Omnia Holdings Limited (OMN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Omnia's interim results for our 2024 financial year. This morning, I would like to call upon Bronwyn Murray, our Executive for Human Resources, who will take us through a safety briefing, and she will also share a safety moment with us. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. Just by way of dealing with our safety housekeeping. I just want to remind everyone that in the event of an emergency, please remain calm, and then when we have to evacuate, please proceed to the right-hand side of the building. My right, your left, outside at the back end of the building and proceed to the assembly point. The assembly point is marked with a 0, and that's in our parking area. Also, if there's anyone with the disability in the room, please assist them to get to the assembly point. When we get to the assembly point, please remain until we've done a roll call and actually indicated that it's safe to proceed back into the building. This morning, I want to talk to you about really a phenomenon that actually plagues all of us. And it's around here in fatigue. As we know, as the year winds down, the last 2 months of the year are quite challenging. And in certain instances, we sometimes become really restless, anxious, fatigued in terms of wanting to really go on a break. And again, just reminding ourselves what we need to do in those particular instances. Within the Omnia environment, in particular, I mean, we operate in a hazardous environment within our plants. We've seen people sometimes become less mindful of where they are, and we've seen slips and trips. And we can understand how serious that can become especially within our manufacturing environment and being mindful of what people are doing and encouraging our teams as well, where we see people are fatigued, especially with the long hours that we work in terms of some of the shifts, we are encouraging people to be mindful of that with their teams, making sure that people have properly rested in certain instances, putting in place, second in charge, a person that will be there to assist with the standby. And also just apart from just the physical side, I think, be cognizant of people who are really anxious. There are various issues that people are dealing with at this particular point in time. And we want to -- we encourage our staff to reach out in terms of the support we've got in different platforms. We also then want to encourage people just look at how they manage themselves in terms of self care, looking at exercising, proper diet as well, which helps with the immune systems and not being shy to actually reach out for support in terms of EAPs. And most of you sitting here would come from organizations where there are EAPs and encourage that as well. As part of the Omnia safety mantra, we've got something that we say, see something, do something, say something. And in that regard, I want to encourage people within Omnia and outside of Omnia where you see people struggling, dealing with being overwhelmed to push them to -- not push them, but actually support them in terms of getting the necessary support, but also encouraging them to live healthier lifestyles, taking time to exercise and to rest. And in this particular point, we want to encourage people to be their brothers keepers. And as part of our value system being safe is key. So I'm encouraged that for all of us in this year-end period. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Bronwyn. And I hope that we all heard the safety message. I would now like to introduce you to Seelan Gobalsamy. Our CEO, who will present our interim results.

Good morning to everybody. Good morning to all of our board members, our shareholders, and good morning to all of you on the webcast. Thank you for making the time and being with us this morning. When Bronwyn said in the event of an emergency, please remain seated. The only thing she missed is oxygen mask will not fall from the panel above you. So hopefully, you won't need that. I'm going to talk you through our results there will be various people coming to join me on stage. And I think what we've tried to do this time around is to give you a little bit more information, so a little bit more detail, a few different drivers and levers in our business. And we will spend a bit of time on some of those new slides and some of those -- some of the new data that we're providing you with. This is a very auspicious occasion for us in that. It is our 70th year anniversary. So we said that at our June result, and we continue to mention that. But for our staff, we have a 70th birthday party happening in 2 weeks' time. So I think it's the 2 or 3 of the Saturday, the first Saturday of December. And I think it's quite a proud moment for us. It's quite a proud moment for our -- just under 4,000 people, our Board and our shareholders to celebrate our group making this profound difference that it makes in the lives of so many millions of people across the continent and across the world. And hopefully, what you will see today is how, firstly, we've reunited our business with its purpose. We've rolled out this new purpose throughout our business units and across all of our regions, innovating to enhance life and together creating a greener future. And you see how we have underpinned ESG not only in what we do in our production, in our supply chain and in our facilities by providing those unique value propositions to our customers, to our farmers and our mines. A number of the investments that we've made have a strong ESG underpin and our Nutriology concept and processes in agriculture, our investment in Hypex Bio, in BME some of our advanced detonators that allow you to do larger, more complex and more detailed blasts, are all aligned to a very, very strong ESG impact. We know that what our business does. It has a profound impact on food security. And for those of you who have been reading up and thinking about that, the world needs to feed 4 to 5x the amount of people in Europe over the next few decades due to the population growth in Africa. So it's very, very important to us that we continue to make this positive difference that we continue to invest in the right technologies, the right value propositions to ensure the sustainability, not only of our business, but also of our planet. Just a quick highlight of our business. What you've seen in the 6 months being reported is another period of disciplined execution of our strategy. That has been done in very volatile declining commodity prices. So we expected the commodity price decline, which we saw in the last half of our financial year to continue into the first half of this year. And we took a whole host of different actions to mute the impact of that falling prices on our revenue and on our earnings. So what we will share with you today is how that fall in commodity prices impacted our business, how the diversification of our business supported that, how volumes were impacted, how GPs were impacted and how we've performed very, very resiliently in a very challenging environment. Having said that, safety is of paramount important in our business. And we've said previously that no ton of fertilizer, no ton of explosives or no can of chemicals is more important than anybody's life and anybody's health. So we continue to make strong, strong progress in our safety stats, our RCRs and Ditebogo is going to talk about that just now. And we continue to show a progression made on a number of our ESG measures, and we'll show you that a little bit later. What we have been able to do in a very, very challenging macro environment is the Omnia group has continued to ensure security of supply to our customers, our farmers and our mines have benefited from the deep investment in our supply chain have benefited from the deep investment in our manufacturing facilities and we've been able to not only supply our customers but also new customers and been able to sell product on a wholesale basis to ensure the agriculture sector has the inputs it needs and the mining sector have the explosives that they need. We see very strong growth and a strong performance in our mining sector with the profits being up. And we see a resilient performance in line with our expectations in the agriculture business. From a balance sheet perspective, our balance sheet remains strong. What we have done is we focused on giving away on the income statement in some instances, protecting what we have and actually focusing on maintaining and protecting our balance sheet. So an incredibly strong cash position at half year, ZAR 1.6 billion in a net cash position. And clearly, we didn't dip into our facilities and facilities of ZAR 4.5 billion available should we need it. From a revenue perspective, our revenue is down. I think we've seen commodity prices go down by more than 50%, depending on which commodity you see. We'll talk through what lifted our revenue in different spaces later. Our profits are down in line with that. And our HEPS also slightly down in line with that, a very strong cash position, net asset value up and our return slightly up. So our balance sheet in a very good and healthy space. I'm going to pause for a minute now and hand over to Ditebogo who is just going to talk you through our safety stats and our ESG. For those of you who don't know Ditebogo, She's our group executive responsible for sustainability, safety. And I thought it would be great for her to let me breathe a bit and talk through the next few slides. So thank you very much.

