Plato Income Maximiser Limited (PL8) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Right. Good morning, everyone. It's 10:00 Sydney time. We should get started and we've got the green light from our marketing team to get going. So welcome, everyone, to the Plato Income Maximizer or PL8 Half Year Results to the End of December 2025. My name is Chris Meyer. I'm a fellow director or fellow shareholder and a director of the company. My fellow director, Don Hamson is also online. He is just back from a good holiday in Japan. So, Konnichiwa Don, nice to have you with us today. The good news for all of us as PL8 shareholders is that you'll see from today's presentation, and you may have seen from the results that PL8 continues to do exactly what it said it was going to do at IPO 8 years ago. It's beating the market's total return. It's beating the income of the market's return, and it's doing it by paying a monthly, very steady dividend. So we're all very pleased with that. And you'll see with these results, it's more of the same. The good news, though, about these February webinars, in particular, is that Don provides a great update on the dividend market to the end of December. A lot of Aussie companies have reported of late. And so it's hot off the press, if you like, the insights from Don, not just on the markets, but obviously relevant to PL8, what's going on in the dividend market, who's winning and who's losing. So that's the main event today. We'll hear from Don about that. We'll then move to some questions. So if you do have any, please punch them into the Q&A box and we'll get to them at the end. If you do want these slides and for whatever reason you can't follow them online, you can just grab them off the ASX using the PL8 ticker and follow along that way. So with that intro, Don, we look forward to your comments. I'll hand it back to you.

