SG Fleet Group Limited (SGF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the SG Fleet Group Limited 2022 Full Year Results. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Robbie Blau, CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. I know it's a pretty busy reporting day, so I appreciate you making the time to listen to our presentation. My name is Robbie Blau, I'm the CEO of SG Fleet. With me today is Kevin Wundram, our CFO. In summary, it's been a very positive year for us given the macro environment, and we have quite a bit to cover today, so let's get started. As usual, I'll refer to the slide numbers as I go through the presentation. If you could please turn to Slide #3 for a quick overview of the period. I think it's clear to everybody that the current environment is still producing unusual challenges in the form of manufacturing and supply chain disruption, labor pressures and simply the way we now conduct business transactions. In that context, I'm delighted to report that we have made clear progress period after period. That is a sign of a company that operates efficiently and consistently and achieve its goals on a year-by-year basis. All of our businesses have maintained their momentum built up early in the COVID period. And in fact, in the Novated channel, we see continued growth in inquiry levels. Both the Corporate and the Novated channels continue to face the challenge of delivering what remains limited supply against a largely growing order pipeline. As a consequence, those deliveries have been pushed out even further. The LeasePlan integration is going really well. And as I will explain later, is already delivering very tangible outcomes that are supporting our performance. Obviously, we continue to look at ways to accelerate the integration of the LeasePlan business. Not surprisingly, given recent developments, interest in electric vehicles and our EV expertise has picked up further and we're actively innovating in that space to further enhance our competitive advantage. In summary, the combined business is delivering strongly on the potential we have created. Please now turn to Slide #4 for a recap of the period in our Australian Corporate sports and tool-of-trade business. In our tool-of-trade channel, the environment has remained largely unchanged from the first half of the financial year. Competitive activity is mostly rational. There's no doubt that the lack of supply has meant that the industry is hesitant to compete aggressively for orders that cannot be fulfilled within the traditional time frame. We're also seeing limited availability of aftermarket products and accessories. I'll talk about the supply situation and the used market conditions a little later. But essentially, supply has not improved and used vehicle values continued to increase during the second half. Organizations are not putting their fleet requirements on hold, however, despite the mainstream awareness of supply challenges, and we continue to see a very strong and significant stream of new opportunities coming to market. Much like every other organization, we're facing significant pressure on staff resourcing, COVID continues to keep people at home at times and the low unemployment rates are putting pressure on recruitment and of course, lifting remuneration levels. No one has been immune from that, I think. Nevertheless, engagement amongst our people is very strong and healthy and no doubt the buzz around the place since we joined forces with LeasePlan has got something to do with that buzz. In terms of the performance of the Corporate channel. Again, this has been a continuation of the momentum from the previous periods. Our tender win rate has remained stable at a high level and a significant number of our tender responses are now in evaluation stage. During the second half, amongst the many wins were a major double tool-of-trade in Novated tender in the utility sector as well as some very nice sale and leaseback wins in the education sector. As I referred to a few periods ago, cash flow management has been a major focus of our customers during the COVID period, and this continues to generate sale and leaseback opportunities from both new and existing customers. In the existing customer book, retention levels were again very high. In terms of products and services, an ever-increasing environmental focus is driving interest in all potential decarbonization avenues including, of course, electric vehicles, as I mentioned a little earlier. I'll come back to this a bit later. But as an example, during the period, we helped a major financial sector customer switch 1/4 of their very significant fleet to hybrid. So the momentum is really growing now. We also have a significant involvement in installation of charging infrastructure to support these transactions. There is no stopping this trend now, and it will only grow from here. Interest in electric vehicles and our eStart service continued to strengthen in line with us. And as I'll explain later, we are now evolving eStart into an integrated EV solution. Pack up of the Bookingintelligence asset booking solution and the DingGo repair platform service continues to grow across the original SG Fleet customer book. All of our top SG originated customers now take up multiple products and pleasingly, as do about 80% of medium-sized accounts now. The customers acquired as part of the LeasePlan deal have also responded very, very well to the SG Fleet product set and our innovation initiatives, in particular, Bookingintelligence and DingGo. I'll give you some more statistics on that a little later in the presentation. Effectively, we now operate as one business. So while the F '22 financials still separate after LeasePlan contribution, the SG Fleet LeasePlan distinction will disappear into future periods. Please turn now to Slide #5 for a look at our Novated channel. Supported by the high employment rates, customer inquiries in the Novated channel are at their highest levels in almost 4 years. However, the supply situation means that delivering vehicles against the orders received is still our greatest challenge. This is particularly the case for EVs, we tried high demand through the Novated channel. As a consequence of the supply challenges, our Novated pipeline continue to grow throughout the year. While performance of existing orders has been a focus of the business, we didn't stand still in terms of growing our customer book. The acquisition of new customers is tracking really well with a significant number of new