Good morning, and we've got people joining us online, so is good afternoon and good evening from wherever you're joining us. I think I actually have the easy part of today because I have the privilege and honor of just sharing Omnia's safety and ESG progress of them over the number of years and specifically over the past 6 months. From a safety perspective, as Seelan already mentioned, safety is very important to Omnia. I'm sure you can imagine that we work with very big machinery. We work with very dangerous chemicals, very dangerous gases as well. So we -- it's important for us to continuously keep our eye on the ball to ensure that we don't hurt people, to ensure that we don't hurt communities. And to ensure that when we're on the road, which is becoming increasingly difficult considering the infrastructure challenges that we are facing in a number of -- specifically Southern Africa, which is where we are dominant, we need to be extra careful. But, despite this, we're seeing -- we've seen rather an improvement in our recordable case rate and our FER rates. So those 2 measures or rather other indicators, they measure, I guess, our ability to keep our people safe. because the one is an injury rate, which has decreased. The second one is our ability to manage and prevent the release of gases and chemicals because as you can imagine, that can have a terrible consequence not only on our people, but the communities in which we operate as well. But I think to say -- I need to say this that safety is a collective effort. So our staff members, our contractors on our sites and management continue to focus on preventing and responding to safety incidents because it can have dire consequences not just for us but for the communities in which we operate. Just moving on to our overall ESG performance. We've seen exceptional progress in the past couple of years. And this is a testament to some of the investments that we've made in our renewable energy and the recycling of water and the improvement in our carbon emissions systems. Our emissions continue to reduce. We've doubled the collection of used oil over the past 3 years. And I think just to put that into perspective, in the first 6 months of this year, of our financial year that is, we collected 13 mega liters of used oil. A liter of used oil can contaminate and pollute up to 1 million liters of water. So essentially, that means by us being able to collect and use in our day-to-day production processes, we've been able to prevent the potential pollution of 13 trillion liters of water. And just while we're on the water perspective as well. So we've increased our recycling. You would have heard -- I think it was the end of last year that we commissioned reverse osmosis water treatment plant at our Sasolburg facility. And since commissioning, we've been able to recycle 3x more water from last year to this year. And on the renewable side, we have -- we commissioned last year a 5 megawatt solar plant at our Sasolburg facility. We've gone on to construct the second phase of that solar plant. And just the first phase of that solar plant is operating at peak and it's actually exceeded the 10 megawatts that was initially projected. And because we are dedicated to increasing the use of renewable energy as part of our production processes, we, a, have allocated capital for further investment in renewable energies. And we've commissioned 2 smaller renewable solar plants at 2 of our manufacturing on the mining side facility. So that is in [indiscernible] and [indiscernible]. The next slide, I'm not going to go into details because I think on the left-hand side, I've spoken about what we are doing internally just to increase our renewables to protect the water that could -- to protect potable water and to reduce our consumption of water. What I would like to focus on is what is our ESG customer proposition. Both on our mining side and agriculture side, and I think Seelan touched a bit on it from mining from -- agriculture other perspective, we have our Nutriology solution. And this is one of our flagship products or solutions that we see as being able to provide agricultural customers with an end-to-end solution for -- to be able to support the efficient use of water and new trends in their farming operations. But just to extend that further, we're seeing an increase, and this is specifically globally in the interest in bio-stimulants. And our AgriBio business is an answer to expanding not just from our traditional nutriology solution, which is not traditional at all because I think it's one of the leading solutions. But just to expand that a bit further to say, in the rise of international pressure against the use of NPKs. Are they alternative bio-stimulant solutions, and that's why we're driving and expanding that business. From the mining side, [indiscernible] Nutriology is our Blast Alliance solution. And this basically increases precision blasting for mining customers. And what this means is because you can blast more precise, you can extract more minerals. You can have a less impact on environmentalist impact on your ground less shaking around where you're blasting. But we are weathering this with our investment in the Hypex Bio, equity stake -- minority equity stake that we have announced a couple of weeks ago. And what this does, it means we're able to support some of our customers to further reduce their carbon footprint through this -- when you're comparing this to the traditional blasting methods. Our ESG proposition is not only limited to what we do internally and for our customers. We extend this to our communities as well. And for a number of years, we've been -- we've committed to give them back to our communities with a focus on food security and education. This remains the same. We started a number of projects a number of years ago, focusing on innovative and resource-efficient food gardening programs in communities we're able to deliver 10,000 of those to 10,000 households in the past year. And we've committed to doubling that, but extending it also where it makes sense to community members who are benefiting from this program to be able to actually make an income out of this. And just on the education side, I'm going to touch on 2 programs that are agriculture and entrepreneurship focus. The one is focused on learners that are living with disabilities and this is teaching them how to produce food and find market for the -- find markets to be able to trade their produce. And then the second one, which is a training facility that we've constructed in our main manufacturing facility in Sasolburg. There it's been -- we've been constructing it for a number of years. I think it's about 2 years now. And we just really proud to say we've finally been able to enroll our first cohort of students. And the idea behind this training center is in addition to it being a training center, there is going to be a processing hub that should in time as we develop and improve this training center be an entrepreneurship center also for food gardeners in the communities where they can come and process their foods and find there -- I guess, find access to markets. I think this is my story. I think we might have time later on just to go into questions and answers for those that have. But I'm going to hand over to Seelan for the rest of the business update.

