Agri. Then if I move us forward into a bit more detail, more specifically in South Africa, a really great performance by our South African business. operating margin up from 6.3% to 11.3% in the current year equates to ZAR 1 billion on a fully baked in basis from an agriculture point of view. And that was due to positive agronomic conditions and the higher commodity prices as Seelan mentioned out. Also the strong volume growth, the 7% volume growth that we've mentioned. And maybe just for our shareholders in the Agriculture SA segment, we also -- that includes our manufacturing component and the production efficiencies that comes through as well as the supply chain optimization gets baked into the agri SA number. From an international point of view, if I can split it into 2. Firstly, the SADC region. There was increased volumes and margins in the SADC region. But as Seelan previously mentioned, the Zambian contract negatively affected the margin. From an international point of view, we saw higher sales volumes out of Brazil due to expanded the distribution footprint and exports to the surrounding regions in South America. From an Australian point of view, on the local front, there was increased volumes but the negativity on the Australian side was the additional freight costs and the shortage of shipping from the Australian region due to the hard lockdowns, which affected the margin negatively. Then if I move us forward from a mining point of view, also from Mining RSI, a really strong performance by the team, revenue up 43% and operating profit up 164%, resulting in our operating margin increase from 4.5% to 8.3%. And that was on the back on the increased volumes as well as the strong commodity prices. Seelan also quickly touched on the inclement weather in the SADC region, which limited some of the growth in our SA business. If I look at the international side of our business from a mining point of view, revenue increased by 17% and operating profit increased by 30%, also an increase in operating margins from 6.4% to 7.1%, again, on the back of strong volume growth, supported by strong ammonia price. We already touched on the inclement weather in the SADC region. That also affect our Indonesian business. And we spoke about the West Africa political environment that actually remains unchanged at the moment. There's also from a chemicals point of view, there's a strong demand for our metallurgical chemicals and services into the copper belt. Then from a chemicals point of view, if the shareholders maybe just cross the mine back to half year, we're really proud about the second half performance of our Chemical business even though revenue was up only 2%. Operating profit was up 41%, also increase in operating margins from 3.5% up to 4.8%. That was due to the focus on the key strategic business sector as well as the disciplined management of cost. Then if I move us forward to our balance sheet. If I can start off on the top with our assets, maybe key 3 things to note. During the last 2 years due to the disposal of from Umongo as well as Oro Agri, there was a significant reduction in our intangible assets. And similar to the working capital discussion, there was an increase in inventories, which is up 29%, driven by higher volumes as well as the commodity prices and also a good increase in our cash position, up from ZAR 1.8 billion to ZAR 2.5 billion. From a liabilities point of view, not much to speak about. The key driver there is our trade and other payables, which increased 20%, similar to the inventories on the back of volumes as well as the high commodity prices, which was supported by the introduction of supply chain finance. Net working capital on a fully baked-in basis increased by 9% from ZAR 3 billion to ZAR 3.3 billion. And then maybe just to close off from a cash point of view, if I can start off with cash from operations. Strong earnings growth throughout all our businesses, which were supported by the lower finance charges. We saw an increase in net working capital by just over ZAR 0.5 billion versus movement from the prior -- movement in the current period. Also income tax increased significantly. That resulted from the ZAR 100 million to the ZAR 500 million. That includes the ZAR 200 million payment to SARS in the first week in December. Then cash flow from investing activities, the 2 points to notice. There was a ZAR 2.2 billion due to the disposal of Oro Agri in the prior period versus the ZAR 1 billion disposal in the current period of Umongo. And then cash flow from financing activities, the one thing to note is the settlement of the debt in the prior period versus the payment of the dividend in the current period. That already results into a strong cash position of ZAR 2.4 billion at the end of our financial period. I want just hand it over to Seelan.