accounts coming on board and more opportunities currently sitting in the evaluation stage. Some of these wins are adding several thousand employees each to the total eligible pool. This progress has been helped by extending our best practice lead generation and employee engagement methodologies into the team servicing existing LeasePlan Novated accounts. We've also been on a digitization drive in this channel for some time, and this work has continued in the second half of the year. We continue to invest significant resources to build our new digital customer platform. At Novated, this thing is traditionally a resource-intensive business. This platform will assist us to achieve improved efficiencies and overall lower operating costs in this channel. If you can now turn to Slide 6 for our comments on the New Zealand business. Tender activity in New Zealand is still rebounding after the COVID lockdown level. That means that the demand recovery here will continue over the coming periods. There has been a particular focus on mobility technology and EVs in this market. And competition for available business has been largely rational as I reported in the Australian channel. As in Australia, supply issues remain and used vehicle prices are still elevated. Our combined business in New Zealand has been very successful in retaining existing corporate and government accounts and adding new business in a number of industries. Particularly pleasing with the progress in the SME sector that we've made in the New Zealand business. As you know, SME is a very large part of the New Zealand economy. As is the case in Australia, the LeasePlan customer base in New Zealand have responded very well to the SG Fleet product set and innovation with particular interest in our asset booking solution over there. Turning now to Slide #7 and then look at the U.K. operations. As is the case in Australia, the environment in the U.K. has remained largely unchanged, although there is some evidence consumers are becoming a little more cautious because of rising inflation in that market. Typically, this is reflected in an uptick in used vehicle leasing, although this only accounts for a very, very small percentage. Despite the end of some incentives, EV demand continues to grow strongly with about 1/3 of orders in that market now being fully electric vehicles. If anything, the supply situation in the U.K. worsened during the second half, with most major models continuing to have extremely lengthy lead times. This has impacted new van registrations in particular. The consequence of this, again, has been extremely strong used vehicle values with little normalization expected before the middle of next year. Projects in the business has continued from previous periods with particular success for our Novalease salary sacrifice product in the U.K. market. Despite the supply challenges I just mentioned, customer interest in light commercial EV is strong. And in fact, we received a significant additional order for these vehicles from one of our marquee customers. These wins inevitably lead to further growth in the order pipeline and further delays in deliveries. Within the existing book, further penetration was achieved by introducing additional products and services. In the process, significantly strengthening our customer relationships over there. I'll pass on the supply situation in all our geographies, and I'll come back to that in a bit more detail now on Slide #8. While Kevin will be providing more detail on deliveries and pipeline numbers in a moment, I'd like to provide an update on how the supply chain situation has evolved since I last presented to you about 6 months ago. 6 months ago, I said that a global production recovery was unlikely to lead to full normalization of supply in the near term, that our order pipeline levels would remain elevated and fully into future periods, and then used vehicle values were likely to soften before the fourth quarter of this calendar year. So where are we now? Well, I think the supply situation has, in fact, worsened in some segments, if anything. The Ukraine crisis affected the supply of certain components, aftermarket accessories and parts even further. And some of you may have heard the anecdotes of manufacturers downgrading specs that have already ordered cars because they simply can't get the necessary components. As fleet cars are extended and run longer due to lack of replacements, we're also starting to see the impact of part supply issues as maintenance requirements increase on those vehicles. All that means that wait times for some models are now beyond 12 months. All of these delays mean for the delivery of the orders in our pipeline. But in Australia, the combined SG Fleet Corporate and Novated pipeline grew throughout the period. And given the strong demand we continue to see, we do not expect the pipeline to shrink materially anytime soon. Similarly, in New Zealand and the U.K., growth in orders meant that deliveries in the pipeline continue to be pushed out further. As to used vehicle values, these increased again over the first half. Currently, current industry expectations seem to indicate that this situation is unlikely to change before the middle of 2023. So a further push out again of the expectations. It will be hard to estimate when the market will normalize because we're facing continued disruption of vehicle and parts manufacturing, as I just explained. This is because of conflict or COVID-related staffing problems, but there is, of course, a massive backlog to given the large order pipeline that it fills up over the past 2 years. So in addition to the continued manufacturing sort of disruption, there's still this pipeline to continue. So large growth in the problem, if anything. And even when the time comes that we do start to clear these order pipelines, as we said 6 months ago, we don't believe that used vehicle values will return to their past levels. And a couple of the reasons for that, again, are lower supply, so the demand/supply equation as well as inflation in this price of the vehicle that have happened over the last 12 months. So all of those should mean that -- and also higher material costs coming out of inflation, all those should mean that the bar has permanently been raised, and that used vehicles will hold up at a different level than they were pre-COVID. So that's where supply is. It still remains challenging. And something we will have to manage over the next period. I'll now hand over to Kevin for a closer look at the numbers.