Thanks, Chris, and good morning, fellow shareholders. So I'm -- my presentation is in 2 parts. First one is really just sort of statutory and a company update in terms of what happened in the last 6 months of last year. And the second bit is probably more interesting, which we start to talk a little bit about the dividends that companies we own are paying for the -- I suppose, for the December half, but they're actually announcing and paying them now in February and probably pay them in March and seeing a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, particularly on the resources side there, and I'll get to that in a minute. So without any further ado to go through the company update. For the first half of the year, of fiscal year '26, so that's the December half, PL8, I'll talk about Plato Income Maximizer as PL8 because it's less of a mouthful, generated a profit of $28.4 million. That was about $11 million shy of the previous half -- first half of FY '25. That's purely due to markets being not as strong in Australia in the December half of '25 compared to the December half of '24. The portfolio itself actually performed quite well. It was up 4.8%, which is actually compares to the benchmark of about 4.2%. So we were about a bit over 0.5% ahead of the market in the December half. And over the 6 months, there was [indiscernible] per share dividends, which means we paid a total of $0.033 per share over the 6 months, which is substantially higher than the market yield. In fact, it's about 1.2% higher than the market yield over that 6-month period, which is 2.1%. And since inception, actually, our yield has been about not quite, but nearly 2.5% higher than the benchmark. And as Chris has said that we have 2 objectives. One is to deliver more income, which we've done since inception and during the half; and secondly, to outperform, which again, we've done during the half year, and we're also 20 basis points ahead after fees and costs above the market since inception. So that's good news for shareholders. We're kicking both goals. Look at the -- the chart here in terms of our NTA, we started the period at $1.15, just over $1.15. Investment returns brought that up to add another $0.04-ish. Costs were less than [ $0.001 ] per share, so quite low. We paid out $0.033 in dividends. And so we ended with a pretax NTA of just over $1.16, so a slight increase over the period. We've already talked about the total returns, but here is a table that sets it out, I think, quite simply, which is our total return for the 6 months was 4.8%. Of that, 3.3% was income. The benchmark total return is 4.2%. So 0.6% ahead of the benchmark over that 6-month period. And our excess income was 1.2% higher so than the market. And indeed, also, I think, quite positive, our excess franking we generated was 0.5% more than the market. And you can see this, we've beaten those -- the benchmark over the full -- since inception period on those measures as well. Just looking at the yield of PL8 compared to the yield of the S&P ASX 200 Index. I mean one of the things which I have discussed at previous presentations in the last year or 2 has been the yield on the market has fallen for the last couple of years for some good reasons in that the market has been rising. And if share prices go up, yields go down. The problem, of course, has been that dividends haven't been going up at the same rate as share prices. And so hence, we have seen a decline in both the cash yield and what I'd call the gross yield, which includes franking credits. And for the last 12 months ending December, the ASX 200 and our numbers generated a gross yield of just 4.2% in calendar year 2025. We generated about 7% over that same period, a 4.9% cash yield at PL8 and a 2.1% franking yield. So we're substantially higher, which is our objective, of course. But the problem is that the market, which is essentially the stocks in the market, so the BHPs, the Rios, the CBAs, et cetera, have been trading on much lower yields than historic because historically, the yield on the Australian market has been more -- gross yield has been more like mid-5s, about 5.5%, indeed at some years, 6% gross yield, last 12 months, only 4.2%. So that's been the challenge of the market is that market prices are going up, but dividends haven't gone up as much. And the main culprits, we have talked about this before, have been resource stocks. We saw huge dividends out of resource stocks in 2022. But for the last 3 years, resource stocks in '23, '24 and these are calendar years in '25 have been cutting their dividends because commodity prices have come down. Just giving you some good news, we actually have seen some signs in the last week or 2 in the reporting season that the dividends in the December half for the likes of BHP and Rio are actually going up. And so that downward trend seems to have stopped, which we were hopeful of. Very long term, and this predates actually the listing of PL8 because PL8 listed in May 2017, but the actual investment pool that PL8 invests into the Plato Australian Shares Income Fund has actually been going since September 2011. And you can see the long-term returns of that portfolio, the long-term generated income. The fund is in blue and the market is in gray. And that just highlights that over what is now coming up to later this year will be a 15-year period, we've been able to generate higher total returns in the market, which is the top 2 lines, our fund after fees beaten the market. And along the way, which is the bottom 2 lines, we've generated substantially or distributed substantially more income over what is coming soon to be 15 years. So a long-term track record of delivering both above-market returns and above market income. If you look at the pattern since PL8 listed, we listed in May 2017, as I said, we took about 5 months to build up a kitty of profits. And since that date, we've been able to pay fully franked dividends each month for the last 7.5 -- 8.5 years basically, and it will be 9 years this year in terms of PL8. We did cut our dividends. You might remember way back 6 years ago, we had that -- the pandemic seems -- doesn't seem 6 years ago, but we had that massive cut in dividends in the Australian market. We increased the dividends back to that level, in fact, set a new high level in 2022, but that was when actual dividends in the market peaked in 2022, but we've been able to maintain that same level of dividends over the last 4 years despite the fact that the market yield and market dollar value of dividends has actually fallen. It peaked in 2022 and is below that level. We are hopefully this year that maybe the resource companies will have some decent increases, already have some increases, and we might push back towards those previous peaks. We were -- we still are the first Australian LIC to pay monthly fully franked dividends and now have a long-term history of doing that. And -- on the other side, I think shareholders -- existing shareholders will be very happy that we're still trading at a significant premium to the NTA of the company. That's the share price has got up to around $1.50 at one stage a few weeks ago, and we're trading at up to 20% or 25% premium to NTA. So the stock has been trading very strongly, which I think just highlights that there's still a demand for that regular monthly income. So the problem with having a high share price is it does actually reduce the yield of our company. I'll now turn to the market update, which is probably more interesting. And -- but before I do so, I'll just reflect on -- when we launched this fund, and we actually were largely but not fully targeting retirees, who love regular income, also love fully franked income. And I think the beauty for retirees is you actually do retire, you've got your money in superannuation that right now, the first $2 million of your pension phase superannuation or the transfer -- call the transfer balance cap after you retire this year is $2 million. In fact, if you retire, I think, on the 1st of July this year, it will be $2.1 million. And that first $2 million per person is tax-free, which means you get a full refund of franking and you don't pay that 15% tax, which on the first $2 million. which accumulators do. So our target client base is largely pension phase or retirees, who love that regular income and love franking credits. And you can see that on this chart that a fully franked dividend is actually worth substantially more than other forms of income, a $1 fully franked dividends worth over $1.40 compared to if you don't pay tax, $1 of other income is just worth $1. So we know that franking credits or franked dividends are very valuable for retirees. So -- but getting back to the present and the results season, which