Omnia Holdings Limited (OMN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Omnia's financial results for the year ended 31st March 2023. Before we start with proceedings, I'd just like to take a short note that in case of emergency, please proceed to the exit on the right of the room and walk through the turnstiles in an orderly fashion onto our parking area, where we've got an assembly point and our safety officers will provide you with further details. I would now like to introduce our Group Executive for SHEQ and Sustainability, Ditebogo Malatsi, to come through and do a safety moment for us.

Good morning, everyone. I think as part of today's safety moment, I'd like to focus on a safety issue that's often slightly overlooked and this is stress. So what we're seeing is that we've got a number of people that are regardless of your social status, regardless of your occupational level, stress can hinder people's judgment, people are anxious, people have depression. And this is leading to safety incidents, both in the work and -- both in the workplace and at home. So as part of Omnia's safety journey, we have a see something, say something, do something message that underlines the way we run our safety programs. And with that said, when you see that someone is struggling with, see that someone is anxious or they're acting out of character, say something, do something, speak to them, reach out to them. There are a number of initiatives internally and externally that are available to support people that are struggling with depression and anxiety. From an internal perspective at Omnia, we've got reality wellness, but I'm aware that a lot of the other corporates also have something similar, for example, ICAS. From external perspective, nationally, we've got the South African Depression and Anxiety Group. It's a toll-free line for people to call. And internationally, because we do operate in more than one country. There is a platform called opencounseling.com. And through this platform, you can get access to hard lines across different countries all over the world. Thank you.

Thank you, [ Di ]. I'd like now like to call our CEO, Seelan Gobalsamy, to present our results.

Thank you, Nerina, and thank you, Ditebogo, for doing that safety moment. For those of you who don't know, safety is one of our core values. And we want to entrench and we'll continue to entrench safety across all of our businesses and all of the geographies we operate in. So firstly, let me welcome all of you. Welcome to all of our shareholders, welcome to the Omnia Board, the Omnia management team, our various stakeholders, banks, auditors, and to all of our staff that are listening in. Thanks for spending the time with us and listening to us talk about how our business has performed in the last financial year, but also where our business is going to in the next few years. Let me start off by saying this is a particularly momentous occasion for us. Omnia celebrates its 70th year of making an impactful difference of innovating, of operating in agriculture, mining and the chemical space and impacting the lives of so many across the African continent, but also across the world. We're proud to be standing here as a management team, custodians of this great company and the journey that this company has been on and the contribution that we make is close to our hearts, and it's something that we believe in the impact that our business makes. And our job is to ensure that our business is placed and well placed to be sustainable for the next 70 years and to grow and to weather some of the challenging environments we have seen in the past year. If I start off and I give you the first line of our results. I think Omnia has delivered an incredibly strong and resilient performance in a very, very challenging market. All of our executives that will talk today will talk to you about how difficult it has been in the past few months and how difficult it has been to operate with the extreme volatility, the extreme inclines and declines that we've seen in commodity prices. But let me move to the next slide and say within that environment, we have been able to improve our safety record, we have been able to improve -- I'm on the wrong slide. We have been able to improve our safety record and also focus heavily on our ESG initiatives. You will hear our executives speak about the underpin of ESG in our businesses and actually ensuring that our businesses are sustainable for the coming decades. We have also continued to progress well on our international expansion. We will talk later about what we've done in Canada, in Indonesia and Australia. And we have delivered incredibly strong cash flows in a very difficult environment. We continue and we've promised disciplined working capital management, and we will show you how we've performed on that -- in that area. But yet again, a great working capital result from our management team. Added to that, that's resulted in a very strong cash position, and we will tell you how we thought about the cash and how we've deployed the cash in this period. So the highlights for us, our revenue is up 25% to just under ZAR 26 billion. Our operating profit up 15% to just under ZAR 2 billion. Our headline earnings up 1% and our ordinary dividend up 36% to ZAR 3.75 per share. Our net cash generated from operations has also been incredibly good in a very volatile market with us generating just over ZAR 1.8 billion for the period we're reporting on. I'm now going to go through our ESG section, and I'm going to ask Tiaan Kotze. Tiaan is our Group Chief Operating Officer, to talk us through the next few slides. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. I'm very proud to be here this morning, celebrating the strong results for 2023, building on what was exceptional in 2022 already. But safety first, let me kick along before. I forget that as well. Safety first, we've seen an improvement in our RCR from 0.021 in 2022 to 0.16. However, within the Agriculture division, we remain at the same levels as before. Our Agriculture division includes our manufacturing operations, which is where we house most of our process safety risk. And we continuously do audits and inspections to identify opportunities to improve the conditions in our infrastructure. In 2 of our units in mining and within the chemical sector, we achieved a 0 RCR for the year, and that's quite pleasing to us. We continue to recognize rate safety as one of the key concerns for our business, and we focus on ways of improving that. And then as Ditebogo mentioned a bit earlier, we recognize that our staff and our business partners are experiencing extreme stresses as a result of the economic and the infrastructure failure conditions and safety that we generally experience. Turning to ESG. The carbon emission levels following the refurbishment of the EnviNox system in last year has continued to improve and as far as renewables are concerned, the commissioning of Sasolburg's 5-megawatt solar plant and the potential 180 megaliter per annum reverse osmosis plant has resulted in significant increases in the consumption of renewables. The plant commissioned in 2023, not only improves our renewable energy generation but will also result in improving reducing the Scope 2 greenhouse gases, that is the [ agreement ]. We continue to collect large volumes of used oil within the -- with the secondary being -- benefit being that for every liter collected with safe potential of 1 million liters of clean water. And we have prioritized investment in generating energy. As you have seen in this year, we continue to invest into 2024. And not only does this help us with the production and the business continuity on our site, but it helps us achieve all our ESG objectives. We're currently installing or have installed at Losberg, at Morwell site in Australia, Dryden and the Sasolburg Phase 2s in production. Further capital will be deployed in the further energy and water efficiency projects. We recognize water is a scarce resource and the availability of clean water for our communities is a basic human right. We recognize our reliance and our responsibility in helping to manage that. With that, we are investing in water management programs. We mentioned the reverse osmosis, we invested this year. And in 2024, we'll be looking to invest in greywater harvesting and further storage capacity. Omnia's a proud history of driving consumption and continuously innovating in the areas of agriculture and mining. In that, we innovate in our core solutions of Nutriology, which results in precision farming. We also focus on precision mining. Recent initiatives that we've launched as we've showcased automated systems, bringing technology to South Africa with a layer of artificial intelligence, which will take precision farming to new levels. We partner globally within the context of mining, chemicals and agriculture to bring technologies to the markets in which we operate. In terms of our social development, CSR initiatives, we focus on the communities in which we operate. And this aligns with our business segments, focusing on 2 brand sectors, education and food security. With the food security, we contribute to the production through our fertilizers and by supporting household and small-scale farmers in agriculture entrepreneurship programs. In the education sector, we invest in science, technology, math education to develop critical skills to be relevant in the fast-evolving global economy. Our CSR aim is to deliver a sustainable impact and partner with credible organizations in this environment. And In terms of our 2030 goals, the goals were set in 2020 based on the 2019 baseline. We've achieved most of the goals that we set for 2030 within 2023. Our focus will be to remain to improve elements. We find the absolute water usage or the absolute measures to be challenging in the environment where we increase our production levels and we will continue to focus on the -- as I mentioned, on the energy and water efficiency measures. Having materially achieved all these objectives will be reviewing together with the new guidelines, the international bodies provide on this matter and our targets for the 2030 within the 2024 financial year. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about ESG.