Thanks. Thanks, Stephan. I think that's -- listening again to these numbers, it's really a humbling story to see the performance of our business over the last few years. It's just such a such a great set of numbers. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to share a few thoughts about the future. We're going to talk a bit about capital allocation and margin guidance, and then we will go into some Q&A. So if I move to the next slide, I think what we've said and what we've started to focus our business on our teams on is really the impact we make. I think we know that businesses with a profound purpose, businesses where the purpose and the future is fully embedded in its culture and its people are really those that are sustainable into the long term. And we said that we want to continue on our journey to be a diversified international sustainable group of businesses. We want to continue to invest in greener technologies. We want to continue to invest in innovation. And we want to continue to make a profound impact on life, whether that is in the agriculture space or whether that is in the mining space where we have such a big role to play in job creation and mineral extraction across the continent. We took that a little bit further and said there's 7 pursuits or 7 things we're focusing on. The first is to make sure that we are safe, zero harm. We want to do more for the environment. We want to be a safer business to be part of. And we want to focus our future capital allocation, our current operations on doing what's right from an ESG perspective. The second is to continue to expand and grow our current innovative R&D offerings. So most of you know, we've got some great solutions in agriculture from an agri tech perspective where we can help farmers enhance yield. We have farms that are geomapped with software and tractors and risk-based solutions. We also have fairly unique detonators and emulsion technology. So we will continue to invest in those. We will continue to put brands behind our innovation, our laboratories and these products and services. I think we will defend and grow our home base. And often, companies battle to be proud about that. But I think we want to proudly defend and grow our home base. We know that our current businesses and operations can deliver a lot more in terms of a return on capital to us so we'll continue to protect and defend them. And then I think we will continue to expand internationally. So we've said before that we want to grow our Agribio businesses globally, and we want to grow our Mining business globally. So we'll continue to invest in those 2 businesses and expand them internationally. We will explore value-accretive organic and inorganic opportunities. And I think it talks to our disciplined capital allocation. As part of that, we'll also consider which assets are not delivering the returns we want, and we will consider exiting those or partnering those off. So we will continue to optimize our capital allocation and increase our return for shareholders. We fundamentally believe there's still value on the table in terms of our organizational effectiveness and efficiency. Our shared services function can be built out further. We can optimize our supply chain, our finance, our HR and various other shared processes across our group. In doing all of this, we will still be disciplined about capital management. And I think you'll see again this year that the way we thought about capital, the way we thought about shareholder distribution, the way we thought about our balance sheet is very, very consistent to the way we did it last year. So growth will come from 2 places for me over the next coming years. The first is there's still operational improvements. We've changed our margin guidance slightly. So we've increased it in certain areas, but we believe there's still a huge amount of value we can unlock from our existing operations. So growth will come from the existing core in the next few years. And then growth will come from our expansion. And our expansion initiatives are in 2 areas: it's in the agri international space, in the bioagrispace, which is our microbials, our humates and our kelp business. And secondly, it will come from our BME international business. And there you know we've selected certain markets, Canada, Indonesia, Australia. And we are focusing on partnerships and growing our presence in those markets. I think the areas where we have secured new business already like in Canada and the areas like Australia where we are searching for a partner or something bigger to do. I think while we're doing that, we will consider other opportunities to allocate capital. However, we will be disciplined. We will only allocate capital where the returns makes sense and where they're close to our core, agriculture and mining, and they strengthen our existing businesses. We will continue to disinvest from businesses that do not meet our required return on capital or do not meet our strategic intent. And you saw us do that by disinvesting from Umongo in the current period. I guess a question on a number of your minds would be, well, where to Seelan and Stephan from a margin guidance perspective. And what we tried to do here is, firstly, we took the eraser and erased the medium-term guidance chart and said, "Look, we now want our businesses to be firmly in the more long-term guidance." But we've said, "Let's produce revised medium-term targets." And in essence, we said, "We'd like to see our Agriculture business be between 9% and 12%, our Mining business be between 10% and 12% and our Chemicals business be between 6% and 8%." Bear in mind now, these are new revised medium-term targets. Clearly, our Mining business is not in that range currently. I'm confident that the team and the actions in place will get us into that range in the coming periods. And obviously, our Agriculture business is already in that range. And as we continue to grow our AgriBio business and our international businesses, you will see that increase further. Let me try and unpack the dividend decision a little bit. So this is very similar to the chart we've been putting out for the last few years. And in essence, a couple of principles. The first one is that we don't intend being in an ungeared position into the long term. And we want our balance sheet to work hard. We want our balance sheet to work hard to generate returns for our shareholders, but we want that to be done in a considered and a risk-based process. And I think what you see in the current period as deploying money into stock, it's a bit -- you've got to look at the stock line rather than the working capital. But you see us deploying money into inventories and stock to force our balance sheet to work harder and unlock the value that we see in our agri and our mining sector. The second principle we said is that we will maintain a conservative balance sheet. So we want a strong balance sheet. We don't want to take on the risk that we saw in 2018, 2019 levels. So we continue to maintain a conservative balance sheet. We continue to look at the macro environment, look at the opportunities out there for us to grow in terms of organic and inorganic opportunities, and that results