Thank you, Robbie. If you can please turn to Slide 10. The results presented today include LeasePlan from the beginning of September, i.e., for 10 months. We presented the estimated LeasePlan contribution separately, but I should point out that the stand-alone results of LeasePlan are less and less meaningful, given the progress of the integration. Accordingly, this will be the last time we report the LeasePlan results separately. In the 10 months post acquisition, the LeasePlan business has strongly outperformed the projections on which the acquisition was modeled. Looking at SG Fleet on a stand-alone basis. Much like the previous half, the results for this half were materially impacted by the shortages of new vehicles, which has elevated used vehicle pricing to unprecedented levels. However, disposal volumes in the second half were 15% lower than in the first half. And this, together with the inability to deliver new vehicles and reduce the overall organic growth in underlying PBT to 3.1% for the year. Please turn over to Slide 11 for a look at the corporate fleet movement. Organically, SG Fleet's new corporate deliveries reduced by 37.6% versus PCP. But part of the reason for that was that in the PCP, we delivered a large batch of 2,900 vehicles into one of our parcel delivery customer. If we adjust for that, our organic corporate deliveries reduced by 16.4% this reporting period, which was driven by new vehicle stock shortages. These shortages have forced our customers to extend their existing leases. And as a result, on an organic basis, extensions were 54.3% higher than PCP. These shortages have also triggered a very material increases in the order pipeline which in total stands at 10,394 vehicles, which is 3.7x what it was 2 years ago. Turning to Slide 12 for the Novated fleet movement. On an organic basis, Novated deliveries grew by 8.2%, which was very pleasing. Including LeasePlan, our Novated order pipeline stands at 5,070 vehicles at the end of the year, which is 5x what it was 2 years ago. Touching briefly on the Lite Fleet on Slide 13. The Lite Fleet ended the year on 145,000 vehicles, 58,857 of which were acquired as part of the LeasePlan acquisition. Turning to Slide 14 for a look at the individual net revenue streams. On an organic basis, net rental and finance income grew by 64.6% driven by growth in the number of vehicles in inertia, which in turn is caused by the lack of new vehicle stock. With the LeasePlan acquisition, we now have circa 52,000 vehicles funded on the balance sheet with a total book size of $1.4 billion. Over to Slide 15 and touching on Net Mobility Services revenue. As a result of the new vehicle shortages, our total fleet size has reduced slightly in organic terms, excluding LeasePlan. And as a result, Net Mobility Services revenue reduced by 2.3% versus PCP. LeasePlan contributed $21.6 million to this revenue line item for the 10 months period. Turning to Slide 16. Net additional products and services revenue grew organically by 2%, driven primarily by growth in Novated deliveries. This line item was, however, adversely impacted by supply disruptions to vehicle accessories. Over to Slide 17 to look at finance commission. Finance commission reduced by 11.5% versus PCP, driven by a reduction in P&A funded new vehicle deliveries as well as an increase in the overall proportion of extensions in the P&A volume. Please turn to Slide 18. Consistent with previous periods, end of lease income benefited materially from the current market conditions for used vehicles. However in this period, volumes were materially lower due to the increase in the number of its extensions at vehicles in inertia. On an organic basis, SG Fleet had 27% fewer operating lease disposals than PCP. But notwithstanding this, we were still able to deliver organic growth in end of lease income of 23.9% due to the strong market pricing. Please turn to Slide 19 for a brief look at the fleet and credit provisions. These provisions increased materially as a result of bringing on the LeasePlan balance sheet. There was no material net P&L impact as a result of provision movements in the period. Over to Slide 20 for a look at operating expenses. There's been quite a material increase in OpEx versus PCP even on an organic basis. Part of the reason is that employee costs were artificially low in the comparative period as a result of just coming out of the first round of lockdown. Like all other businesses, we are experiencing material wage cost pressure. In addition, we've seen an increase in our staff turnover ratio, which further compounds this. Our technology costs have increased because a lot of the developments in progress at the moment relates to Software-as-a-Service solutions, and these are expensed in line with the new accounting interpretation, whereas historically, this type of development would typically have been capitalized. It goes without saying that we will have a key focus on operating costs in the next few years