Thanks, Tiaan. I think 2 things that really makes me proud is the fact that over the last few years, we've attempted to give all of our staff irrespective of their levels in our company a few shares to make all of our staff, shareholders. And what we've done this year is we've set aside money for education. And we've been able to set aside in a very structured program process to help all of our staff with school fees and university fees for their kids, just us doing something to give back. But let me proceed to our results now and give you a short business update. The year we're speaking about has clearly been one of the most significant years in terms of challenges and headwinds that our business faced. Not only has there been significant macro volatility and challenges for us, but there was also significant internal issues that we needed to deal with in the various countries that we operated in. And I'm going to touch on a few as we speak, go through the presentation. I think the biggest for us was really the inclining initially prices of oil, gas and commodities. And then in the second half of the year, which I'll talk to in the next slide, the precipitous decline of commodity prices and how that had impacted our stock and working capital positions. We also saw globally that the Russia-Ukraine conflict created immense volatility and immense supply disruption across various other territories that we operated in. And obviously, we sit with the impacts of inflation and locally, the volatility and movement in the currency. The tail end of the year was really a cocktail of all of those coming together. We also saw, and you know that we've got a large, large operating business in South Africa, and that business was impacted by constrained electricity, disruption in water, disruption in rail and disruption in logistics. And I guess what we're showing you is that all of that resulted in most of our suppliers, most of our competitors and a number of businesses in the markets we operate, declaring force majeure. I think we can proudly stand here today as a management team and tell you that we have been able to supply all of our customers with fertilizer and with explosives. We have taken our incredibly strong balance sheet and use that balance sheet to ensure security of supply. We use the investment we put into our supply chain, our trains, our storage capacity up and downstream. And we were not -- we did not need to declare force majeure. We were able to have the stock in the right spaces and ensure that all of our customers were able to do what they needed to do in the period. I guess the biggest story for us was really this material change in the commodity prices. And what you saw in the first half of the year, whilst commodity prices were volatile, they were still high. The first half of the year is clearly the part of the year where we build up our stock positions. We build up our fertilizer stocks, not only in South Africa but across the continent for the rainy season. And what you saw in the second half of the year is this massive decline in commodity prices. What you also saw is the rains, the rains came a little bit harder and a little bit faster than what we would have expected. And some of our farmers were unable to do what they wanted to do in terms of planting. Some of our opencast mines were flooded. And with notwithstanding all of these challenges, you see a very, very strong and resilient result delivered by our business. Maybe it's just worth noting that the precipitous decline of this nature, we saw last, I think, in 2008, 2009. And at that stage, our company performed very, very differently to the way it did in this reporting period. So I'm very, very proud of what the management team have been able to do through a very disrupted macro and internal micro environment. Having said all of that, we've been on a disciplined path of stating where we're going to. We've put out a [ true ] north for our company and we've been executing on our strategy in a way that has been very focused, very organized and very disciplined. The first thing we needed to do was stabilize our business. So when our boat was in very choppy waters in 2018 and 2019 and things were very uncertain for our company. We put together a plan and we said let's stabilize our business, let's focus on a whole lot of fixes that we need to do. Let's put our business back pointing north towards where it should be going. And I think we can say adequately, we've ticked those boxes. Right now, where we are again is we're renewing various of our capabilities. We're investing in new technologies, we're focusing on our customers and winning in our customer markets. And I think what we're showing in this reporting period is how we've been able to deliver to our customers and actually ensure that they have had security of supply in a very, very disruptive market. We continue to invest in our organizational capacity. So a business that's in 25 countries operating in these various jurisdictions. We need to ensure that we have folks that can focus on those markets, focus on what needs to be delivered to those customers, and there's more we need to do in that space. And I guess what you're seeing now is a lot of execution around our growth. We said there are certain areas we want to invest and grow in. And we will talk a little bit about that later to show you what we've been doing in our explosives business in Canada and Indonesia and also what we've been doing in our core operations in SADC to protect, to conserve and to grow them with all of the issues we face around us. We also said that we will be very prudent about capital allocation and discipline. And when we think about M&A, we will do that in a very structured, organized way, and you see us go about doing that. I guess, what we have delivered is a steady increase in our return on equity. We've got more to do there. But I think great delivery over the last few years, a steady increase in operating profit. And clearly, the operating profit that you're seeing now is being done in a very, very disrupted, challenging environment. So it demonstrates the agility of our teams. It demonstrates the agility of our business units. And lastly, an improvement in our earnings. In terms of how we go about focusing on this execution plan, we've put in a performance underpinned operating model. So all of our business units, all of our MDs, all of our people have got line of sight of what they need to achieve, what they need to go about doing. And to give you a few themes of that, we want to protect and grow our core. Any business operating in the South African context knows that it needs to do a lot more to sustain itself, to ensure uninterrupted supply, to ensure that you can deal with what's happening with the utility providers of electricity and of rail. So we've set aside some manpower. We've set aside some capital to actually focus on that. The second thing is we want to integrate and synergize our SADC businesses. So we've still got a lot of work to do there -- to do things once, to do them in one place, to optimize our costs and to increase our efficiency. We'll talk to you a little bit later about our plants and how they've performed, but there's still an immense amount of value we can unlock from our supply chain, our manufacturer and the demand management. And then I guess, finally, we set out to grow internationally and some good, good execution of that in the last reporting period. So if I get to our salient results, I've mentioned revenue already. Our revenue up largely 25% to just under ZAR 26 billion. Our gross profit up to just over ZAR 5 billion and our operating profit up as well to just under ZAR 2 billion. Our operating margins were under pressure this year with a downturn in the commodity prices and our stock positions. So our operating profit saw a decline at a group level from 8.2% to 7.6%, largely driven by our Agriculture segment. Our net cash position positive. Again, the company was no debt and a ZAR 1.8 billion worth of cash at year-end. Our working capital was also well managed. However, we have -- we did put more money into stock, into both explosives and fertilizer through the planting season and through the year. Our return on equity, as I mentioned before, up to 11.9%. And then all of that's resulted in a ordinary dividend, that's also 35% up to ZAR 3.75 a share. I will talk a little bit further about further capital allocation later in the presentation. What you have seen is over the years, and if we cast our minds back to the last 5 years, a consistent delivery of EBITDA growth through our business. And I think what was particularly interesting for me, looking at the slide on the right-hand side, looking at the graphs, you can see how, towards the tail end of the year, the graphs come down. A few issues that drive that in this particular year, it's the commodity prices, it's the rains that came a little bit too much or too violently. But it's also the month of March