Thank you, Ditebogo. And I think it's very important to us as a business to do what we do and do it well. for all of our stakeholders. And I think it's really proud for us to be making the investments and to be putting in place the initiatives we are as a business. So if I go into the difficult part of the heavy lifting of the day, and I'm glad that Ditebogo speaks a little bit less than me, and Stephan also speaks a little bit less than me. So we will try and stick as much as we can to time. Let me talk a little bit about where we are from a strategic perspective. for most of you that have been following us for a while, you know that we've spent a bit of effort on stabilizing our balance sheet in our company broadly in 2019 and 2020. We then went on a process to invest in our core assets and decide what is noncore. We disposed of Umongo over the period. We also looked at the offer we got from Oro Agri. We did a rights issue, and we've shored up our balance sheet, and we refocused our company on agriculture, mining and chemicals. We did, at the time, say that we've got a lot of heavy lifting to do to improve our margins, to improve our agility and actually put us on a path to increase our return on capital. I guess where we redesigned our operating model and we did a few other things. I guess where we find ourselves now is actually focusing further on our customers expanding and diversifying our operations locally and globally. And focusing on actually growing our market share, focusing on those unique value propositions to our customers that will make a profound difference to them. and making sure that we have those propositions that are globally competitive. And it Ditebogo spoke on one, which is nutriology. We fundamentally believe that is a globally competitive proposition we've got. You see us investing in Hypex Bio, which we'll talk a little bit later about. And you see us continuing to make great strides with our double-salt emulsion in BME with our detonators, our access detonators in BME and others and win new contracts and new market share. So we are firmly in this renew and grow and continue to diversify. We will do that in a very responsible way. in terms of ESG and future-proofing our business, and we will be very responsible with capital. So I think never doubt that our strong capital position will cause us to do things that are not carefully considered. We implemented a new operating model to unlock this value and this growth. And we've been on a path to embed that across our business. Some of that is embedded well. And some of that, there's still more progress to be made. I think what's more pleasing is that from a growth perspective, we're starting to see the impacts of the seeds and the new investments that we have made over the last few years. So this year, if I start with our mining business, you will see profit coming through from our Indonesian joint venture and our Canadian joint venture. Last year and the year before, you heard us talking about doing something in that space. Today, we show you we're unlocking the value there. You also see us making a 10% investment in Hypex Bio, which is a Swedish-based company that provides a greener tener way of blasting. And new year, the investments we've made in our ad tech business around robotics, around precision farming, around AI technology to be more precise in the way farmers use chemicals, water and others. And we fully understand balancing the move to more greener technologies, wireless ensuring food security and adequate inputs for farming in doing that. Our AgriBio business remains a very important part of our group and an attractive proposition, and I'll talk a little bit about that later. We certainly believe we can continue to extract value by continuing to execute on the same on the strategy that we've put out before. What has happened around the world? So what is the context that we've delivered these results in I think the first thing to state is that these results are delivered in falling and volatile macros. The geopolitical issues, if we step back to COVID and supply chain disruption and then the Russia-Ukraine issues, we saw commodity prices elevating. We saw a number of countries across the world, locking down imports, exports becoming very insular. Commodity prices then peaked probably towards the second half of our last financial year. And since then, we've seen them come down, and we'll put up a few slides later. That's resulted in volatility for us. We've certainly got a long business cycle. And I think I just want to remind all of you that the Omnia business cycle certainly spans across the financial years and financial cycles. And you'll see a lot of the data we're giving you today we're talking across those cycles, and we're trying to explain to you how our business. How our business gets correlated and how it's de-correlated to these various commodities. But what we've seen is a massive increase in commodity prices. We saw high commodity prices and now -- and then we saw a decrease and then a further decrease and our business still continues to perform resiliently. Clearly, the second big issue we're watching is climate change. So for those of you who are in Midrand, in South Africa last week, you would have seen the hail. That's not where climate change starts or ends. But what we do know, climate change is something that is critical to be aware of. It's something critically to think about and the alignment of our propositions, the alignment of our ESG drives all underpinned to do good for the environment. Having said that, climate change also disrupts. It also caused supply chain disruption, it caused volatility and uncertainty in how we plan and how the demand looks and that's something that our supply chain focus have had to be very, very agile in this reporting period. We also see persistent sociopolitical issues. So not only globally, which disrupt supply chains, but also locally, which disrupt supply chain, which causes us to have to manage our product, our working capital and our costs differently. Locally then, we've had the manufacturing sector decline. We've seen issues with constrained electricity issues with our ports, issues with the rail and sociopolitical disruptions on the road these sort of the bottom 3 issues have acutely impacted our chemical sector, and you will see how Protea has been significantly impacted by those issues. All these issues then clearly drive what are these volatile prices. And we've put out these 2 charts, you will find them in the appendix of the deck in large scale. So we've -- we've sandwiched them on one page here just in the interest of space. But if you go to the back and you want to see a bigger picture of them, you'll see them at the back. And what we've demonstrated is how our business has been performing over a number of years. What has happened to the commodity prices. And you will see how we correlate that a little bit later to our GPs and our performance. The first thing to say is that our business has performed well in lower commodity prices. It's performed well in volatile and higher commodity prices. And now you see us performing according to model in massively declining commodity prices. Price and then the commodity price is normalizing a little bit as we've gone into the planting season in the Southern Hemisphere. We have not seen this level of change probably in the last 15 years, one of our finance people looked and said, when did we see this sort of change? And we saw, we saw it 15 years ago. And at that point, our business made a loss. I guess what that tells you is how important it is to manage our balance sheet and protect our balance sheet, shore up our working capital positions and make sure that when these geopolitical issues affect prices, our business is sustainable through that. What we've also done, most of our shareholders look at ammonia and urea. And you can see how we perform and how we've broken some of the correlation between our overall performance just being linked to this. So if you say prices went down 19% in the second half of the year and 58% in the first half of this year, our revenue didn't go down 58%. Our revenue went down differently. And that's a testament to our diversification strategy, that's testament to the value add in our agriculture and mining business. And that's the element of the decommoditizing of our products that have come through. I think the second commodity we wanted to put up for you was phosphate rock. And really what we're showing you there is the benefit we've got of our nitro-phosphate plant. We have an ability to add value into that space and to generate value -- further value for our customers and further value for ourselves so that we are not just correlated to ammonia or urea prices. If I just step ahead, what has this resulted in. Our revenue is down 12%. Our gross profit in line with the revenue is down 20%, and our profits are down 34%. You see that impacting our operating margin and our earnings per share. I guess what we focused on heavily was to protect our balance sheet. And on those indicators, you see the opposite. You see our working capital very well managed, 22% down. That could have been a better position. We chose to take certain stock positions and debtor positions in certain territories, and we can get into that detail a little bit later. So -- so maybe that's a little bit better than what you see there. And our cash position at ZAR 1.6 billion, which is well managed and it talks to the strength of our