as we seek to maximize all synergy opportunities. Turning to Slide 21. The net impact of the items discussed in the previous slides is that we were able to grow underlying EPS by 12.4% versus PCP, and we've declared a dividend of $0.0681 per share. Our total dividend for the year amounts to $0.1513 per share, which is an increase of 20.2% versus PCP. Our payout ratio is always based on reported NPATA, i.e., cash EPS. However, for this year, we decided to increase the payout ratio so that the dividend was not adversely impacted by the deal costs incurred in the period. On Slide 22, we present the detailed P&L. I've spoken to the key line items already, so I won't spend more time on this. Please turn to Slide 23 for a look at the balance sheet. Obviously, the balance sheet was materially impacted by the LeasePlan acquisition. So the comparison versus PCP is not that meaningful. We're very pleased that the securitization warehouses have better down and are operating well. And from a corporate debt point of view, our leverage stands at 1.6x operating EBITDA, which is a level that we are very comfortable with. Finally, please turn to Slide 24. Cash generation came in at 92.5% of EBITDA. Cash generation was adversely impacted by an increase in inventory and a reduction in vehicle maintenance funds, which was driven by increased fleet utilization and higher fuel prices. I'll now hand back to Robbie for an operational update.

Thank you, Kevin. Please turn to Slide 26 for an update on the LeasePlan integration process. I spoke in January about the rapid progress we have made in various areas, and that great work has continued since then. The initial phase is coming to a close as we introduce common premises, policies, collaboration tools and shared services processes. In many areas, we are now effectively operating as one team. We also -- we're also close to finalizing the second phase of the integration, which is putting in place a group-wide products and services infrastructure. Phase 3, the operational integration is well progressed with target operating models now being designed for imminent implementation. That means that we have already been able to start work on the major driver of synergy extraction, which is Phase 4 or the systems integration. In short, the integration is progressing very, very well. And as I said earlier, we continue to look for ways to further accelerate this process. Please now turn to Slide #27 for a look at some of the positive outcomes that the integration has already delivered. Operationally, we've been seeing a clear impact on the integration work done to date. And this is firmly improving our efficiency as well as our competitive positioning. We are now well down the path of common procurement in Australia with the benefits of that to come through during this financial year. New Zealand will follow shortly. This rollout has again confirmed our synergy expectations. In the disposal area, we've now started selling some LeasePlan vehicles through the SG Fleet tender sales channel, creating a better outcome for both our customers and our business. More broadly, we continue to introduce LeasePlan customers to the SG Fleet product set, as I mentioned earlier. In terms of our competitive positioning, we're bringing together the best of both worlds in making a clear difference in the market that we compete in. The combined sales team has now received training across the full products and services range and we are now able to showcase the quality of our combined offering in every single interaction with existing and prospective customers. As I mentioned earlier, SG Fleet's lead generation methodology has now been extended to the broad Novated team, and our Novated education teams are working hand-in-hand with existing LeasePlan customers to deliver customized employee engagement activities and drive higher conversion rates. There's no doubt that these efforts have not only allowed us to retain existing LeasePlan customers, but also deepen our relationships with them. The ability to present the full combined range of our products and services and the value they deliver is also driving penetration across both existing SG Fleet's and LeasePlan customers. While a number of additional products will only become available for cross-sell once the systems integration is complete, the reception from LeasePlan customers of the currently available SG Fleet Solutions has been very, very positive. Our in-house innovation capability has really opened up an entirely new range of options for existing LeasePlan customers. I think I have shared when we made the acquisition that the LeasePlan customers have not seen too much innovation for a while given some group initiatives around systems in that business. And the fact that we've opened these doors has been majorly, majorly successful for us. As mentioned earlier, there's been a particularly strong uptake amongst LeasePlan customers of our Bookingintelligence asset booking