and February, the months when we slow our plants down and go into our normal maintenance shuts that also slows our business a little bit. But I guess, overall, what you can see is really great delivery from an EBITDA perspective. That's resulted in strong cash generation by our business. And if we go back a few years, you can see that consistently, we have delivered good cash flows. If I look at FY '21, '22 and '23, the left-hand side of the slide, you can see, whilst we are putting money into working capital, we are still generating positive cash flows and that is testament to the focus on cash in our business, the focus on managing working capital, CapEx and expenses very, very carefully over the last few years. We also have been successful in paying down our debt. There was a time when we had as much as ZAR 6.8 billion worth of debt. And over the last few years, you can see how we've whittled the debt away and also how we have then paid dividends to our shareholders. So if I get into our businesses itself. And I think the backdrop is the most challenging environment that we faced over the last few years. From a group perspective, we saw a sharp declining -- a sharp decline in commodity prices in the second half of the year, which you're seeing in these results. We also saw adverse weather conditions. The weather conditions resulted in lower volumes being used in our agriculture business, but also in our mining business, where a number of open cast mines were flooded. I guess to add to that, there was significant disruption in our customer base and our supplier base. You saw a slowdown in manufacturing activity, you saw a slowdown in mining activity. And you saw a number of farmers consider the high commodity prices and the weather events and change the product mix of what they're planting. That resulted in our team being very active and agile in terms of working capital, in terms of stock positions. And I think an incredible job has been done to work through the stock positions and the working capital in the second half of the year which required us to do things very, very differently. You saw the prices of ammonia and urea and how they declined on the previous slides. We also saw immense disruption. So I'm saying again, repeating the issues around Eskom, Transnet logistics. I think the one thing which talks very much to the heart of what Ditebogo presented here just earlier on, is the social political impacts on our society. So whilst, we all talk about Eskom and maybe the rail issues what you also have is a lot of service delivery disruption. Unfortunately, on the roads, you have unrest. And you -- and we have to do a whole lot more to protect our trucks, to protect our vehicles, to protect our people. And that is probably very quickly becoming a big third challenge in the market we operate in. If I move to our businesses, and if you bear with me, if I could start with the Chemicals business first, I think the Chemicals business also had a tough second half. It saw a declining in the manufacturing sector and had a number of one-off costs that affected the profitability. I think that business can and could have performed a lot better than this. So we saw a decline in profits by ZAR 10 million, whilst margins were held. I think what's great to see is that the business sustain some of the delivery we saw over the last few years, but I think a lot more work needs to be done there for us to not have the recurring items we've had in the current financial year. From a mining segment perspective, our business has performed incredibly well. Margin increase, profit increase, great support from the mining chemicals part of that business. We've commenced blasting in Canada. We've secured new contracts locally on the African continent and globally. In the first half of the year, if you recall, we had a lot of disruption around used oil and the supply chain thereof that normalized a bit in the second half, but that still dragged our earnings down for the entire year. So I think good progress made to deal with some of those supply chain issues we had in the first half. And as I said, real great growth from the Mining Chemicals business. So good performance from our mining sector. In our Agriculture business, unfortunately, the commodity prices in the second half declined steeply, which impacted our gross margins and our operating margins. The volumes were impacted with adverse weather conditions. And I mentioned already that the mix of crops planted changed, which also resulted in impacts on to the -- on our volumes. In essence, that probably were the biggest factors that resulted in the margin decline and that margin declined in filters into the group. On the positive side, our manufacturer and our supply chain and our agriculture teams were incredibly agile to deal with these headwinds. We ensured security of supply. We ensured that in our Zambia business where we had some challenges last year, those challenges will overcome this year. So you'll see when Stephan speaks through the segment, the positivity that came out there. And our Brazil -- our business in Brazil had a very, very strong year and very strong growth. We're still seeing good strong growth in our humates in our business in Australia. And both Stephan and I will touch on that a little bit later. So from an agriculture perspective, what you're seeing is it's slight decrease in margin. And however, a slight increase in profits. If I move on to working capital, and probably one of the most important things that our management team look at and monitor, not on a monthly basis but a weekly basis. I think we've done incredibly well to manage the working capital position in an extreme volatile year. So volatile and high and then extreme decline and a massive fall off in the second half. So our working capital positions, while higher than last year, we're still managed well, broad brush. We've got -- we put probably another ZAR 1 billion into working capital at year-end that we would have not liked to have done. But the way the season played out with the late rains and the security of supply to our mines, we had a few extra 100 million of working capital in West Africa to ensure security of supply there. We had a debtor position in Zambia where that season played out a little bit later than planned. And I think post year-end, what I can tell you is that those positions are well managed. The next part of our delivery is around CapEx and I think yet again very good CapEx management and expense management from a CapEx perspective. Our executives have done a good job there. Sticking within budget some of our CapEx for the current period will be spent in the next period, and that's why we've given more disclosure around if -- the forecast for 2024. And I think what we also wanted you to see is how we're thinking about CapEx. We're setting aside CapEx to protect and grow and preserve our core businesses that generate a lot of cash for us, but we're also setting aside CapEx to expand and grow our international businesses, the explosives and the agri business internationally. And I think Tiaan emphasized how not only are our businesses focused on doing what's right from an ESG perspective but also investing in various ESG and CSI projects. So we've also set aside CapEx to achieve that by enhancing our solar plant by looking at new green technologies in both our mining and our agriculture businesses. If I just step further into capital allocation, so we always told you that we will not maintain a cash positive -- a 0 debt position into perpetuity. So at some point, we will take on some debt. We haven't done that yet. We told you that we will run a conservative balance sheet, and we will be very disciplined about capital allocation. We told you that we will not just go out and spend the money and buy assets at ridiculous PEs. And you can see us demonstrating an immense amount of constraint and discipline in that regard. So we've set some capital aside to protect and invest in our core. We've set some capital aside for our growth initiatives. We still have an ungeared balance sheet at year-end. And what we've then done is put in place an ordinary dividend, which the Board has approved of ZAR 3.75 a share which is 2x EPS. And I guess when we look at our cash available and our cash generated in future periods, we felt that it is prudent to return further cash to shareholders. And today, we've announced that we would seek permission via a general meeting in the next few weeks to get shareholder approval to repurchase up to 10% of our share capital. In the circular, what we do state is that the Board has approved an initial tranche of up to ZAR 0.5 billion to execute on that. So that notice will go out. And I think that vote will happen in the next few weeks. So I'm going to pause there and hand over to Stephan and Stephan will take us through the performance of the business units. The income statement, the balance sheet and cash flow statement. Thanks, Stephan.