financial position. Our net asset value, obviously slightly up. So what you see is a fairly resilient performance overall in our group in a very, very challenging macro environment. So let's talk a little bit about that operating performance and talk about gross margins. So a few of these slides are new. The slides we haven't done before, and I think our team has worked quite hard to extract some of this. What we've done here is we've correlated a broad brush. There's not -- isn't perfection here, but we've correlated what the ammonia and urea prices done over a few reporting periods. And what our operating margin and GP margins have gone. And I think what's important to note is how we're performing in massive declines in the ammonia and urea prices, our GPs went in the last 6 months, not this one, the prior 6 months, down to 16.2%. With continuing falling prices, we've now normalized back to 21%. So that's giving a sense of back to normalization around this falling trend. And you can see how in previous cycles, when we've seen these downturns, our business performed very differently. So you can see the diversification coming through. You can see the benefits of our supply -- our agile supply, manufacturing and demand planning. So a very robust performance. We're wanting to show you that we've changed the way our business operates. We've obviously, in the current period also seen some additional volumes coming through, which has negated a little bit of a GP and operating profit impact. And obviously, at a group level, the diversification of our different businesses, which you'll see as we get into the detail with Stephan a little bit later. Has also offset some of the impact of the commodity prices. So I guess, the story here is a very resilient performance in what is some incredibly volatile and declining prices that we haven't seen for probably 15 years or so. What have we done to perform this way, we certainly have certain cost initiatives in place and the group has done well. The management have done well to execute on that. And our working capital has been well managed. So even at a simplistic form, if we had chosen to take bigger risks in that falling market and bigger stock positions and try to leverage up our income statement too much. We would have seen a deeper impact in the balance sheet. We'll have seen deeper stock write-offs. And I think what you can see the working capital is well managed, and the balance sheet is well protected through the downturn. What's pleasing for me is we always said our business must perform in flat commodity cycles and increasing in reducing in volatile and we perform fairly resiliently in a downward cycle. We continue to generate cash. And you've seen you can go and do the various calculations and see what that means. We continue to invest in CapEx. We continue to invest in infrastructure. So we've been able to buy the 10% stake in Hypex Bio. We've been able to invest in more rail wagons and solar plants to assist the sustainability of our business. From a segment perspective, let me maybe start with Chemicals. I think the Chemicals segment was the hardest debt in this half year with the changes and the specific issues we saw in South Africa, the manufacturing sector, the rail logistics, the road logistics and the port logistics. We also saw prolonged shutdowns from some of our key suppliers, which resulted in shortages of inputs. And we saw an immense slowdown in that business. So a very stock decline in that business. We remain committed to that business, and I think we remain focused to take the necessary action needed there to restore that business to a more acceptable level of product profitability. Obviously, that business is now outside of its target margin guidance. And the management team -- we've made a few changes, and we will continue to get that business back on -- back to model. We always said we want that business, manage to a model and we want, at some point, a strategic partner in that business. And I guess that's where we will continue to go. From a mining sector perspective, our mining sector has performed incredibly well. So the margin, 11.1%, ahead of where we expected it, and we're pleased with that. It's been supported by profits from the Mining Chemicals business, and it's been supported by profits from our international expansion. Both Canada and Indonesia are profitable and those profits are coming through Stephan or Tanya. In fact, I think there's a deck at the end of the slide shows somewhere that will tell you how we are accounting for some of those investments. So I think a very, very pleasing performance from BME and mining chemicals and growing volumes, growing profits, both in South Africa, international and in the mining, chemical side. And great to see the margins going to where we want them to be. There's been some support of some new business that we've got there, also some more efficient and effective management of inputs like used oil. And then great to see the international operations making money. From an agriculture perspective, and bear in mind, our agriculture perspective has all of our supply chain and our manufacturing in there. So, it is the one that will be the most impacted by the commodity changes. It will be the one that's most impacted by the GP changes. And obviously, there, what we're seeing is a decline in margin out of our range. Margin pressure. If we look where we are currently, there's good agronomic conditions, we're well placed to deliver into the planting season, and we're doing that. And we believe there will be a recovery going forward, but I'll talk to that a little bit later. Our AgriBio business was also impacted by lower volumes. We saw volume growth in all of our territories where our humates and AgriBio business is involved, except 2. And those 2 territories had a slowdown in volumes due to specific issues they faced. And that's resulted in a bit of a slowdown in that business. Obviously, the rest of Africa performed well, and you'll see that in the detail. That's resulted in the Omnia group obviously, at half year being a little bit below our margin guidance. And bear in mind, our margin guidance is full year. So we -- a lot of the performance you're seeing is in line with our business cycle and is what we're expecting. We saw overall electricity logistics disruptions and social political issues affect all 3 businesses. We saw a decline in the mining sector. We all know how the logistics has impacted that sector. And what we've been able to do, which we're incredibly proud of is we've been able to continue to supply into all the agriculture and mining customers were involved in and more, and we'll talk a little bit about that later. So from an EBITDA perspective, this is where we are relative to prior years, an incredibly resilient performance for us under tough, tough macro conditions. I think these are the toughest conditions we've experienced in the last 4 or 5 years. And we continue to perform well. From a cycle perspective, we've moved very much to a normalized agriculture cycle. So, if you go back to 2018, 2017, those years where you saw a slow cycle in the first 6 months and more coming through in the second 6 months. That's the cycle. We're into a very normalized cycle. So hopefully, we will continue to keep our shoulder to the wheel to continue to progress this EBITDA in the right direction going forward. And we'll talk a bit about that. Working capital is really something we can be proud of. I mentioned earlier that we took a stock and debtor position in one of our businesses. So the position probably could even look a bit better than this. But I think our team have done really well to manage working capital carefully. To think hard about the stock position versus the income statement and commodity risk. So a really good performance there, which has resulted in strong cash and our working capital continues to be very prudently managed. I guess that then filters into our capital allocation. And we promised you that we will be disciplined with capital allocation. We continue to do that. We -- our business is cash generative, and we will continue to focus on paying a sustainable dividends. We will continue to deploy capital to protect and grow our business, and we will continue to deploy capital in line with our stated objectives of growing our Agri international business, growing our Mining international business and where we see opportunities to protect and grow our local business and our traditional businesses, we will also do that. In this period under review, we commenced our share repurchase program, and we bought roughly 400 -- 840,000 worth of shares. For about ZAR 47 million or so. I think what you're seeing is an incredibly resilient and strong balance sheet. What this does do, it allows us great optionality, great flexibility to deploy capital as and when we need it. And we did say that we will not keep a lazy balance sheet into perpetuity, but please bear with us when we -- when we've made certain decisions to run a strong balance sheet because we believe that is in the interest of a business with a long business cycle, which plays across different years. So I think if you look at all of this and you project it, clearly, we've seen a good level of free cash flow and cash projections going forward. So I'm going to pause there and hand over to Stephan, who's going to go into a little bit more detail into the finance financial performance, and then I'll come back at the end to talk about the outlook.