has been another quite volatile results season. One of the strongest performance in February actually has been Commonwealth Bank, and it did have a what we call a strong result. But the reality is a strong result. It was 6% cash -- its cash profit was 6% above same period last year, which was about 2% to 3% above market expectations. It's not a huge result, 6% better than last year, but the share price has rallied substantially off the back of that. In fact, banks have been well supported this month. They rose the -- they raised the interim dividend by 4%. It's fully franked. But that just equates to, in fact, I think at the time it announced it at a 4.5% annual gross yield. And that's only just a tick above the market annual gross yield. And in fact, it is better than what CBA has been trading at. There was a time over the last 12 months when CBA was trading at a below market yield. We always think of banks, I think it's high-yield stocks, but there was a time over the last 12 months, quite a long time that CBA was trading so fully valued that it was at a lower yield than the market. It paid out 74% of its earnings, which is sort of in the middle of its 70% to 80% range. It doesn't need to pull back much more than that. So it's a pretty good result, but I mean, it's hardly something to get too excited about, but the market has supported CBA strongly. We often -- CBA is the biggest bank in Australia, and so it's got its finger on the pulse of the economy. And this slide, which has been showing for a number of years, I think, highlights a bit of the state of the economy. It looks at a number of things. But if we look at the spending data on the left-hand side there, Commonwealth Bank split their debit and credit card spending into essential items, which are like electricity and food and discretionary items, which might be like going out for a meal or having a holiday. And it's clearly highlighting in the essentials column, one of the problems in the Australian economy, which has sort of been on earth in the last 9 months, which is inflation has been led out of the bottle again, and we're seeing strong levels of inflation, particularly amongst essential items, which is food and electricity, utility bills. And you can see that the essential spending rates of spending, which essentially people don't cut back on food and electricity generally, the inflation is running at between 4% and 6% for there, which is not good for borrowers because we expect at least one more interest rate rise from the RBA this year, possibly even to inflation numbers yesterday were not particularly encouraging. And you're seeing a bit of increased spending in discretionary, particularly for older people, and I think retirees is probably doing it better than younger people. And the right-hand column just highlights the inflation rate that we're seeing at the moment and are pretty much indicative of the number from yesterday, we're looking at inflation at 3.8%. Remember that, that is headline inflation. But remember, the RBA targets 2% to 3%. And so that headline inflation is well outside of that band. The biggest contributor is housing, including utilities. The next biggest contributor is food. So they are essential items that people have to spend money on and they're going up -- they're big contributors to the inflation rate. So we expect, as I mentioned, at least one more increase in interest rates this year, following on the earlier rise that we -- the latest rise we've seen. JB Hi-Fi has been one of our top stocks for many years. It keeps on keeping on. And again, it did the same thing, earnings up 7%, sales up 7%. Final dividend of $2.10, 75% payout ratio. It doesn't need to invest a lot. So it's trading on above market yield. We like JB Hi-Fi. It's been a great performer for us. Surprisingly, AGL's results, I thought it might have been a bit better given where electricity prices are, but it's trading on a pretty good yield. So from a yield point of view, 7.7% gross yields. We like that stock, although its earnings surprisingly weren't better given where electricity prices are going. A good result, again, we felt from Telstra, 8% increase in NPAT and another small increase to their final dividend, and it's coming back to becoming a yield stock. It's trading at a 5.8% gross yield. So you think back many years ago, Telstra was the darling yield stock in the market and then halved its dividend, well, it's coming back after many years to being a reasonably good dividend yielding stock. But I think the good news really from the reporting season so far has been that we are starting to see some increases in dividends from the mining complex. And of course, Australia is dominated by some large miners, BHP, Rio, Fortescue and then some of the gold miners and gold prices have been strong. But BHP is back to being the biggest stock in Australia. and it increased its dividend. It is quite cyclical because obviously, commodity price is cyclical, but it increased its dividend by 46%. Now this comes off the back of large cuts in its dividends over the last 3 years. So it's still nowhere near its sort of peak dividend, but it's great to see such a large rise. Interestingly, and compared to Rio, now more than 50% of BHP's earnings are driven by copper and copper prices have been very strong. So it used to be all about iron ore, and now it's much more about copper. The other, if you like, pardon the pun, silver lining was that they sold some of their -- most of their silver production for $4 billion, which is a bit of a surprise and a very positive surprise. Silver price have been quite strong, and they've elected basically to pay a lot of that back as dividends. Rio also increased its dividends, not by as much. but still up by 13%, which is good. It only has 30% exposure to copper, so still quite more beholden to iron ore. But even Fortescue, which reported after I put these slides together, has actually increased its dividend. So we're starting to see the mining complex come back. There's always a few laggards and a few dividend traps. And the key, I think, to dividend investing for income, if you're investing for income is make sure you get that income and avoid the dividend traps. And Treasury Wines struggled for a while. Firstly, it was Chinese tariffs. It still really hasn't come back from the China situation. And now it's U.S. tariffs, et cetera, which are holding it back. And one of the problems, I think, in dividend investing is the stocks that look like juicy grade dividend stocks. So if you look at the end of last year, Treasury Wines was trading at a gross yield of nearly 10%, G8 Education over 11% and Spark over 11%. But they've all cut the dividends, Treasury and G8 Education by 100%. So they're not paying any dividend at all. So you might have thought 2 months ago, if you're in those stocks, you're going to get a nice juicy dividend, you end up getting nothing. We try and avoid those. We actually build a model to predict stocks that might have large cuts in dividends for the -- so that we can avoid them because we don't want to be in those sorts of stocks. So clearly, tariffs are still affecting it. And just before I finish and we get to questions, if I look at the overall market because everyone is saying, well, what is the market -- what do things look like going forward? I've shown this chart for a number of years. This takes the dividend cut model that we use at the individual stock level to predict stocks that might cut the yields such as Treasury Wines. And it actually averages it across all the stocks in the market. So the very high likelihood, we had a very high likelihood that Treasury Wines,G8 and Spark would cut their dividends. Those probabilities go into this. This is an average across the market. The latest read on this is actually slightly below the straight line. The straight line is the long-term average of dividend cuts at the market level. And the latest reading is actually slightly better than -- which is reading from this month is slightly better than it has -- than the long-term average, which is good. And when you interpret this chart, a low probability of dividend cut is good. So a lower than -- below the line is good, above the line is bad. So bad was 5, 6 years ago when we were -- we had the pandemic, the huge interest dividend cuts there. So it's a little bit of -- despite the fact we've got rising interest rates in Australia, we're slightly better than average expectations about dividends. And if the cuts are lower, it probably means that dividends are going to increase, and we're starting to see that from the miners and still seeing good dividends from the industrial and financial companies as well. So I am going to leave it there and hand back to Chris to --