Thank you, Seelan, and good morning or good afternoon, everyone, depending on where you are in the world. Now for the exciting part of the presentation, into the numbers. Just before we get to the excitement, let's just quickly deal with the SARS matter. Maybe just a quick update to our shareholders last time when we spoke at half year, is that SARS has ruled on our objection at that time and partially allowed our objection with a nominal reduction in the assessment. Obviously, Omnia has launched our objection to the revised assessment in December. And we also made our intention clear to follow our ADR process. During February, SARS has actually came back to us to set -- they accept that process. Since year-end, we're basically an informal ADR process. Even though the ADR process is set aside 90 days, due to the complexity of the matter, we expect that to take a bit longer than that, but the management team is still fully committed to close that out as quickly as possible. Then jumping into the numbers, as Seelan mentioned, this is an exceptional set of results. If you -- on the back of -- in the prior year, the revenue grew by 30%; in the current year, it grew further 24% in total, up to ZAR 26.5 billion. That was driven by the higher commodity prices, as was mentioned earlier as well as the weaker exchange rate that we've experienced in the current year. Then if you move further down the income statement to the gross profit line, you can see gross profit was up 13%. And as Seelan earlier mentioned, there were several headwinds actually facing the gross profit. As -- when we spoke last time at half year, there was mention about the used oil, specifically on our mining space that affected the half year results of the mining business. And then in the second half, specifically the last quarter in our second half, the sharp decline had a significant impact, mostly around our key commodity inputs [ assets ] in ammonia, which drops by more than 60% in that period. Also, the extreme weather conditions, which affected our agriculture and a mining business, specifically in SADC, South Africa as well as in Zambia. And that -- the sharp drop in commodity prices further resulted in stock adjustment over our year-end specifically in our Agriculture segment. Then if you move further down the income statement, admin and distribution expenses were really well managed, only up by 4% in a very high inflationary environment. And then maybe just to mention, during the year, we also concluded in our [ Zimbabwe ] joint venture, [indiscernible] Chemicals, that was closed out during the year, and that resulted in an additional ZAR 60 million FCTR loss that was recycled into our income statement. If you look at our finance expenses, our finance expenses are slightly up compared to the comparative period. And that was just utilizing our facilities throughout the bolt-up of our peak working capital cycle throughout the year. From maybe just to highlight as well from an effective tax rate point of view, you will see there's an increase in the effective tax rate compared to the comparative period and that was driven by the higher earnings as well as intercompany dividends, whether it's withholding taxes, additional withholding taxes and then lastly, the hyperinflation effect on certain taxes, which further increase that number. Then if we move forward from an operating profit point of view, maybe just to isolate the Zimbabwe operating profits to look at the adjusted operating profit. The adjusted operating profits increased by 15% or ZAR 257 million for the period. And as you can see on the graph in front of you, the impact, as we already mentioned, specifically in agriculture, but you can see the strong performance coming through our mining business in the current year. Then if you maybe just jump into the segments. As such, Agriculture Manufacturing segment. First, you can see specifically in South Africa, revenue was up 25%, but the operating profit was down by 8% relative to the comparative period. After the revenue was driven by the elevated commodity prices and weaker exchange rate, as previously explained, taking into account the bulk of our sales, specifically in agriculture, so happens in the second half and the decline in commodity prices put additional pressure then on the margins, which you can see playing out in the operating profit. Also, the severe weather conditions, specifically in South Africa, and I'll touch on SADC now, further had an impact on volumes in SA. And that resulted in crop substitution, so certain farmers moving from maize into soya. Also further no fertilization of [indiscernible] due to the excess of high prices of fertilizers. From a liquids volume point of view, that was also impacted in SA during the current financial year. And that was mainly due to the heavy rains, specifically late in our summer planting season in SA as well as the poor state of infrastructure in the country, as Seelan touched on load shedding, et cetera. Then from a manufacturing point of view, as mentioned on this slide, we maintain security of supply to our customers. From an international point of view, revenue was up 56% and operating profit up 51%. In Africa, similar trends were playing out as in South Africa. The volume margin mix model, specifically in our Zambia or SADC region, yielded good results on the back of the fixed price contracts, which was a negative impact on the comparative period as well as the regional hubs, specifically out of Zambia and selling into other areas, specifically around the Central Africa, we actually made good progress from that perspective. Then moving on to our biostimulant business, Aus and Brazil business. Australia and the local market as well face severe challenges flooding on the eastern side of the country, we had impact on volumes as well as some margins and revenues from that perspective. That was counted by exports out of Australia, specifically into new regions. Our K-humate was exported to Greece, Turkey as well as Bulgaria. There was also a significant growth into our AgriBio Brazil business, where volumes were up 47%, which was a fantastic achievement by the team. Then as Seelan also touched on, we're further now exploring our footprint into the U.S. as well as into Europe, where we're in the final stages of closing out our registrations from that point of view. Then if we just step forward into our mining business, really pleasing set of results by the full mining set. The revenue was up 26%, operating profit was up 35%. And maybe just if you take the mining in perception, mining at a world-class safety performance during the year, they progressed really well on the ESG side, and they protected the South African market, demonstrated security of supply to our key customers across the globe as well as made good progress in our international ventures. So from a South African point of view, the sales volumes were slightly lower compared to the comparative period. That was due to some of the weather impacts we've seen, load shedding as well as social political issues. We secured new contracts in South Africa in the platinum as well as in the coal sectors. The margins were really buoyant throughout the year due to the elevated commodity prices that we've seen played out during the year as well as this nice organic growth opportunities that faces the business going forward. From an international point of view, revenue were up 30%. Operating profit were up a significant 76% from that point of view. In SADC, the commodity prices supported the revenue growth, in SADC the inclement weather had a negative impact on margins. as well as a safety incident on one of our big customers in Zambia that resulted in [ Côté ] production at the mine, which infected some of our volumes. But I'm pleased to inform our shareholders that we've awarded new contracts, specifically in Zambia, Lesotho, Namibia as well as in DRC, which bodes really well for the mining business going forward. Also good margin improvement, strong performance by our mining chemicals team outside of Africa, really supported our international business. From an Indonesia side, our international expansion, the joint venture partnership was finalized, which resulted in additional contracts that will be rolled into that joint venture into the future as well as the mobilization in Canada. That partnership is making good progress. We've already executed on the first blast, that will also further enhance our margins in the international side going forward. And we re-formalized our Australian strategy to make sure that we actually showcase our AXXIS world-class -- AXXIS titanium products from that point of view. Then maybe just closing out on the segments, specifically in chemicals. As Seelan earlier mentioned, the business continued to be under pressure. The manufacturing sector faced severe decline throughout the last couple of years as well as load shedding that further actually added pain into the manufacturing sector as well as just small and medium-sized enterprises from that point of view. Also, throughout the business, there was a lot of one-offs as was reported at the half year. The additional amortization on the IT software that played a role as well as stock adjustments in that business, which was offset by the profit of the sale of the Jacobs site. The business continued its focused strategy on SBS or its strategic business sectors to make sure we focus to higher-margin business from that point of view. Then if we maybe move on to our balance sheet or statement of financial position. The balance sheet remains strong. We increased our liquidity from ZAR 5.4 billion, up to ZAR 5.8 billion as well as increase our solvency further from ZAR 10 billion to ZAR 10.3 billion. This was on the back of increased investment into working capital. Seelan touched on it, the additional ZAR 1 billion that was put into working capital to make sure we maintain security of supply in the mining side in West Africa as well is the delayed contract business in our SADC region in Zambia in agriculture. Overall, a strong cash position as reflected on the balance sheet. If I then can close out with our cash flow statement, the cash flow from operations over the last 2 years resulted strong results, strong cash flow generation throughout the organization. We can also see the working -- of the capital was well managed from that point of view. I've highlighted -- as Seelan highlighted earlier in the slide that some of the capital will flow cash flow-wise into FY '24. And you can see the impact of the dividends and the increased dividend that was played out over the last 2 years. Maybe just to close out then with the flow of the cash flow. You can see the dividend that was played out, the ZAR 1.3 billion throughout the year, the strong cash generation with the investment in working capital and the increased payment, as highlighted earlier, on taxes resulted in a strong cash position of ZAR 1.8 billion at the end of the financial year. Thank you. I'll just hand over to Seelan to close out.