Yes. Thank you, Seelan. Good morning to our board, our shareholders, stakeholders and all our employees from around the world. Maybe just before we jump into the numbers, just A quick update on the SARS matter. As we discussed during our year-end process, is that SARS confirmed that the matter was partake for ADR. And ADR is basically just a process then to find a solution to bring the part this closer together. The ADR process is roughly set out to be 90 days, but due to the complexity of the [ proprietary ] matters, that process could take a bit longer. We're currently busy engaging with SARS on the matter. The matter has not been concluded as yet. But we're still committed to find an amical solution. If through the ADR process, we can't find an amical solution, then the next step will be to proceed to the appeal process. Will there be more opportunity to engage with SARS to find a solution to this matter. Maybe just jumping into the financial numbers. Just quickly to highlight specifically on the Zim as we've disclosed with our financial year-end. In Zim, we've changed the functional currency effective from the first of April. And that will result in, obviously, the disproportionate ForEx movements will be slightly muted into our numbers. You can still see it's still baked into our comparative period from that perspective. So from a revenue point of view, you can see a decline in revenue of 14% relative to the prior period. And that was mostly due, to as Seelan mentioned, due to the commodity price environment, which was offset by the higher volumes that we've experienced in agriculture, wireless and mining, also supported by the depreciation in the currency relative to the comparative period. From a gross profit margin point of view, similar to what Seelan just touched on, you can see the contraction in the gross profit down to ZAR 2.1 billion. And that was mostly due to the significant decline in commodity prices with experienced over the last 3 quarters. So it was the back end of our previous financial year as well into quarter 1 of this financial year. What we did see is, obviously, the commodity prices were starting to stabilize and a slight turn towards the back end of this financial year of this half year. From a distribution and admin point of view, you can see relative to comparative period that was really well managed. Taking into account it was in a very high price of high inflation environment, where we've actually managed those costs. And that was really good management actions that I'll touch on a bit later. Maybe just moving further down, if you look at the net other operating income baked into the operating open is maybe 2 -- 2 points to note. First of all, we are a commodity hedge gain worth of ZAR 9 million, that's baked into that number. As well as the sale of carbon credits, which also sits in that number, which amounts to ZAR 19 million. From an MNK perspective or the joint venture, you can see that, that's accounted on an equity basis. We disclosed that Seelan mentioned, further down in the deck and the next, more specifically relevance on that. But specifically, you can see a significant contribution already by that business, which is ahead of our expectations. That is effective from the end of May. So it's about 4 months that's actually baked into our numbers currently. That resulted in an operating profit of 6.5% , which is down versus the 6.6% in the comparative period. But again, if I then isolate Zim's impact in the prior period was ZAR 264 million. We've also further down in the deck, we give additional disclosures relative to the ZAR 50 million in the current period. And if I just isolate the prior period, the margins taking into going the excess of high commodity price at the time was at 9.2% from that perspective. Then maybe moving further down the income statement from a tax perspective. The effective tax rate reduced relative to the comparative period to 29.9%, where in the comparative period, the effective taxes were at [ 15.9% ] That resulted in an operating profit of ZAR 487 million for the 6 months and which is 8% down relative to the comparative period. Then maybe just jumping into some of the segments. And what you will see, as Seelan already touched on it, the diversification coming through our business as well. As mentioned, in agriculture and specifically, agriculture SA the high commodity prices relative in the comparative period and the sharp declines continuing into this quarter. Into quarter 1 of this financial year. Opposite thing we seen in agriculture segment with revenue down by 20% and operating profit down by 65%. As I mentioned, the commodity prices. That was slightly offset again by the higher group volumes in Agriculture SA due to the good economic conditions that we experienced at this stage. Furthermore, our manufacturing and supply chain throughout this volatile environment that we've already touched on and ensure that we secure security of supply across all our segments in agriculture, mining as well as into chemicals. The operating expenses, specifically in the agriculture SA was really well controlled and we're progressing well on our cost savings initiatives that I'll touch on a bit later. From an international point of view, the revenue increased by 15%, while the operating profit was down 3%, again, driven by higher volumes in our SADC region in Zambia as well as in Mozambique. But what we also experienced is margin pressure, specifically in the SADC region due to the lower commodity price environment that we experienced at trade stage as well as the introduction of additional competition into the region. From an AgriBio point of view, the AgriBio point of view is that the volumes were lower, and that was just due to slower volumes from 2 of our major customers, specifically playing out in the first half of this year. And we've also experienced lower volumes into Brazil, and that was just due to the inclement weather and a later start to the season specifically into Brazil. Furthermore, into AgriBio we keep on investing into our distribution channels specifically into Europe and the U.S., and those mobilization costs also creates a bit of a drag on our operating margin from that perspective. I think from a mining point of view, Seelan touched on it, excellent performance by our mining cluster. If you take into account, this was in the face of very challenging macroenvironment that challenges that the business faced. As well as a declining mining sector from that point of view. We've already touched on it but strong performance, as you can see throughout our business. And our business is already moving into the margin guide and the ranges that we set for our medium term. From an RSA perspective, revenue were down 5%, while operating profit increased by 16% and the revenue down due to the lower ammonia price from that point of view, but it was also offset by the organic growth in volumes that we see coming through our mining business. Seelan touched on it, we all see a recovery in utilization of used oil, which was actually quite pleasing as well as production and cost efficiencies that we can see coming through our production environment in our mining business. From an international point of view, we see a really strong performance with revenue down 6%, but operating profit increased by 36% from that point of view. We've seen higher volumes in our West African region as it's starting to set up from that point of view as well as what we can see in Canada, also strong performance and the Canada business turning profitable from that perspective, which is quite pleasing. Maybe just if you look at it in the SADC region, we've seen lower volumes, specifically in Zambia, and that was just due to early rains reported earlier in the season that slowed down some of the mining production from that perspective. The JV, we've already touched on, specifically on MNK, is contributing nicely towards our operating earnings in our International segment. Furthermore, our mining chemicals, as Seelan already touched on, really had a strong performance throughout the first 6 months of our financial year. We can see increased margins coming throughout that business, and that was also due to a bit of a product mix even though volumes somehow declined that business, really strong performance from an earnings point of view. The teams throughout our mining, local as well international, is also making really good strides in managing our cost savings initiatives across our business. Then I think from a chemical point of view, yes, I think chemicals was a disappointment -- disappointing performance for us. But if you take into account revenue down 24% and operating profit down 95% from that perspective, relative to the comparative period, there was a couple of ones off specifically the sale of the Jacobs site which was slightly muted by some of the intangibles that we disclosed in the comparative period. But if I take into account the volume and the price mix was in a difficult macro environment point of view. Seelan touched on it, the decline in the manufacturing sector as well as weaker consumer spending and also the lower pricing environment. Further down, what you also can see, we had a big impact on our chemical segment was the load shedding as well as deterioration in our road and rail infrastructure. Also, that Seelan touched on was the extended unavailability of key raw materials due to prolonged unplanned chart by one of our key suppliers of compound chemicals. There was also inventory adjusted in this business. which we actually disclosed further. Furthermore, from a management point of view, we remain committed to position the business going forward. We aim to recover market share as well as the focal efficiencies across all our operating sites, specifically throughout SADC region. From a margin guidance point of view, this margin guidance was put out to the market in our previous financial year. This is the medium-term guidance. And maybe just to remind our shareholders, this is actually as Seelan mentioned, it's a long business cycle, this is basically through the cycle. So it's basically on a full year basis, which we still remain committed to our medium-term margin guidance. And management is implemented specifically in the lower price environment cost-savings initiatives as we've discussed a bit earlier as well as focusing on our growth initiatives, specifically at our mining as well as in agri-international businesses from that perspective. Maybe touching on a couple of additional initiatives, more specifically on the cost initiatives side. As I mentioned already on the back of this significant decline over the last 3 quarters and the lower price environment. We really made good progress from a cost initiative point of view. We've unlocked ZAR 165 million worth of cost savings initiatives across all our operations. And we're progressing well to meet our annual target for this year, which is in the region between ZAR 250 million and ZAR 300 million from that perspective. We've also made really good progress in our international expansion, in mining as well as in our agriculture business. Then mining specifically, what you can see coming through in the numbers, Indonesia as well as in Canada, as previously disclosed, it was a long lead cycle. There was a lot of mobilization costs through the system, but now we can see we're starting to turn it tight as those business becomes profitable and driving volumes from that perspective. The team still remain focused on enhancing our margins and also delivering our medium-term guidance ranges. Maybe just from a balance sheet point of view, our balance sheet remains strong. Specifically, if you look at the working capital, inventory reduced to ZAR 4.7 billion, which is due to the lower price environment as well as the managing of the price risk, as Seelan touched on, specifically in quarter 1, where we saw that significant further decline in commodity prices. That also resulted in further lower turnout in payables from that perspective. But our focus on net working capital remains strong. That resulted in a release of ZAR 1.1 billion relative to the comparative period. And if you take into account where our year-end position was, which is normally the low end of our working capital cycle versus half year is normally the higher end of our working capital cycle. We further released another ZAR 200 million just for the 6 months in that space. That resulted in a really strong cash position of ZAR 1.6 billion for the half year. Furthermore, that ZAR 1.6 billion was also supported by prepaid sales in agriculture relative to the comparative period, and that was on the back of potential increase or anticipation of increased pricing and also, as Seelan mentioned, that is slightly offset by the higher debtor position in our Agri Zambia business. Furthermore, from -- we returned capital to shareholders in the form of ordinary dividend, which amounted to ZAR 629 million from that perspective. Maybe just to point to note specifically the investments there. That relates to the JV investment in MNK specifically effective from the end of May. Then maybe just touching on our capital expenditure. As previously indicated, we remain focused on investing into our key pillars, and that is investing in our core, as previously discussed, has [ wireless ] investing in our international expansion, our international business in agriculture as well as in mining, which is underpinned also by our ESG strategy. Maybe just one thing to highlight specifically on the capital expenses. We gave guidance of the ZAR 700 million for the year, which was slightly higher. That what we can see at the half year, we're tracking slightly below that. The guidance is still on tack for the full year as some of those capital flows flow into the second half of this year. Maybe just one point to note, we don't starve our plans of any capital, but we follow a very disciplined capital allocation framework in order to make sure that we only capitalize cost of the capital nature onto our balance sheet. The [ risk is ] expensed by repair and maintenance into the income statement, which is into account in how we think about our guidance from an operating margin point of view. And then maybe just closing out specifically on the cash flow. As I already mentioned, the focus on net working capital, the disciplined capital allocation resulted in a good cash generation from Omnia perspective. The net working capital release as well as the cash generated from operations resulted in the ZAR 1.6 billion net cash position. Maybe just notable outflows during the period was the ordinary dividend of ZAR 629 million as well as the CapEx expense of ZAR 263 million as well as the investment in the JV as we seeded those contracts into the JV, which amounted to ZAR 235 million. And maybe just closing out the last slide, the movement in cash. As earlier explained, this is the movement from our year-end position, which is the low end of our net working capital cycle versus where we find ourselves at half year. Obviously, you can see the big dividend payout there. But you can see the strong cash generation from operations as well as further release in working capital. It just talks to the disciplined capital allocation from our teams, as well as to ensure that protect and safeguard our balance sheet in these volatile and uncertain environment. Thank you. I'll maybe just hand over to Seelan for the close.