Proceed to Q&A. Yes. Good, Don. Well, thanks for that. That was excellent in swift order. So we'll move on to questions now, and thanks, everyone, for your questions. It's always great. It's such an engaged shareholder base, this PL8 shareholder base that we appreciate your questions. Don, the first 2, I might group together in a way because they both relate to the prospects for higher dividends on PL8. So the first question from Chris is straight out, when is the dividend going to be increased, which is probably difficult to comment on, but it's a question nevertheless. And then Nathan asks and rightly points out, I think that PL8 has a very large profit reserve. Does this essentially mean that you could pay a higher dividend because you've got a high profits reserve. So maybe if you just take those 2 in turn, just read PL8 dividend levels.

Yes. Well, I suppose the first question might be linked to the second in that if we've got such a high profit reserve, why don't we pay more dividends? So they're getting the same thing. I think the issue is not really the profit reserve because -- and I would say that our accounting technique, we actually do take -- came through in the half. I mean, capital growth is considered profit as well. So if the investment portfolio goes up, it's considered profit. It means if the market falls can be -- can be a loss as well. So one of the reasons for such a large profit reserve is the market has gone up. And we don't necessarily want no one to pay dividends purely out of capital growth. So in fact, the defining feature probably more on dividend payments is the amount of franking credits that we have and our franking account balance has actually been going down, not up. We still have a few months in reserve, but -- and we're always increasing that bank account balance as we get dividends in from the likes of BHP and CBA. But that is one of the issues. And to link to when should we increase dividends, the reality is we're an investment company. We invest in companies. We get the dividends that are paid to us from those companies. And so we're reliant on dividends at the market level, the ones that we received to grow for us to be able to grow our dividend. Now I mentioned before that actually dividends -- the dollar value of dividends in the Australian market actually peaked in calendar year 2022. And it coincided with some extremely large dividends from the mining stocks, particularly BHP, Rio and Fortescue, but also some of the energy stocks as well, so the Santos, the Woodsides and some of the coal miners. And commodity prices have fallen for most -- the most part of the last 3 years from 2022, but they started to rise or stabilize/rise around the middle to -- in the last half. And we're starting to see that come through in the dividend increases, particularly for BHP and Rio and Fortescue hasn't really affected the energy stocks yet. But hopefully, we will see the market dividends this year, I'm pretty hopeful they will go up given the start that we're having in February. But commodity prices could collapse in the second half of the year because they are quite cyclical and no one really can forecast them, but we don't expect them to collapse, but it's a day-to-day thing. So what I'm saying is that our ability to pay dividends is linked to the market's ability to pay dividends, which is linked to ultimately the profits of those stocks. Commodity prices are a big driver. We're hopeful they'll be positive. We're seeing 5%, 6%, 7% increases from industrial and financial companies like JB Hi-Fi and CBA. We're starting to see some turnaround in resource stocks. If that continues substantially, then we should be able to increase our dividends down the line. But the reality is, and this is the problem we face at the moment is we have been paying more dividends out than we've received for the last couple of years because we've maintained the dividends at the 2022 level, which was the peak of the market. And in fact, market dividends fell for the next couple of years. So the beauty of PL8 is we can -- we have got a bank of profits and a bank of franking credits, and we can smooth out the dividends, but we've been actually overpaying dividends for the last couple of years. So we can't immediately increase dividends if BHP increased its dividend this year because we need to build that kitty back up a bit, particularly the franking account -- franking balance kitty. The profit reserve is not an issue, but the franking balance is.