Thanks, Stephan. So what's left for me is to do 2 things to talk about our growth and how we're thinking about our growth into the future and then a little bit about outlook and where we're positioned and how we're positioning ourselves. So if I talk about growth, firstly, what excites me is that there's still an immense amount of growth in our current business. We've set aside capital to protect and grow our core, and we will continue to deliver value from that. I will go into my next slide just now, which will show you our plant productivity. We want to strengthen our leadership abilities and our other capabilities in that space. We also believe there's further value to be unlocked in terms of integrating our supply chain, our manufacturing and some of our common processes across the group. There's still a lot more we can do with our world-class Nutriology model. It's something that has a profound impact on our farmers in South Africa, and we can take that to other parts of the world. And I think we can roll that out further into parts of the country where we are still not as strong and as prevalent as we should be. This will result in an improvement in our return on capital, and we will continue to execute on that. The second pillar we will deliver against is expanding our Agri International business globally. So good progress is being made on distribution. Our teams in Australia have set up a distribution footprint in the U.S. to access that market and have also set up a distribution footprint in the EU which I'll talk a little bit about that later. We also believe there's value in the Ag Tech space. You would have noticed that we've brought in certain robotic machines that can aid and enhance crop yields with our farmers, and we're rolling those out in various spaces locally but we believe we can do some of that on a global basis as well. I guess, overall, in our Agriculture segment, what you see is our growth is in the higher-margin products, and our growth is in strong developed markets of agriculture across the world. From a mining perspective, that's the third pillar that we would see growth coming from. And that is really focused on Indonesia, Canada and Australia. We believe that our Mining Chemicals business is also well positioned to be taken outside the geographic areas that it plays in at the moment, and we could take that to other parts of the world. And what I've said earlier is that we have secured contracts in some of these regions in BME, and we started blasting, Canada being one of them. I'll talk a little bit about that just now. So if I just unpack our plant and our plant utilization, I think broadly, what you can see here is that we can enhance our return on capital by enhancing the throughput through our plants. We can enhance our return on capital by optimizing further our supply chain, our manufacturing and our demand management. The teams have done an incredible job this year to move supply into the explosive sector when the agriculture area was slowing down. Also, when you saw immense disruption in the explosive sector, we were able to change what we produce to meet some of that supply. And we will continue to do that. I mean, in essence, we will continue to look at how we can sell our products and buy products on a wholesale basis to wholesale customers and distributors not only locally but across the world. We will continue to do that in a very careful and considered manner in terms of ESG and safety. We will continue to invest in our skills and our capabilities to manage our plants and plant utilization better going forward. Just to talk a little bit about the global AgriBio and biostimulants market. We've told you that this is a market that is growing very strongly. It's growing much faster than a traditional fertilizer market. And we've got a really great business there and we see good growth. We've seen good growth out of humate, but still believe there's a lot more we can do in the coming years. We will consider adding to that product base. And our focus now is solely on distribution partnerships, wholesale distribution partnerships that would mirror what we've got with Deepak fertilizer in India where we are coating their products with our [ FertiCoat ] product, and there's a number of discussions underway with various large, large fertilizer groups to use our product in their stable. I've touched on Indonesia before, but you all know that we've executed on our partnership and joint venture with MNK. MNK is the second largest explosives provider in Indonesia. They have an AN facility, they are large conglomerate. They do a lot more than just explosives. There are 14 customers that will move into that joint venture, which will ensure that all of our investment there becomes profitable. And our teams now are hard at work to align our processes and to get all of those mines moved into our partnership. I think, really great execution from our BME business to get this done. You would have heard me speak about this a few times. And with COVID, a lot of these international partnerships slowed and in the current year, you can see us executing on 2 of them. The second one is our partnership in Canada, and that's with a large drill and blast company called Consbec. We are -- we have got the facility on the right is the facility where our 2 detonator plants are going in. I was able to visit that facility a month or 2 ago. And you can see awesome progress. I met our blasting teams, our blasting teams have blasted on the Côté Gold mine already. It's a fully autonomous mine, which was incredibly fascinating for me to see. And I think what you can just feel is the tangible excitement of our teams to actually execute and get this partnership going. I'm pleased to say that we're tendering for new business. We've secured and we will secure further new business in that space going forward. So I think our initiatives, both in Indonesia and Canada is gaining great momentum for us. I think the third part of our explosives business is in Australia. And there, we've been looking to do something bigger. We haven't found the right partner for us. And at this point, what we've done is we've gone back to basics and we've invested in our current core business. We've set some capital aside. We've enhanced the management team. They're doing a number of trials and going out there looking for customers. We do know that, that market is really favorable to look -- is really favorable at looking at new entrants. And we're not a new entrant because we've been there for a while. So our focus here is to do what we're doing ourselves. And hopefully, in the upcoming periods, we will find the right partnership to execute on and have that track the way we're tracking in Canada and Indonesia. So if I then just move to closing and our outlook. I think it's important, firstly, to try and just remind ourselves of where is Omnia placed, where is Omnia placed in this -- in the global megatrends that we're seeing and where do we find ourselves now and hopefully, for the next 70 years to come. So I think, firstly, factors driving demand and ensuring the future of agriculture and minerals is population growth. And I think what we know is the world's population is growing, the world's population must be fed, the world's population needs minerals, the world's population need jobs and economies need broadly agriculture and mining to drive GDP growth and sustain themselves going forward. So we're well placed from that perspective, one to meet world demand and to assist meeting the demand for food. We know that, that is underpinned by a big, big ESG foundation may perhaps in some of the emerging markets and frontier markets. We haven't seen a huge uptake as yet of greener technologies and greener products. But we know in the developed markets, there's a big drive towards lower carbon nutrient efficiency, water efficiency, Omnia's Nutriology model and actually mines looking for more effective and more efficient blasts. And in all of those spaces, we are well placed whether it be from our agriculture solutions, Nutriology concept in South Africa, our humates business in Australia, our ability to do larger blasts and more accurate blasts in BME, our ability to use used oil instead of clean oil and save, not only the oil but also the water, as Tiaan has mentioned. So Omnia is really well placed and aligned to global megatrends, and it's something that we can be really grateful for that we're not in luxury goods, we're not in airlines, we're not in things that ebb and flow quite significantly. Having said all of that, you're probably going to ask me Seelan, so what does that mean for your margin guidance in terms of your outlook because we're a little bit below where we'd like to be in agriculture and the group. And I think my response is to say that we want to be conservative around our margin guidance for the half years as usual because you know the half years are quite challenging for us as we go into our planting season. But what we always promised is that we will be disciplinedly focused on this margin guidance. We upped our margin guidance. I think it was last year and we are absolutely still committed to our medium-term margin guidance of between 8% and 10% for the group between 9% and 12% for Agriculture, 10% to 12% for the Mining business and 6% to 8% for the Chemicals business. I've asked of our team. We are entering and continuing to be in a very, very challenging business environment, we are in a lower commodity price at the moment, and we see immense disruption around logistics, around volatility and have to do business differently. And I've engaged with our teams, and I said, can we think about what are the areas and what are the things we can do to actually enhance and ensure that we remain resilient and thrive through this challenging environment. And there's the next slide coming is a little bit of a paint -- of a picture that we're trying to paint around margins. And what we did was, we said, well, we believe there's more value we can get from our current businesses, agriculture, mining and chemicals. And we started putting down exactly where that optimization and that growth can come from. And then we started putting around some view of how that would enhance our margins. And we put some ranges out there. But really, that is all -- those are the sorts of initiatives, the sorts of projects that will actually take us into our margin guidance and beyond in future years. I'm not going to go through all of them because there's just -- there's -- it's a lot of repetition of the things I've spoken about, but here what you will see when you're going to our management team is a specific project that we will build and execute to respond to the challenging environment we see coming. What we also said is we'll continue to manage capital in a very disciplined way. We've returned circa ZAR 3 billion to shareholders since the rights issue in FY '20. We've steadily increased our return on equity from 2.3% to 11.9%. And what we're telling you today is we would hold a meeting on the 18th of July to seek permission to buyback up to 10% of our share capital. So we've obviously got a planned repurchase that we'd like to execute on as well. Omnia then provides a fairly attractive investor proposition. We operate in primary sectors, which would enhance our resilience through downturns. Those primary sectors are fairly aligned to our ESG investments and what we do. I think what you can see is we've got a -- it might sound boring to you, but we've got a very focused business model. So we keep setting out to do exactly what we said in the past. You're not seeing us divert from our very disciplined focus and strategy, and we will keep doing that. We will focus on operational excellence. So we've still got value to unlock in our manufacturing plants, in our production environment, in the optimization of our supply chain, our manufacturing and our demand management. We've got great execution of growth in our humates, AgriBio and our BME international business, and we will continue to do that. We've got some very distinct competitive advantages, and you see that in our current period where we didn't declare force majeure and we were able to supply fertilizer and explosives to all of our customers and other customers who are unable to source. We've got some of the greatest plants, biggest capacities and newest plants on the continent. And we've got some really good technologies like our Blast Alliance, AXXIS, our dual salt emulsion that uses used oil. And now what you're seeing is some really good global partnerships being executed on our -- I can proudly say that our -- both our partner in Indonesia and our partner in Canada, I've -- after COVID, I've been able to meet both of our partners physically and really align to what we want to achieve and putting their shoulder to the wheel to grow our business jointly. From a capital perspective, you're seeing us being very committed to what we say in terms of capital allocation, in terms of cash generation and how we're executing on the distribution of cash. And we will continue to do that. As a management team, we will remain focused. We will continue to strengthen ourselves to deal with the headwinds that we face. And I fundamentally believe that whilst our company has performed incredibly strongly and resiliently in a very, very tough environment, there's a lot more we can do and there's a lot more that our team can deliver in the coming years. So thank you for listening to the presentation. It is our 70th birthday. I shouldn't be saying this, but Protea chemicals is also 50 years old this year, and they want to have a separate birthday announcement a little bit later. So it is a proud moment for us to deliver such great results in very challenging times, and we thank you for listening to us. I thank our shareholders, our stakeholders, all of the folks who help us be successful. Our board will continue to guide us and point and all of our management team that have worked tirelessly over the last year to navigate the challenges. And then our 4,000 people across the world who wake up every day brace the different weather conditions and ensure that our customers have a fertilizer, that our customers have explosives and our customers have all the technologies that underpin that to really make the profound difference we make in food production and mineral extraction across the world. So thank you very much, and we'll open up for questions.