in us getting to a view on distribution. When the Board thought about the distribution, we said let's not hoard cash on our balance sheet, which we said last year as well. And let's consider both an ordinary and a special dividend. We use the cover ratio for our ordinary dividend. We were fairly conservative with that. Obviously, in a rising commodity cycle, you deploy more cash into working capital. So we declared an ordinary dividend of ZAR 2.75 a share and a special dividend of ZAR 5.25 a share. We will continue to deploy capital into working capital. We will continue to deploy capital into organic and inorganic opportunities as they come about. And I think keeping a strong balance sheet allows us great optionality to unlock value from an organic and inorganic perspective as these opportunities come across and as we explore them and believe they're the right ones. We often talk internally about the opportunities we explored and we walk away from them. And we use that as a learning to define our process more robustly going forward. I think capital allocation is one of the things that is critical for businesses to get right. And it's probably one of the things that cause a lot of demise when you allocate capital badly. It's a discipline to allocate capital. It's a discipline to take capital away, to disallocate capital as well. And I think what you're seeing is that our team has been able to take capital away, to sell a business like Oro Agri to take capital away and disinvest or disinvest from Oro and disinvest from Umongo. And we will continue to look at all of our assets. You will see in the current period where we've got unutilized warehouses, unutilized factories, we will disinvest from those and take those assets off our balance sheet and convert them convert them to cash. So that's our story around capital. I think we continue to manage capital carefully. We continue to use a risk-based approach. And we continue to drive a conservative balance sheet. So I guess I'm sure some of you will say, "Well, why not another ZAR 2 more dividend or another ZAR 2 less dividend?" But at the end of the day, it's what we said last year, we will have a conservative balance sheet. We will do what is right. We will do what we promise and this is where the Board has landed in terms of a capital structure. We will continue to optimize. We will continue to look at our cash balances on an annual basis, the way Stephan has been doing it. And we will continue to think about how we distribute further to shareholders, whether that be ordinary, special or share buybacks in the coming years, years ahead. So if I try and move to a bit of a summary. What you're seeing is Omnia continues to be an attractive investor proposition. We will manage capital well and increase our returns. We've got a fairly focused business model now that's delivering what it's intended to deliver. Good operational excellence. You see our distinctive competitive advantage. We talk about new contracts secured in Canada, new contracts secured in Africa. You see us increase volumes in our Agriculture business and our Mining business. So great competitive advantage in our teams, and we'll continue to invest in that. And also with us operating in these primary sectors, which have a high level of resilience during downturns. The next slide gives a little bit more detail about this, and I'm not going to go into it. We've spoken at length about this in various areas. But it just talked to you about where we will invest. So we will continue to invest in expanding BME International and our Agri International business. And we will continue to invest in our R&D and technologies across our group. Our people are the folks that make the difference, so we will continue to invest in our people. We will continue to invest in their abilities to service our customers. A great thing that's come through in the current period is the refocusing on our customer, and that's driven the top line. It's driven the volumes. It's driven the product mix in Protea. It's driven the product mix in agriculture. And it shows you as that operating model gets more and more embedded around operational excellence and customer focus, the benefits start being unlocked in a fairly unique way. Just in conclusion, I think we can proudly state that we've delivered an incredible set of numbers. It's humbling for me to look at the chart again and see all the green arrows. And to thank the Omnia teams, to thank all of you for the confidence you showed in our business over the years to walk with us through the dark days. And it's humbling to see how the business continues to deliver. We have a strong balance sheet. We've used that to increase our stock positions. We've used that to provide us with strong optionality to grow organically and inorganically. You see that we've got a very focused strategy, operating model and plans. What we say we're going to go out and do, we go out and do it. There's still significant value to be unlocked in our current core business. And as our operating margins continue to increase, our return on capital from previously invested capital will increase. We've got some very focused opportunities that we're exploring in the agriculture and the mining markets internationally, and we'll continue to explore that. We will do that in a very disciplined and focused manner. And our focus is now solely on long-term value creation and growth. And that will be underpinned by safety. It will be underpinned by doing what's right from a sustainability perspective. And it will be underpinned by the great people in the Omnia team that will continue to make this positive difference and impact in the markets we operate. I want to pause and end there. Maybe just one other statement to make. You would have noticed today that we announced the retirement of our Chairman, Mr. Ralph Havenstein. I think I'd like to personally thank him for his contribution, his commitment, his dedication, his leadership, his judgment over the last number of years. Ralph steered the company through a very difficult time when we had spiraling debt and needed to execute on the rights issue. He's been a pillar of support and strength for me during this period. And I acknowledge and honor him for what he's done for Omnia over the years. And I thank him for his contribution on behalf of the Board and the management team and wish him well in his retirement. At the same time, we're pleased to announce Mrs. Tina Eboka as our Chairperson Designate. Tina has been on the Board for 6 years. She has been part of the change and the turnaround as well. And it's really pleasing to have someone of her caliber on our board that can pick up the leadership role. It demonstrates our thoughtful board succession planning. And it also is extremely encouraging to know that this business of ours, which will be 70 years next year, now has a female chairperson, but also a black female chairperson that's come from South Africa. So I'm really pleased to welcome Tina into the leadership helm of the company, and we look forward to working with over the coming years to grow and continue the success of the Omnia Group. So I'll pause there, and I'll open up for questions and engagements. Thank you.