Thank you, Stephan, and I think we must thank you and the team for all the effort it takes to get these results out and -- we're obviously getting them out a little bit sooner each period than we initially did. So thank you for that. I'm just going to try and bring things together in the form of a close. And I want to firstly just talk about our growth initiatives and tell you where we are on that score. Firstly, to state, we said before that our focus is to continue to deliver against these 3 pillars, protect and grow our core business. So we've got a fantastic business in terms of supply, manufacture and demand management. There's an immense amount of agility and flexibility in that, that we can sell product on a local basis in South Africa into SADC. We can change product between fertilizer and explosives and maximize the value of the nitrogen molecule. And we've got some great value propositions in that space in BME and in agriculture. So we will continue to invest and protect our core business. The second thing we would do is expand our agriculture international business. So James, our MD in Australia and the team, continue to make good progress to develop partnerships across the world. We continue to distribute via some very, very large agriculture business and we believe we have a great business in our humates investment, and we will continue to expand and run that business prudently. We do know that, that business also is highly sought after, and I will talk a little bit about that later. We will also continue to grow our mining international business. And I think Ralf has made great traction in Canada and Indonesia, and we hope to leverage the investments we've made in Australia and hopefully see our Australian entity also grow profits the way the other 2 have. We've touched on a number of other points on this slide, so I'm not going to repeat those. If I just go one step deeper, and this is something we haven't done before. So bear with me, and hopefully, you can have a cup of coffee just now for those of you who are in the room. But we want you to give you a sense of what our competitive advantage is in our supply chain. We believe we have an incredible moat in our supply and manufacturing complex in South Africa. And we wanted to talk through that a little bit. So this diagram tries to achieve that. And what we're showing you there is we have sources of inputs. So we have various sources where we can get ammonia from. We have various sources where we can buy urea and other inputs from. So we have a source, which is from Sasolburg, which is from Sasol itself. A source from Secunda and a source from Richards Bay, where we can buy a ship, we can bring the ship to Richards Bay, put it into our facility there and then train it up. So those sources then either move via pipe, they move by a road or they move via rail into our facilities. So when you hear me speaking about all the macro challenges, you know probably at any point in time, maybe the rail didn't work or maybe the port didn't work, or maybe the road didn't work or maybe the pipe didn't work. But I guess what our competitive advantage is that we are able to move between all of those. And in certain instances, when one works and one doesn't, we can do something a little bit differently. We then take this into our plants. And what you do know is our executive sitting in the front here, they run the largest capacity, the most modern, and they tell me they're most reliable as well and they deliver that in terms of our plant. So then this feedstock goes into our plants. And we're able to then optimize that between the agri market in South Africa, the agri market in Africa, the mining market in South Africa, the mining market in Africa and also into some strategic sales and ammonia derivatives to other customers. And that has been what we've been doing and optimizing in our business. That is -- it's this process that has resulted in us limiting the impact that massive decline in commodity prices could have had in our business and also allow us to capture the upside. And the next slide, I'm going to talk to you about how we capture the upside. We then also have the option at the bottom to import both raw materials and finished products. So in times, in years, in quarters or in half years, when we decide to make a little bit less fertilizer and import some fertilizer and optimize the use of our supply chain, our plants. There's still a lot we can do there. But what you're seeing is the value that's being generated, there is lower stock, inventory days, higher cash conversion cycles. What you're seeing is our business. demonstrating a higher degree of resilience to volatility. And this is something we will guide against this flexibility. We will protect -- where we feel we need more rail wagons, we will buy them and build them, which we have done in the current period. We've ordered 20 more rail wagons and taken delivery of 3 and where we feel our plant or our facility is under threat due to reliability of energy, we will put up a solar plant, which you see us having done and delivering 10 -- more than 10 megawatts at peak performance. This is -- we'll continue to bonus out. But this just gives you a view into the pilots cabin of what's happening at the back and how we're optimizing and what flexibility we have. If you look at the fact that we have been able to supply through various challenges, we've been able to do that because of the agility because of the flexibility we have in terms of this supply production and demand. What this has done for us, and if I just go back, so I'm going to build out a little bit on that strategic sales bucket right at the bottom. So we said previously, and you would have heard me say that we've made a decision as a management team not only to sell our produce to BME and to our agriculture business, but also to sell our product on a wholesale basis. So what you do know is we have a number of nitrogen derivative products. And we've entered into a process to sell those on a strategic basis where customers, who're not our customers need the product, where other users of the product on a wholesale basis need it. And over the last few years, if I would just take FY '19 to FY '23, and we're just using 100 to 187 as to give you a value. We've increased the amount of strategic sales we've done through our facilities by 87%. This has been -- this is a testament to the agility and the delivery of the previous slide, and it has helped us in terms of our working capital management, our supply and demand management and our profitability. It shows you as well how we've been able to run our nitric acid plants higher. So if you take broadly from FY '19 to FY '23, 20% higher and we also see how we've been able to -- I think in 2018, 2019, my first job in [indiscernible] was to fix the nitrophosphate plant, how we've been able to get that sorted and ramp up the volumes fairly significantly for us. If you correlate this nitrophos production to the slide we put up previously and how we make money out of that, you can see that's another profit generator for us that actually further move the performance of our business away from being purely an ammonia and urea driven business. So what you're seeing here is further diversification, further agility of being able to sell our product into not only BME and Agri's core markets where both those businesses have grown volumes in the 6 months, but also into an additional market for us. This is not something that we've -- it's very difficult to articulate and -- but I thought a lot of our shareholders have been asking us explain beyond how are you -- What are you beyond correlated to rather than just ammonia and urea, and we've tried to do that on these lines. I think great delivery to demonstrate the value we add on the P, to demonstrate the value we add on strategic sales and to show how we're able to run our facilities better and there's still more to come here. The next growth vector for us is the scaling up of our AgriBio business. And broadly, what you can see there is that our humates volumes are determined by us signing on a new big customer. So they are lumpy. When you sign that customer on, if you take what's happened from '20, financial year '20 to financial year '21, you see the jump. And I guess I'm very pleased to know that we are doing a number of trials with very big distributors, distributors in all parts of the world. And we've been pointing to as those distributors land, we will see another buildup in value. We know that this is an attractive market. These businesses trade at fairly high multiples and we do have significant interest from a partnership perspective in this business, and we continue to look at that and consider how we unlock value in this business going forward. What I also just wanted to touch on is the operating margin in this business. The operating margin in this business you can see of a margin somewhere, let's say, 28%, 30%. That is significantly ahead of your traditional fertilizer business, and it's something that as it grows and as it continues to scale, will have a profound impact on our agri segment. What we've also done is further articulation of and investment in our ag tech business. We've been talking more about this to our customers and our shareholders, and we've been talking more about not just what we do but how we do it. And we've been looking to monetize this further for our group. There are certain elements of our ag tech that we can take to other parts of the world and certain elements of our ag tech that has application in our mining business. And we have started doing that. And we've started seeing some of the benefits from that. There's still more we can do there. Clearly, here is an area where we are in artificial intelligence. We are in intelligent capture of cameras and colors. We're able to sense what is brown, what is green. We're able to spray accurately. If any of you have seen -- I'm not sure what his name is, but he has a name -- Oro It's a difficult name, Louis. But I thought you'd just say as, but if anyone has seen Oro is fully functional. We had him at a number of our different agriculture shows across the country. And he operates 24/7. He doesn't eat as much as I do. He doesn't need as much coffee as I do. It doesn't complain as much as I do. And it gets on with it being very, very accurately. So it doesn't drive as exactly as I do as well, he drives to perfection and precision. We continue to build that out. We continue to form partnerships globally with various technology providers and bring the best that's out there to our farmers. We fundamentally believe that Africa needs the latest and the best tech and we should be providing that from an agriculture perspective. From a mining perspective, we've spoken at length. There are just 3 things we're doing there, growing our Indonesia and that JV moving across those contracts. Ralf is doing that in a very responsible way. We've secured some new contracts there as well, and that's a little bit ahead of where we planned. The Canadian operation is also going well. The blasts are happening on the Cote Gold Mine. Our nonelectric site is there and being commissioned. So I think great progress being made there. Australia is the one area where we'd still like more progress. So it's not fully profitable yet. We're doing some new trials. We've enhanced our management and we've enhanced our infrastructure. So hopefully, at some point, we'll be telling you what we did in Indonesia is now happening in Australia and those profits are coming through. Then we've all touched on it, Stephan did before than I did. We've invested and bought roughly 10% of equity in a business called Hypex Bio. A Swedish-based explosives business. They are the only commercially viable non-nitrate explosives business. It's green. They are blasting in the northern hemisphere in very cold conditions. We've also signed an exclusivity with them to take their product into certain parts of the world. And we will start off by doing some tests and building a test plant of theirs in Canada. Clearly, Canada being in the north and also being cold, the product is tested and fully functional in cold environment. So we'll take that there hopefully, and then we'll start doing the tests in some of the Southern Hemisphere countries where we are involved. We're excited about this. We see a great demand for greener, cleaner explosives going forward. And what was particularly pleasing to me after Ralf put pen to paper, one of our competitors called us up and said, we'd like the x -- called Hypex Bio. And said, we'd like access to the product, and Hypex Bio said, you've got to go through BME because they have sold exclusivity in this territory. So it shows you the demand for a disruptive technology, very similar to what you've got in humate in agriculture. We've now invested in something of a very different nature in the mining business. Very excited about this. It will take time. It's not something that's going to ramp up immediately. So similarly, you will not see a complete end to chemical-based fertilizers. Those are needed. They have a big role to play in food security. Similarly, you will not see just a switch off of nitrogen explosives. You will see a transition. It will take a while. There's a lot of work to be done there, but it's great for our company to be in the forefront of that. You see the impact of our Mining Chemicals business doing very well in the Mining International segment. We believe we've got a great asset year. We believe we've got some great solutions here, and we've made a decision to continue to expand that business. We will add to the team. We will add to the principles we've got. And we will, at the right time, in a very careful manner take this business alongside BME into the territories BME is in and take it to the customers of BME. So actually enhance the value proposition of our BME with these chemicals. I've personally been involved in some of these new sales, meeting some of these customers, and this is a great business we've got. So we'll continue to grow this and more growth will come from it. From an outlook perspective, and we're almost done, there's only 3 slides coming, and I don't have a fourth. We positively leveraged to population growth. So I said previously that food security is of critical importance to all of us. For those of you living in South Africa, you might have seen a few weeks ago, the price of eggs went from ZAR 2.50 to ZAR 8.50 in some places. And every WhatsApp group was saying, is the eggs aren't the eggs. So food is a critical part of what population needs. And that's what we're in. We're in the primary sector of as this population is growing to provide the inputs for food security. We also have our business very aligned to decarbonization and climate change. So Ditebogo spent quite a bit of time initially talking to us about how our investment in ESG is not something we do on the side. It's not something we do at our plant. It's something that's embedded in our value propositions to customers. So we believe the world needing more greener, cleaner and ESG aligned solutions are the solutions we will be providing both in agriculture and both in mining. And that will ensure that we, our business is sustainable, and our business is clearly aligned to these big mega trends. We have demonstrated strong and consistent cash generation. So whether it's the rising, whether it's the high, whether it's the volatile or whether it's declining commodity cycle, we've demonstrated free cash flow, a good net cash position and continuous returns to shareholders. There's a slide at the back of the deck where Glen went and correlated but our dividend yields have been over the last period and maybe it's worth when you're bored, just have a look at that. but strong consistent cash flow. And we believe this is the right thing for our business and also the right thing for our shareholders. So in closing, we operate in primary sectors. We have a very focused business model. So a lot of the things I'm telling you is exactly the same as I've been saying for a number of reporting periods. We've rolled out our purpose in our organization, but we've also rolled out our values. And one of our values is really to strive for excellence to help our people be precise. We operate in both our agri and mining markets to ensure precision, to ensure accuracy, to ensure efficiency. So we've got some very great operational excellence solutions for us. I think we've got a great moat and competitive advantage that we're investing in and protecting and we'll continue to do that. And then finally, to underpin that is the strong capital and cash position. It obviously allows us flexibility. It allows our shareholders to get some view of what we would do with that capital, which we told you. This is how we would spend it and this is how we would return capital to shareholders. But it also allows us to use that capital strength to invest in growth and to invest in protecting our businesses where we believe they are under attack. I think what we've got is a strong management team focused. We've got a very busy planting season ahead of us, good conditions, and we look forward to working hard in the second half of the year to deliver a sustained performance. And hopefully, when we meet in June next year, we will be able to talk through how the next 6 months performed. But I'm going to stop there. and we can take a few questions or comments or thoughts? Should we start on the line first or in the room? Okay. We'll start in the room. Is there any questions in the room. [indiscernible], I thought you would have land from the spring box, there's a way of just throwing it.