It's Rowan Goeller from Chronux Research. I've got 2 questions, please. The first is on your margin enhancing initiatives where you speak about 1.5% to 2.5% increase to your margin at a group level. Can you just talk through your fixed strategy, what has been achieved to date, possibly assuming this is what's going to come in the future? And then my second question would be around market share and you're being able to supply customers where your peers might not have been able to. What does that mean for your market share across your different divisions?

Thanks, Rowan. Maybe let me deal with the second question first around market share. Usually, in terms of force majeure's and supply disruptions, customers need supply immediately. So they have a contract somewhere else, and they say, look, we've got this challenge, can you supply? In instances like that, what we're able to do is plug the hole for the customer if it makes sense from a safety perspective and a logistics perspective. And our main focus is not the one-off revenue or income we make. At that point, our main focus is to convert that into a sustainable contract and a new customer into the future. So what you will see post, let's call it, calendar year 2022, I got that right, last year, calendar year. Due to the number of force majeure's, what you will see is a number of customers go out on tender and actually potentially reorganize their suppliers based on what happened. And I think what you will see is mines diversify their supply base a little bit. So where you've got 1 supplier maybe have more than one, and you will see our explosives business, secure new contracts, probably both in areas where we did not have contracts before, and we maybe not as strong, maybe underground would be an example of that, but also in the surface mining. In terms of margins, our business needed a chunk of fixes around getting back to basics, running our plants harder, getting our nitrophosphate plant, which didn't work well in 2019 and 2020, sorted out. And our executives have done a really good job in doing that. I think where we are now is to focus on the optimization of our supply manufacture and demand. And as you see demand changes like we've had in the current year, where we had certain grades of fertilizer in SADC and the season changed very rapidly. We brought that fertilizer back to South Africa and sold it here. So I think the next level of optimization the -- I think whether you call it 1.5% to 2.5% or beyond that is really going to result in us optimizing our plants further and to say how do we optimize between one agriculture and mining and then how do we optimize further between our agriculture and mining businesses and potential wholesale distributors or partners of those products that our manufacturer can make and can supply. Having said that, we need to improve supply chain resilience and logistics resilience in South Africa because that's where a lot of this happens. And we also need to think -- need to think very carefully around storage. So we are investing in some additional storage to allow us to convert which what you raised in your second point into long-term sustainable contracts. And we will be able to meet ad hoc demand but also meet the long-term sustainable contracts, which probably will happen out of cycle of the way we would like to have it happen. So I'm getting into unnecessary detail here, but it really boils down to the optimization of our plant complex. So when we meet tomorrow or the next day and can get into a bit more detail, we can share with you how off-cycle demand will need to be achieved by storage and how we're thinking about that. And that will obviously unlock these additional margins we're talking about. I'm absolutely confident, though, there's a lot more we can do, and our teams know that, that can be achieved. Who is next?