Yes. I think, Don, just Nathan asked, would you consider paying an unfranked or partially franked dividend? And I think that is something that's at the disposal of the Board. If we deem it to be more important to hold the dividend at its current cash level or even increase the dividend, but partially frank it, that is something that is a possible outcome from a dividend policy standpoint. So it's not like that is a current consideration, but that is in our toolkit, if you like, to be able to do if we deem the cash dividend to be the most important factor that you all care about. Okay. We're moving on to tax then, Don, which is, obviously, there's a bit of news at the moment about the capital gains tax relief, the 50% may be falling to 33%. There's a question here around if the government does manage to pass that as part of the budget in May, do you think it will apply only to individuals and companies and that self-managed super funds when they hit retirement age might still benefit from a 0% tax even on capital gains?

Thanks for that question,[ Lynn ]. Look, I don't know really. What I've -- from what I can -- the rumblings I've heard is that they're talking about it affecting property and particularly residential property. I would have thought if you wouldn't want to differentiate between vehicles because whether a person invests in their own name via a company or via a self-managed super fund, if your aim is to penalize or increase the tax rate on property, you do it for all investors. I mean, I would definitely hope that they wouldn't change the 0 tax rate for pension investors in property. But quite possibly, they might increase the capital gains rate for accumulation super or for balances above $2 million in pension. The -- remember already that within self-managed super funds or super full stop, whether it's self-managed or it's corporate super or government super or industry fund super, that you only get a 33% discount anyway. Your long-term capital gains tax rate is 10% when -- for a 15% accumulation superannuation rate. So to some extent, I think the latest discussions I've heard have been around a 33% discount, and that would actually bring the discount for individuals in line with the discount for super funds. Remembering actually, and maybe I should also say this, companies don't actually get a CGT discount. if you invest in a company, you're taxed at the company tax rate on capital gains. So I don't even get a discount at the moment. So it seems to me the discussions are that individuals will be taxed at a rate, which is -- or the discount will probably maybe move in line to what is a self-managed super fund currently pays.

Yes. And as you point out, Don, hopefully, if it is only on property, it's not going to affect your shareholding in PL8. So -- all right. Don, we've got one more here. The market has obviously been pretty volatile. What happens in terms of your team and reviewing the portfolio? Does the frequency of looking at these stocks sort of increase as the volatility of the market increases?

Not really because, to be honest, we look at everything every day and update prices. And so that continues. I mean, clearly, we -- if we see -- look, if we do see extreme volatility and particularly market volatility, yes, we watch it probably slightly more closely. But every stock, every holding is looked at daily in terms of we update our models and our valuations, et cetera, all updated daily anyway. Look, interestingly, volatility in the last month has been more at the stock level than the market level in terms of we are seeing like yesterday, Woolworths had a slightly better-than-expected result, which reversed the previous year -- last year when it was underperforming Coles. It seems to have got back a bit of its mojo, and we saw a massive move yesterday in the stock. That flows through straight away to valuations. It flows straight away through to the yield we have on the stock, et cetera, and we reevaluate that based on those movements. So we're not really looking any more closely than we do, but we look very closely anyway every day.

Well, Don, I think we're all very grateful that we've got Plato, you and Plato navigating this volatility because I have to say just when you're a shareholder in PL8, it feels remarkably steady and stable. So that tranquility, if you like, that comes about by virtue of the fact that you guys are navigating the market on our behalf, we really do appreciate. So I think with that, Don, we'll say thanks for your comments, and we'll say thanks to the shareholders for their questions and obviously, for your long-term support as a shareholder of PL8. As usual, if you have anything you have on your mind and you want to tell us about it, please reach out to us, and we'll endeavor to get back to you. So with that, I think, Don, another stellar half year. Congratulations. And hopefully, this market throws up some more dividends over the next 6 months, and we can have similar news next time we meet. Thanks for your time.

Thanks, shareholders.