Afternoon. Ntuthuko Sithole from SBG Securities. Just wanted to say, Seelan, congratulations to your team on the results given the current macroeconomic conditions. And I was speaking to Marina earlier, I said I was very happy to see a slide with volumes. It adds a lot more science to the art of modeling the future. I just have 2 questions for you, 3 actually. The Mining Chemicals business, I really would love to understand more how it looks currently in terms of location? And I guess, what it is in a short summary and what you'd like it to look like going forward? Secondly, just your concerns around. I know Omnia is not an ammonia based business, but you guys have quite a large exposure to it. And I would like to understand what are the risks -- what are you worried about towards year-end when it comes to the price environment, especially supply security given the current conflict in the Middle East. And lastly, share buybacks. Do you -- should we expect to see more going forward to the end of the year based on what was approved at the last general meeting?

Thanks for that question. I mean just on the volumes, we have disclosed price and volume slides for a number of years. So you will -- percentages. You will see the percentages of volume and price increases. We've always done that at -- in the back, in the appendix. Just in terms of mining chemicals, I think that's a very valid question. What is the value proposition of our Mining Chemicals business, where does it operate? Our Mining Chemicals business operates predominantly in Africa, so predominantly outside of South Africa. And it is predominantly a business that offers the safe transportation of various commodity chemicals, but also certain specialty chemicals, for mineral extraction. That's broadly what it does. It's got a few unique propositions where it has principles in Europe that have certain unique chemic that it works and guests with a mine and then supplies that. And it offers the full bundled service of doing some of that testing and analysis and then getting the chemical to the location. So the opportunities there is to replicate that in South Africa, to replicate that in other countries where BME is strong because it's done that on its side. If we go back to Omnia 4, 5 years ago, we largely ran a Hub-and-spoke business where each business operated separately. And now what we're wanting to do is leverage the customer base and leverage the infrastructure that BME has. We can go a little bit further into that maybe in some of the -- at a future stage or even put out a bit of a brochure or something around that business. From a ammonia perspective, what are we worried about? And that's exactly why we put up that slide. There's certainly a lot of unease about, and our team often says it, it's not about the availability of ammonia. It's about the availability of ammonia at the point of where it's needed. So it's actually the logistics to get the ammonia where it's needed. So there's plenty of ammonia across the world, but you don't need the ammonia in the Gulf, you need the ammonia in Sasolburg. We don't need the ammonia in the Gulf. You need the ammonia in other places where some of our competitors are. And that's where the problem comes is the availability the logistics and the timing of that availability is often out. So that's what worries me is that we have a fairly agile and robust supply chain. But it's to make sure that as the timing is out, we have enough storage, we have enough moving and we have enough product in various stages related to ammonia. I do think, though, in the medium term, you will see a level of consolidation in the space. I do think there are certain manufacturing facilities that are will probably get bigger and stronger and succeed, and there are certain that probably need to change and reconsider where they are. So I think you will see a change in the ammonia landscape where the -- that, yes, landscape in the country. I think in terms of share buybacks, we seek permission to buy back shares, and we got that. We told you how much we got. And I think we said at the time the Board has [ just ] decide an initial transfer of cash to buy back shares. So that will continue in a way that makes sense based on where we are, what our capital allocation is. And clearly, if you look at how much we've spoken about our cash and our balance sheet, we will continue to consider all options of buybacks, dividends, M&A, special dividends. However, just a reminder, we did say that we will do that at year-end. So we're not -- when thinking about a dividend, we have paid dividends at year-end consistently for the last few years. So regardless, we've got a very strong position at half year, we've made the same decision the Board made a decision to say, just look at it at year-end and at year-end, decide what you do about the capital allocation. So yes, I mean, at this point, there's no reason to stop the buyback, but there might -- there's various things we will look at, at all times at all points in time, and we will tell you as we've done now, this is what we've done, and this is why we've done it. Is that okay? Anyone else in the room? I'm assuming the more difficult questions are online.

We have a couple of questions on that. The first from Rowan Goeller of Chronux Research. Within the commodity cycle in the Agriculture division, what is the seasonal impact from pharma demand expected to be this year between the first and second half?

Yes. So that's a great question. I think -- and I said it and I'm when I went down off the stage, and I thought about it, I said, did I say it loud enough? And thanks for the question, Rowan. In essence, what we're seeing is a more normalization of demand. So we expect an overall agriculture segment to have a bigger contribution to the Omnia group in the second half of the year. That's what our expectations are. Having said that, we are in a in a very dynamic environment in terms of climate and planting. There's good agronomic conditions, which we say. There's a high demand for fertilizer, which we see. Fertilizer prices have come down. So farmers are using that as an opportunity to restore some of the soil nutrients. And we are clearly well placed to deliver that fertilizer. Our Head of Marketing and Sales is telling me it's very busy. And there's -- and supply chains are still disrupted. So we're in a strong position. And broadly, what we expect is to move to more of a normalized cycle where the second half overall is better than the first half. Having said that, you've got a lot of factors that play into that. I think what you're seeing here is not a first half that has been -- like we've seen in the prior 2 periods, prior to financial years, where the first halves were inflicted by early purchasing and right now we're in a more normalized agriculture season.