Thank you, Seelan. The first question comes from [indiscernible] from SBG Securities. The group has divested from noncore assets. Can we expect any acquisitions in the future? And the second question, is there any ideal EBITDA mix going forward?

Thanks for that. I think the first question around noncore assets, we said that we will be fairly disciplined around capital allocation and our core businesses are agriculture and mining. We said that our chemical assets are less core, and both the chemical assets that we had, which was Umongo and Protea, we will run and manage them to a model and focus on increasing their margins and their cash generation. In terms of acquisitions, yes, we are -- we have explored a number of opportunities. Those opportunities we have been looking at have been in the AgriBio space, in the mining international space. And we will -- we are not under any pressure to dispose of any assets or to buy any asset. We will do that in a very considered careful manner because that's at the heart of our capital allocation and ensuring that its value accretive to shareholders. Did I miss a part of the question?

It was just what the ideal EBITDA mix is going forward.

Ideal EBITDA mix, goodness. And I think let me maybe talk about the geographical mix firstly. I think we would like a bigger Agriculture International business and a bigger BME Mining business. If I look out into the horizon, it would be great if we could have 30% or 40% of our earnings coming from those 2 businesses. And that would be something, that would be great to achieve.

Thank you, Seelan. Perhaps a related question. [John Peach from MGS]. Well done to all. Any intention to grow BME, the Mining division into the African segment, such as strategic countries, Zambia, DRC, Namibia, et cetera?

Thanks for that. Obviously, BME is already in a number of the African countries already. BME is probably one of the premier explosives businesses in these territories. BME's competitive advantage has really been its ability to mobilize in difficult territories, reactive ground, complex mining environments. So BME is in all of these territories already. I think our ambition is to continue to grow in those areas. We've mentioned in our results that we've recontracted or secured the largest part of our big contract in Zambia. And we continue -- we've also renewed contract that we've had in West Africa for 3 years. So we continue to grow and focus on Africa. It's a core market for us. I think more than that, it actually leverages our strength from our production facilities in Sasolburg. A number of our products can be taken up north to a certain point that's feasible. So we will continue to invest and grow in Africa. Having said that, Africa comes with a lot of complexity. It comes with sociopolitical issues. It comes with all of us changing presidents quite regularly, changing ruling parties quite regularly, port disruptions, road disruptions so we will also consider the risk and the value that we can unlock in these different territories. But as a group, both agriculture and mining, we're committed to Africa.

Thank you, Seelan. A question from Joseph Tucker, InterGlobe Financial Solutions. He has asked if you will have any more possible asset sales.

I think my response there is there's always unutilized little assets that Stephan and the team will be looking at. And you see I think even in the current period, we sold some land or we sold some warehouses. I think our core businesses are Agriculture and Mining. And I think what we have said is that our Chemicals business is less core. Having said that, there's absolutely no need for us to sell Protea. There's -- Protea's been performing well. But should the right partner arrive and it makes sense for Protea and us, we would consider that. At this stage, we don't have any major asset for sale. We're focusing on running our business. We're focusing on increasing the returns. However, we have said Protea is less core than agriculture and mining. When we deploy capital, we'll deploy capital in Agriculture and Mining.

Thank you, Seelan. The next question comes from Rajay Ambekar of Excelsia Capital. Please comment on the post-March trading, volumes, impact of prices on demand, the impact on working capital, logistical issues and planting expectations.