Congratulations on your results. [ Diteus Tolle ] from SBG Securities. So I've got 3 questions. I just wanted to add on to the guidance. I saw on the slide, you said you are a lot more conservative half year '24. Can we expect that guidance to be achieved in the full year? That's one. My second question is in relation to your Australian expansion. I see you mentioned organic growth, and you want to do something big. So can we expect another investment in nitrate supply? Or is it still sticking to technologies? And lastly, your -- the share buyback. Looking at your capital allocation framework, I'd like to understand the levers that were considered in coming to a share buyback this time around instead of a special dividend?

Great. Thank you very much for that. So in terms of margin guidance, I think you can expect us to target the guidance levels we focused on for full year. I think we -- we're just cautioning that obviously, the outlook remains very difficult for us. I mean, I think it's as difficult as you've seen in the last 6 months, but obviously, a lower commodity price, which will help a little bit. But I think we're just reminding you that our margin guidance is a full year margin guidance. I don't think you will be upset if we hit it at half year. But you do know that we build up stocks for our planting season and all of those things. In terms of Australia, let me first say that I think we've been very clear that as a management team, we must be prudent, remain humble and always do what's right from a return on capital perspective. So we are not out there looking for something big. That would be the wrong reason to be out there and looking. What we're out there and looking for is a partnership that can help us take our technologies and our products to customers. Ideally, we just would like the customers. So if we find a partner that's able to help us do that, that would be an ideal partner for us. And I think maybe think about it very similar to the way we've done Indonesia and Canada. Those were like joint venture type partners, and they had slow, very careful investments made in there. We haven't -- we didn't go into a one-off big investment in Canada or Indonesia. I think we will be conservative as we think about Australia as well. Having said that, if we find the right thing, our balance sheet is strong and we will consider that as well. We're not out there looking for something big. We're looking for a partnership that can help leverage. In terms of the share buyback, as usual, we looked at our cash, the ordinary dividend and the special dividend. And obviously, the last 2 years, we executed on a special dividend. And this year, we did the same piece of work as a management team, as a Board. And we fundamentally believe the work we've done is that it will be more value accretive for shareholders to execute on a buyback. And we've done the modeling and the work around that and that underpins that. And that's why we're executing on a buyback. Now clearly, a buyback comes with a little bit more administration and a little bit more effort. I think we got it around this -- I think we got a 74 point-something percentage vote for the buyback at our AGM [indiscernible]. So we missed it by like a [ 0, 4%, 0, 5% ]. So that forces us now to do a general meeting in the next few weeks. But we believe it's more value accretive for our shareholders to execute a buyback in the current environment and do a special dividend. But I'm sure we're going to have shareholders that would prefer a bigger ordinary dividend, a bigger special dividend or a buyback, and we -- and everyone will have a view on this. But what we've done our work that underpins that, and that's where we're finding ourselves. So we will -- we've put out a notice already for the general meeting, and we will seek permission from all of our shareholders to be able to execute on a buyback. And we will seek permission in future for general buyback on an annual basis. Thanks.

Keith McLachlan, Integral Asset Management. I have 3 quick questions. The first one, it was a bit of a challenging volume environment. And you can see in terms of Slide 17, there's a tapering off of the EBITDA on the back end of the second half. How are you trading in terms of volumes and EBITDA and stuff post period? How is it looking relative to -- has that tapering off continued, accelerated, reversed, just a sense and in terms of how you're trading now? Second thing in terms of the pullback in the commodity prices, can we expect some unwinded working capital? Or is that not the way you're anticipating it playing out? Third one, your effective tax rate jumped up and working through the notes, it's quite clear that there were some withholding taxes in the international side. That feels permanent given your drive to grow offshore, can we expect higher effective tax rate going forward? Or is that more of an anomaly, am I misreading it?

Great. Thanks, Keith. I mean in terms of volumes and trading, bear in mind that our company is -- has got cycles in it. So less so in Protea and the mining segment but more so in the agriculture segment. So early in this year, we do all the preventative maintenance in our plants. We shut our plants and then we do some volumes for the Western Cape region. We do some -- we start making some volumes for Zambia. And I guess, the uptick in our activity start in June, July, August, September. So I guess if I now start talking to you about volumes, there's nothing -- our business is not operating any different way it normally operates from a volumes perspective. That then obviously drives our EBITDA and our earnings and others. So there's nothing different in terms of our cycles. If anything, last year, our volumes reverted back to a more traditional type volume. In the prior year, as Stephan said, we did some additional volumes for the Western Cape. And in the current financial year, the one we're reporting on, our volumes went back to a normal cycle. And to add to that, if you've got rising commodity prices, our farmers will buy sooner. If you've got high commodity prices and falling commodity prices, our farmers will buy a little bit later. So I think to think going forward, we've got to look at all of what's happening around us and then say, how does our company trade. In terms of the commodities, so I don't think there's much more I can add to that. I think we will -- we're in that now at the moment, and there's nothing -- we're not operating very different to what we've operated in previous years. In terms of the commodity price pullback, you will naturally see our working capital come down due to commodity prices. And you see some of that. I can point to at year-end that there was probably a chunk more that will come down, and it does unwind, and it is unwinding. But to give you an exact number or to say where that will land, I think, in theory, what you're saying makes absolutely sense as the commodity prices come down, the working capital will come down. Bear in mind that I did say the planting season was delayed a little bit in Zambia. So we had a chunk of debtors at year-end that will come out. And we did take additional stock position in BME in West Africa, which I think Stephan might have touched on to ensure security of supply there so that those mines don't run out. So that will come down as the months go forward. Your third question was just the effective tax rate and then to, I suppose, getting to what could you model in for the tax rates going forward based on the entities we operate in. Do you want to answer that or [ Tanya ], I can, but I think it's better for a change in voice.