Thank you, Seelan. We did have a similar question from Herbert Kharivhe of Investec, but I think you've addressed that. The next question comes from Adam [ MCmboley ] of Allocated capital. Can you please give us more details what precipitated the 95% fall in operating profit for the chemicals business, talk to pricing and volumes. Strategically, why are you sticking with this business when it has been deteriorating for the past 3 years and has poor margins?

No, thanks for that. I think the Protea business, and if we if we think long through a cycle, so not 3 years or 5 years, but if we take a 10-year horizon, Protea has always been a difficult business for the Omnia group to run. And I think what this management team have said and what I've said is part of Protea not being fully integrated into Omnia makes it a business that must stand up on its own to feet. It makes it a business that has had this cyclicality of being a lot more prone to some of the external factors. We then have said we're going to run the business separately again. We're going to run it to model, and we're going to look for a partner. We -- the business clearly started running well towards model and what we're seeing. And really, this [ 4 ], if you look at the last 6 months of last year, Protea made roughly about ZAR 20 million or ZAR 30 million of -- In mix of was saying ZAR 28 million of earnings. So it already started having a fall. So you see the acute impact of load shedding of logistics of customer issues of the manufacturing sector in that business. Our commitment to that business, it's a 50-year-old business. There's certainly some very strong medication that the business needs to take. We've had to make a few changes in that business. And we do remain committed to the business. We believe that business has a great static reach. It's a great brand. It's got great facilities. And it's got some primary products that are needed for customers and manufacturing across [indiscernible]. What the business does need, it needs a partner, it needs additional principles. It needs some more sales folk maybe. So we remain committed to providing the business with the medication it needs firstly. We remain committed to finding a partner for that business, and we remain committed to fixing that business. I think it's -- the performance is certainly not what we would have expected, and we've started taking the necessary remedial action in that business.

Thank you, Seelan. The next question comes from Herbert Kharivhe of Investec. How does the current TFR situation affect your business? Pharma produce is likely to go bad as the way to export. Does that affect how much the plant? And is the local ammonia supplier still in force majeure?

Yes. So there's a few questions there. I think if we take TFR overall, that is affecting a number of sectors, not just agriculture. It certainly has affected the mining sector. It certainly has affected us. And it has affected our competitors. As far as the force majeure is concerned, we certainly haven't declared any force majeure. And that's why the effort of showing you the slide of how we manage it. We have seen a benefit to us because of our strong supply chain. I do think there's early -- there's a lot of commitment. And there's early signs of wanting TFR to improve and business TFR and government are working together to solve it. Do I fundamentally believe it will solve immediately? No. So I do think a more agile way of moving produce a more agile way of doing things is what's needed. Protea's going bad clearly is not great for food security, and it's not something we want, and it's not good for our farmers. From our perspective, we're not involved in that part of the chain. We involve more at the primary end, so we're involved in the inputs that go in the soil before the plant and potentially after the plant. There is some post-harvest that we do. And clearly, what we want is, we want our farmers and our miners to do well. We want them to be profitable so they can expand and plant more and blast more. So TFR is an issue for us. the ammonia force majeure issues, there might be other companies that have declared force majeure, we haven't. And clearly, as I said, there is ammonia. It just so happens the ammonia might be in the wrong part of the world. And the demand and supply of it is not adequately matched. And we've -- from our perspective, we work very hard to try and manage that logistics. Did I miss anything on that question?

Right. The one part was whether the TFR issues are affecting how much farmers plant.

I don't know, do you want to maybe answer that? I'm not convinced we've seen a slowdown in planting, but Louis can answer that.

No, thank you, Herbert. And thank you for the question. Yes, from a TFR perspective, it's Protea then going out, and I don't think there's a real threat to farmers, especially our maize farmers, which is normally road bound in terms of getting their product either to the mill or to the port for exports. Obviously, there's an impact on citrus farmers and exports farmers. And I've engaged to them extensively over the past 6 months. And it's just phenomenal again, Seelan, how these farmers came up with plans and how they made arrangements to get their product, not only to the port, but actually to the receiving port in the country where they export to. So to answer the question, I don't think there's a big impact from a TFR perspective and also the port situation at this point in time with plantings of our farmers.

We have another question from Wesley Gardener of Rezco Asset Management. Is it fair to say that Omnia has a plus/minus 12-month lead time in purchasing ammonia to sale being made through Omnia's Agri or mining segments?

No, thanks for that question, Wesley. No, it's not -- I wouldn't say 12 months. I think what we've -- if we go back to the slide, what we're trying to demonstrate here, it's going to be tricky to go to that exact slide. What we're trying to demonstrate is that -- there are certain parts of our business where the conversion of ammonia to cash can be as low as 30 or 60 days. Broadly, you'd expect that in our Explosives business. And there are certain parts of our business where the end component in the bag of fertilizer might take 6 months or 9 months or a much longer cycle. So this level of optimization is what our team manages to ensure that where you've got volatile commodity prices, you map the supply and demand, not only to just producing a stock, but also to understanding the risk of the ammonia devaluation or appreciation in the stock that you are carrying. And that's what our supply demand and manufacturing teams do. So there are areas where the in component in a bag of fertilizer, it might take 6 months to convert, but that's the ammonia component. Remember, there's an entire bag and there's other chemicals in that bag as well. But there are areas where -- and if we take our mining business, where ammonia converts a lot quicker into cash and turns through our plant. And this is something the team have to manage and work out and have done work out how to when to make the product and which product to make because we're making -- we have the added flexibility that we have in agriculture business, a explosives business and a strategic sales business, and we can move ammonia and product through each one of those differently to maximize the margin out of that ammonia molecule, not just the income statement effect, but also the stock risk or the working capital risk. And I think this is exactly what we've been able to do very well in the current period.

Thank you, Seelan. The last question online for now is from [indiscernible] of All Weather Capital. On working capital, can you please provide a bit more detail on the increase in trade receivable days and how concentrated the debtors are currently such that what percentage does the top 5 make up of the current debtors balance.

Yes. So I mean, we don't -- we haven't given out that detail. But I guess, obviously, our working capital has got 3 components to it. It's got the stock. It's got the debtors and it's got the creditors and we've also got the supply chain finance that's a bit in there. So from a debtor's perspective, we've obviously got debtors in BME. From an agriculture perspective, we've got debtors in South Africa, where we -- where we largely sell to very large commercial farmers, and we've seen a very good management of the debtors book in those spaces. And obviously, in SADC, we've got different exposure to different debtors there, which is largely government and large contracts in the agriculture space. So we're not -- we -- unfortunately, we will not be able to give you a debtors list, but what we'll talk you through then you're going to have our customers and go and sell [indiscernible], your own fertilizer to them. But what we can tell you is we manage those debtors very carefully. And in all instances, we have to consider whether we need letters of credit from some of the big commercial banks around some of those transactions where we're uncomfortable with the underlying credit rating of the government or that we're dealing with. This is something we look at. And there clearly are at different points in the cycle or different exposures to, let me say, just broadly, Africa, mining and South Africa. Are there specific exposures that out of the ordinary or areas, I think those exposures are being managed. When our track record in this space has been good. Having said that, we have -- you have governments that can't pay in some instances and banks that don't pay in some instances. But I mean, this is something our team have to manage well.

No further questions from the webcast. I don't know if there are any further questions from the floor?

Okay. So thank you then to all of you for coming here. We really appreciate it. And thank you to all of our shareholders online. If you have any further questions, please e-mail our IR team or myself and we will take care of that. And we thank you for the interest in our company and making the time to listen to what we have to say. We look forward to seeing you in June next year. Thank you.