Great. Yes, thanks for that. I think we -- the commodity price rise happened towards the latter part of our financial year last year. And it's important to note that Omnia's working capital cycle, it straddles a financial year and it's a fairly long business cycle. So we procure well in advance. We secure shipments. We secure feedstock in advance. And we produce based on orders and demand. So I think the rising commodity prices, we go into the year experiencing that in its full force now. So the current trading, we continue to see elevated commodity price cycle. We continue to see strong demand. We continue to see uncertainty of supply. So farmers and mines want to know that they've got supply. And I think at this point, if you're asking me, "Seelan, as the rising commodity prices led now to demand destruction, are you seeing farmers getting to a point where they're not going to plant because the prices are so high?" My sense is we're not there yet, and that hasn't happened. We've seen in the last few weeks a little bit of softening on prices. And so we are still optimistic about the next few months. Agronomy conditions are good. Moisture conditions are good. We expect a good plant. The weathermen and ladies are telling us that there's going to be a good rainy season coming. For those of you who live in Johannesburg, you can see there's a cold winter. We've seen that a cold winter is followed by a wet summer. And I'm not -- I can't tell you about the weather, but it all looks like the stars are aligning for a good plant again. And obviously, added to that is there's a lot of uncertainty around food security and a high demand for governments across the world to source inputs for agriculture, to source inputs for mining and ensure food security for the world.

Thank you, Seelan. Perhaps 2 related questions. The first one from Herbert Kharivhe of Investec Securities. How much of your ammonia requirements do you source locally and internationally? If the Russia-Ukraine situation does not improve, is there a scenario where local supply is not enough to support volumes?

Thanks. So I guess ammonia, and we've spoken extensively about this, we source ammonia locally and globally. And we have been doing that for the past number of years. Broadly, we, over the last, call it, 3 to 5 years, we've been sourcing more ammonia from the global markets purely because the local supplier has had operational challenges. Now from the local supplier, we're able to get ammonia via pipeline, which is obviously easy and effective and simpler. From the global markets, we get ammonia, we buy it from large global traders. We don't get it from Russia. And that comes on the ocean. It gets unloaded in Richards Bay, and it gets railed up to Sasolburg via our rail wagons. What's great about that is those rail wagons are owned by Omnia. They're maintained by Omnia. So they're fully functional. We are still dependent on Transnet to pull them around. And we're dependent on the rail and the copper and all of those good things to work. I suppose the next question you're going to ask me is how do we balance that? We -- our head of supply chain balances the purchasing locally and globally, and we ensure that there's an adequate supply of ammonia going forward. Are we concerned if either the local or the global supply has issues? We've managed that all through COVID and all through the ports disruptions. So it's what we do for a living. In terms of pricing, it's similar. So we've been Whether you buy locally, whether you buy globally, it's the same pricing that we get. And I think it's great to have this agility of supply. Having said that, we also have the choice or we have a diversification option of using that ammonia either for fertilizer, for explosives or for wholesale sales into fertilizer or explosives. So it gives us a really great flexibility to manage rising commodity prices, falling commodity prices and shortage of demand and supply through different cycles. It's what our teams have been doing excellently over the last few years, and you see it in the financial results. There's no way we can produce these sort of results without an agile supply chain manufacturing area and demand management.

Thank you, Seelan. You've partly answered the question from [Wesley Gardner from Risk and Asset Management]. He wants to get some color on the procurement of feedstock, which I believe you've provided. But he also asked what is the average lag in procurement across the different inputs.

Yes. I think to go into the detail of the average prices, we won't do that. But maybe let's just build it out a little bit. We spoke about our source of nitrogen, which we get from ammonia. We also have flexibility around our -- potassium source is that right?

[indiscernible] .

Our phosphate source which we can either buy from a local producer or we could import or we can get it from our nitrophosphate plant and there we can use phosphate rock either from locally or from another static source. So I think if you look at all of the macro and micro inputs, we've been focusing heavily on diversification of supply to make sure that we've got optionality should 1 supplier or 1 logistics network block up that we have got flexibility from different sources. We've also thought about where we store and how much feedstock we hold. And in some instances, we've stored a little bit more. We've done some strategic changes in our plant from a holding perspective to build additional dams to store different product to allow us to be more competitive in the busy time of the planting cycle.

Thank you, Seelan. Could you -- this question comes from Daniel King at Counterpoint Asset Management. Could you please comment on the more recent deterioration in the urea ammonia price ratio? And to what extent that impacts your agri margin assumptions, overall margin assumptions and the timing of the impact?