Yes. I think from the effective tax rate point of view, as we highlighted, we've added additional disclosures there in the note, but you will see there's a lot of moving parts in it, but we've highlighted the 2 big ones. The withholding tax, and that comes mostly out of the Zambia regions where that is. That is a bit abnormal where it is but some of it will be baked in into the future, but not the excessive part as it is there now. And then you will see there was hyperinflated related as well which is a bit abnormal. So I think normally, we give the guidance overall, depending on the mix between South Africa as well as international, depending on how our businesses grow and the guidance that we provide is normally between 20%, 29% up to about 32%. That should be our effective tax rate. I think the 36%, where it's currently as you'll see in the disclosure, there's a couple of the numbers in there, which is very excessive from that point of view.

Seelan, we have a couple of questions from the webcast. Two are actually similar in regards to the supply chain finance. I'll deal with those first. First one from Charles Boles of Titanium Capital. Can you provide some clarity on the extent or quantum of supply chain finance and the impact thereof on cash flow? A similar question is from Jovan Jackson of Laurium Capital. He says good day and well done on the results in tough times. Can you please indicate what the repayments of trade payables, supply chain financing relates to on the cash flow statement?

Okay. I'm just going to do an intro then, can you -- so if we just think about supply chain finance, supply chain finance requires you to keep turning your stock because as you're buying you're getting the supply chain finance. And if at some point, you slow down the turn of your stock, you slow down your supply chain finance as well. And I guess what we saw in the tail end of our reporting period is a little bit of a slowdown in volumes that we're pointing to, which meant there was also a result in slowdown in stock turn and supply chain finance. But as to exactly the numbers, Stephan, do you want to talk through that?

Is this on again?

We need a mic on for the webcast.

Is it okay? Can I go -- I think Jovan and co. thanks a lot for the question. I think Supply chain finance is basically a create a platform where you can maintain and arrange your creditor terms. That's effectively the mechanism that we drive. So you can see throughout our cash flows. Our cash cycle is actually shortened so -- and we increased our cash flows. I suppose from a disclosure point of view, what you can see, it creates a bit of noise in your cash flow statement. Because of the accounting rules, you need to disclose that separately. But you will see in our long-form as well, we see it as part of working capital that's the way we utilize supply chain finance. On the cash flow statement, we've also added additional disclosures on as we include it into cash flow from operations, just to have better insight what supply chain finance means. Just also on the supply chain finance, we've introduced that about a year ago. So it's a bit of abnormal in the cash flows because what happens is a year after, you can only see that going through your cash flows, what you can see from next year, it will start normalizing on a year-to-year basis. But the way that the cash flows get disclosed on the cash flow statement is just all the flows that goes through supply chain finance needs to be disclosed separately. But we see that as part of working capital, and that's why we've just included the additional disclosure on supply chain finance.

Thanks, Stephan. We've got a few places where we've given additional disclosure on supply chain finance. One is in the cash flow analysis at the back of the pack. And I think it's also fair to say that we have got a supply chain finance project or program that's moving various parts of our business into the supply chain finance platform and that hasn't been completed yet. So we would anticipate more suppliers on the platform going forward and a benefit being unlocked from that.

Thank you. We have 2 further questions from Charles Boles of Titanium Capital. The first one, in agriculture, you speak of crop changes by farmers, please could you give us some insight as to the background of this as well as the impact on Omnia? The second one, in mining, what is Omnia's competitive advantage that enables it to be competitive globally?

Great. Thanks, Charles. Maybe just the first question. around the crop changes. So as fertilizer prices were incredibly high last year, and you saw, there was a time when soft commodity prices match that, and you saw that come off a little bit. What we saw is certain farmers moving away from maize to soya. What you do know is our underpin of our business is the planter mix. So a lot of our fertilizer goes in much earlier into the soil. And what this results then is when the top dressing and the additional fertilizer is being sold at the tail end of the year, December, November, December, January, those volumes go away. So we saw a little bit of that last year. I don't see Louis Strydom here, if someone cannot and say that I've done a reasonable job on that. Okay. Okay. The second question was around BME's competitive advantage. I can take a stab at that Ralf, but you right here. I'll start and you can maybe take over. In essence, BME's competitive advantage is really certain of its components, certain of the way it brings together the blast and we've been able to take that globally. So we cannot take our nitric acid plants that are based in Sasolburg globally. We've got to buy that in. But it's actually the technology of a double-salt emulsion, the detonators and others that has one business against some of the major, major mining houses like Orica and [indiscernible] and others locally and globally. And that technology, we believe, can make an impact in a number of the countries that we don't operate in. Do you want to add to that? Ralf is our COO of the Mining business, for those of you who haven't met him.

Good afternoon. I think Seelan summarized it well. There's basically 3 buckets that we're looking at from a differentiation perspective. The first one is our technology and the complementary technology to what other explosives companies and/or customers bring to the offering. We're talking about mechanization. We're talking about digital platforms, digital platforms in integrating with software platforms on the customer sites. Talking to and enhancing data mining, data storage, trend analysis and ultimately, all leading to optimized blasting. We see ourselves on the forefront on that. We also believe that our electronic detonator system, the AXXIS Titanium is one of 2 premium products in the world currently from a safety, accuracy and ease-of-use perspective. That opens doors for us. And thirdly, it is the dual-salt emulsion that Seelan has alluded to, that not only is a very stable emulsion but it also allows the used oil functionality, as you know, and it gives you a lot of optionality in the market being a dual-salt feedstock. From a working capital management perspective, to a commercial perspective and as I said, stability and practical perspective. So those 3 buckets are in combination, what makes us so attractive.

Thank you, Ralf.

There are no further questions from the webcast.

Are there any other questions in the room? So thank you to all of you joining us here today, and thank you to all on the webcast. Please take care and feel free to contact us with any questions or any thoughts you might have. And for those of you here, please feel free to join us for a cup of tea or coffee outside. Thank you very much.