Yes. So when folk look at our business over the decades, one of the key indicators they looked at was the ammonia-urea ratio. And I think that is That is an important ratio to look at. But it is too simplistic to look at that ratio alone. And our supply chain folk and our demand plan is have done an incredible job to demonstrate to us the different factors that our Agriculture business is built on. So let me give you some examples there. I think if you were to say, well, the ratio is out of favor and actually your margin is going to drop. That's too simplistic because it depends on the product mix. It depends on the value-add services. Our agronomists and our teams have worked for years to actually integrate our superior products, ammonium nitrate-based products, into our Agriculture segment. So I'm probably not answering the question directly. Because my belief is that wireless the ammonia-urea ratio is important and does drive some change in buying behavior, the impact is fairly muted on our business compared to the way it was a decade ago because we've got a chunk of other initiatives in place that we are focused on managing our margin. And I guess if you look back over the last 3 years, you'll see that ratio being in and out of our favor and you'll see that we have consistently grown the margin in agriculture through those cycles. And that bears testament to the good work of our agronomists, of our value-added products in ad tech, of the move from traditional NPKs to specialities and liquids and how we think about matching the demand to the supply. So I wouldn't necessarily see it as a drop off in margin or drop off in profitability. I would see it as something that we are -- that we need to watch.

Thank you, Seelan. There are a number of questions related to margins. So I'll just read those out. And if you can just bear with me, I'll try and find them all to lump them together. So the first one from Paul Whitburn of Rosendal Capital. Are the operating margins of BME SA similar to the African margins? That's the first one. Second question from him, what margins do you want to achieve for BME SA and Africa?

Let me maybe answer that because I think -- well, firstly, let me say that the BME margin overall, there's significant legs in that to improve. So we've guided towards BME S.A., we would like to see a 10% margin out of that business. And BME International, we would like to see more than that, probably 12%, maybe plus margin out of the international. So when it blends, it should blend somewhere between 10% and 12%. And that's how we've thought about our margin targets. Overall, I guess if you ask me, we should get higher margins from Africa and higher margins from international. And I've answered it. I think BME Local should get to 10%, and that's how we're running that business and thinking about it.

All right. A related question from [indiscernible] from Eskom Pension and Provident Fund. He asked how sustainable the RSA Mining operating margin of 8.3% and given the pullback in some commodity prices.

Yes. I think our view is the 8.3% is too low. We believe that it should be higher than that. And we've had some changes in the BME team during the course of the year. And if you compare the margin for the first bit to the second bit, you can see the improvement coming through. So we have got targeted projects in BME to actually increase the margin in SA Rather than being concerned of the margin in SA dropping, I think it's more delivering closer to the 10% that we focused on.

Thank you, Seelan. The next question comes from Paul Bosman of Granate Asset Management. Could you please give us a granular breakdown of the agri margin improvement in the SA business? To what extent was it driven by ammonia versus urea price volume improvements and plant efficiencies?

Okay. I think maybe the best way of looking at this, and Stephan can talk through it, this was agri SA is to look maybe at the volume and margin slide in the deck. So I'm not sure if we can flick to that slide. It's -- are we able to go to the slide? Or can we just point to the slide?

We can actually go to the slide.

So we've got a slide in the deck that actually demonstrates per business unit a view of volumes. It's Slide 6 -- 57 in my deck. That's the one. It's Slide 60 on this. It shows you a view. It's crude, but it will give an indication of how the volumes have increased and how the prices have increased per business unit. Obviously, this is very sensitive to product mix and a number of other factors. But overall, what you see is that all the businesses have broadly growing volumes besides Zim where we specifically didn't increase our exposure to Zim. And all the businesses have had -- I'm talking broadly about mining and agriculture have had the commodity price also increase their sales.

Thank you, Seelan. I think you've partly addressed this, but you might want to add some comments around other business segments. But [Kanaya Ajumbe from Invest Securities] has asked how sustainable are your revised margins? What are the key factors you're looking out for to reach or maintain these targets? Please specify for each business.

Yes. I mean we wouldn't put out margin targets if we thought they were not sustainable. So I think if you ask me how sustainable all these targets are, my answer will be we've put these targets out because we have project plans in place to deliver them. We have looked at these margins, and we believe they're sustainable. Our margins, we build -- our margins based on certain commodity price levels up and down. We have been fairly conservative with that. So in our view, these margins are sustainable. Now let's maybe talk business per business. From an agriculture perspective, we are growing our Agriculture International business faster than we will grow our local business. Our Agri International business is a slide Stephan put up where you can see they have operating margins of 20...

23%.

23% versus the local business that's got margins of significantly less than that. So the fastest growing area in our Agriculture segment is the highest margin by a long way. And we've got 40% spare capacity there. We're growing distribution. So as that comes online, you will see our agriculture margin lift. We also in the current period have not delivered the value we want out of our agriculture Zambian business. If that just comes through next year, that margin will lift as well. Let's go to the Mining business. We've said before that we broadly priced our Mining business in South Africa on a 10% margin. So there's some cost synergies that must come through there. There's some efficiency synergies that must come through there. And we've got fairly finite plans for our management team to get RSA up to 10%. Whether we'll get there in the next 3 months or the next 6 months or the next 12 months, I don't think matters much. What matters is that we're on the journey to get there. We've got clear, clear plans to do that. Our mining international business, so that's Africa and the rest of the world, they also have higher margins than 10%. And we see that coming through We've got a new detonator plant going to Canada. We've got new clients coming onboard in Canada. So there as well, some very clear, concise actions. Stephan spoke a bit about Protea. Protea performed a lot better in the second half of the year than the first half of the year. A chunk of actions that we put in place are delivering results. So while it's a smaller business, we also believe there that those margins are sustainable. And all 3 segments, we believe the margins will grow. We are not sitting here telling you that these margins are unsustainable or this is the best we're going to deliver. I've said that before, there's capacity in our plants, the efficiencies we're going to unlock and the return on our currently invested capital will increase over the coming periods.

Thank you, Seelan. A question from Steph Erasmus at Anchor Capital. Are you concerned by the balance of volume growth versus price growth? Is there a risk that we are at peak pricing and, therefore, possibly a downside to revenue given the FY '22 volume growth?

I don't -- I think if there's a risk, and that's why the slide we put up is actually quite telling. Because if there is a reduction in revenue, I don't foresee that correlating 100% directly to a reduction all the way through the income statement. If there is a reduction due to commodity prices, we demonstrate the elasticity of that in the Agriculture segment versus the Mining segment is different. So you see a high elasticity of price in the Agriculture segment than you do in the Explosives segment. So we will immediately reconsider how much fertilizer we produce, how much explosives we produce and how much wholesale product we produce. So I think we've got a lot of levers at our disposal to manage a downturn in commodity price, an upturn in commodity price. And it's what we do continuously, what we work through continuously. Should -- and I don't think it's beyond possibility that commodity prices come down. I mean we've seen a softening in the last few weeks. Does that worry me to the extent that it's going to have a massive impact on our income statement? No, it doesn't. You've seen when revenue and commodity prices have stayed flat, we've grown profit. So we've still got a number of projects underway that will sustain and grow profits in a downturn in the commodity cycle. I think we've got a very astute board member that continues to remind me that revenue is meaningless and profit is very meaningful. So our teams are very focused on operating margin and profit rather than revenue.

Thank you, Seelan. The next question comes from Daniel King at Counterpoint Asset Management. Are you acquiring new customers due to the fertilizer export disruptions from China and Russia. If so, at what scale? And how sticky do you expect this new business to be?

Yes. So that's a brilliant question. We have seen -- we have acquired new customers. And let me say it again, our Head of Sales and marketing keeps telling me that we've got to be very responsible because what we do is -- we've got a very noble purpose, so we've got to be very responsible. So when we saw supply being constrained and we saw the need for a planting season in the Western Cape, we produced additional fertilizer, and we sent it down there for the wheat season. That was additional tonnage and new customers. And we were very responsible in doing that because we knew it was good for the Agriculture segment. I think what I've seen is the supply disruption and uncertainty of supply has brought in new customers in BME and Agriculture and has built new relationships. I think we will see new customers being secured in the current financial year, so FY 2023 due to them not having supply in the prior year and not being customers of Omnia. So those customers will go out on tender in the mining market, and they will reconsider the inputs in the agriculture market after seeing that Omnia has been one of the few companies that were able to supply through a lot of disruption in FY 2022. And I think that is why -- and this is a good lead indicator to future profit and future business. We've been focusing in FY 2022. We've been focusing our teams, on the customers. We've been saying We've got very good executives focusing on supply chain and manufacturing and internal processes. Let's now have good executives focused on the SADC, on the South African market and on the mining markets locally and globally to build those relationships with the customers. We focused on long-term sustainable relationships. I do believe that the disruption we saw last year will cause us to secure new customers in future years because they've seen Omnia's ability to supply in deeply disrupted markets.

Thank you, Seelan. The next question comes from Steph Erasmus at Anchor Capital. How is the onboarding of the new mining customer in South Africa going? Has Omnia been able to meet the requirements of the contract?

It's -- that contract is fully onboarded in the current financial year, and we've been able to meet our requirements. I think there'll always be -- the local market is highly contested. So there'll always be noise in the local market. I think what I've said consistently, Omnia has secured -- it was a lot of noise. Omnia secured those contracts, we've mobilized those contracts. There's been significant disruption last year where Omnia as a group had to supply and assist various other suppliers in the explosives market with product because they ran out. And I think that has entrenched our position with some of these large customers. So I don't have any concerns that those customers are fully mobilized.

The next question comes from [indiscernible] from EPZA. He says well done on the wonderful set of results. Are there any plans for Omnia to invest in your own self-generation electricity units and your various operations with some of the working capital?

Yes. So we've dipped our toe in the water with a 5-megawatt plant that we've built in Sasolburg. We've done that ourselves. Our engineers were quite keen to do it themselves, and we've registered with NERSA and got all that behind us. We've put up solar -- some solar facilities in some of our warehouses. But we will consider that. There's other things we're considering. We want more green ammonia. We're looking at -- we now will start testing some solar forklifts in Sasolburg. So I think this will be a continuous journey of us doing bits and pieces and more each year. We watch the green economy carefully. In Protea, we're investing in some hydro plus technology, which is used in hydrogen fuel cells. So there's various different things we're looking at. And obviously, capital has to be put to the places that it gives the highest return. So in some instances, building our own plant of a specific nature might not be the best utilization of our capital so we think carefully about that.

Thank you, Seelan. The next question comes from Shoaib Vayej of Afena Capital. Are you happy with the disclosed return on equity of 11.2%? If not, what are your plans to drive higher returns?

Well, we would not give margin guidance higher than where we are if we were happy with the return on equity. Clearly, we don't have debt. So we're using a return on equity. We want to work our balance sheet harder, and we're not -- and we're targeting a higher number. So if you model our targeted operating margins, that's how the management team is KPI-ed to deliver a higher return on capital. We're not -- and to give you a sense, I mean, if we're looking at our capital project in South Africa, we'd want a return of between 15% and 25% on a project. If we're looking at a project outside, we'd want a return similar, maybe a little bit less. So our return on projects are much higher than the return on capital. And I think you're going to see that return increasing as our margins increase, as we get more effective with our balance sheet management and as we get more effective with our production capacities and utilization in our plant. So I think I'm happy with the progress we've made over the years, but I don't think any of us believe that this is a position we want to end at. We've got plans in place and our KPI to increase that.

Thank you, Seelan. We only have a few more minutes left for questions. So I'll just wrap it up now with 2 more. [indiscernible] from SBG Securities has asked -- says you mentioned a further ZAR 1 billion investment into inventories in the current period. Does this mean target net working capital turnover or days have been revised?

So in the current period, we show you a working capital investment of, I think, ZAR 400-and-something million. However, the inventory number in the current reporting period has gone up by ZAR 1.15 billion, if I got the number right. We haven't changed the working capital days or the conversion of stock to cash cycle. If anything, our teams have improved that. So we haven't -- if the question is, will the additional ZAR 1 billion that we invested at year-end cause us to have a longer working capital cycle? No, it will not. It is what we invested to be well positioned for the planting and to provide security to our mines in the coming months.

Thank you, Seelan. The last question from Steph Erasmus of Anchor Capital. Please can you unpack your investment into PPE as a function of depreciation? FY '22 depreciation of circa ZAR 650 million compared to a capital investment of ZAR 385 million seems like underinvestment in PPE.

Do you want to talk about that?

Yes, sure. I will pick that up. Thanks, Seelan. I think the way to look at it is to the earlier discussion on capital, in a sense, there's a long cycle as Seelan mentioned with our maintenance capital as well as our expansion capital. So some of it is due to a timing difference that flows into different periods from that perspective. Also, what we need to take into account is that some of our plants are fairly young or new plants, if I can call it that, relating to our nitrophos as well as into our nitric acid plant, which do not require a lot of capital to be spent on them at the moment. I suppose what you also need to look at is the R&D spend that comes through our income statement. In prior periods, I think there was a lot of that capitalized. And there's a prudent management action, specifically on how do we think about allocating that capital versus what gets expensed and what gets allocated from that perspective. From our perspective, we will not staff our plants of any capital. We will invest in our plants where required. So there's definitely not an underinvestment.

Thank you, Stephan. I think that's all we have time for now. If we can close off.

So to all of our shareholders, listeners, Board and staff on the line, thanks for attending this. I think we're particularly proud and humbled by the achievement of the Omnia team, a great set of results, good cash generation and pleasing to be able to reward shareholders that have walked the journey with us. Thanks for your time, and thanks for your interest in our company. Please send us -- we haven't dealt with all the detailed questions, and we'll obviously deal with that over the coming days and weeks as we meet you, so please shout. You can e-mail Stephan or myself, and we will engage further over the coming weeks. Thank you very much.