product and the DingGo repair platform service. We've already got dozens of LeasePlan customers signing up for the DingGo platform, which is a really great outcome. The used personal vehicle sales solution trade advantage is now also live in the LeasePlan Novated book, and we expect to see good results out of that during this period as well. Please now turn to Slide #28 for a quick update on how we're tracking against the 5-year horizon time lines I presented when I last reported to you in February. All the trends presented on this slide at our half year results are still very much in place. I'd like to touch on a few where there have been developments over the past 6 months. One obvious one is electric vehicles, as I've touched on earlier. Clearly, there have been major developments in the space in Australia recently, and I'll come back to that on the next slide. As I mentioned before, the timing of supply normalization and the corresponding used vehicle values adjustment has slipped again by at least 12 months in our view. In terms of the LeasePlan integration, as I said, we are indeed taking advantage of our greater scale already and are realizing the synergies expected at this time. The system integration work continues. Our cost and efficiency improvement project is proceeding as planned with increased automation and digitization of our processes top -- front of mind for us. The new corporate credit system is also being implemented. In terms of innovation, we're expanding our range of mobility services with the investments in eBike solutions provider Zoomo announced earlier this year in electric vehicles and EV-related services are ever increasing demand. I'll come back to both of these themes a little later. And as just explained, we continue to utilize our strengthened competitive position to support our above-market win rates and we're making significant gains in terms of product penetration across our existing customer book. If you could now turn to Slide 29 for a closer look at the very topical electric vehicle situation. We've spoken about the advent of electric vehicles previously. And while in our U.K. business, this has been a reality for some time now, Australia and New Zealand have been playing catch-up to date. Transport emissions reduction has, of course, been a hot political topic here this year with the elections. And in the past 3 weeks alone, we've seen the tabling of a climate bill in Australia and more pertinently for our industry, the EV FBT exemption amendments both. In Australia, there's been a pointed lack of EV suppliers as most manufacturers have been shipping their stock to countries with fuel efficiency standards to avoid emission penalties. Given the recent developments here, we may see some legislative measures to address that situation too. Regardless of the legislative situation, it's abundantly clear that the greater focus on ESG risk management across the globe is also shaping the decarbonization conversation here in Australia. Whereas in the past conversations with our customers were purely about the fleet, that fleet is now seen as just one component or contributor to achieve wider environmental objectives. It's become an integral part of how their world is changing. I'll come back to it in a minute to show how it is driving interest in our eStart product amongst Corporate customers. We're in a fortunate position of having gathered considerable expertise in the EV space in the U.K., and we are, of course, deploying that unique knowledge over here and in New Zealand. In the U.K., EVs now make up about 30% of our order book. Close to 15% of our existing fleet are EVs, and that percentage is considerably higher for personal contract hired vehicles and growing I must say. In Australia in contrast, tool-of-trade customers are looking ahead to EVs. But given the number of vehicles they would require, availability issues are currently still a major concern and limiting factor. The number of EVs in our Australian tool-of-trade fleet grew by 45% in 2022. Unfortunately, penetration is still at a pretty low 1%. And that unfortunately, is about double the national penetration figures. So that just shows you the gap between Australia and the U.K. And we -- but that also, in my mind, illustrates massive potential and massive opportunity. And that's the real message here today. Penetration is somewhat higher in New Zealand where EVs account for about 5% of our fleet. The number of EVs in the fleet there increased six-folds over the year. So the trend is very, very clear where we go. And we have to deal with supply issues but the opportunity is certainly immense. Yes, there's ever increasing interest. And the demand for our eStart product illustrates that organizations are looking ahead, but we do have to see the massive switch coming as supply unlocks. Similarly, Novated interest was a really strong prior to the FBT announcements. And the number of EVs in this channel tripled over the last year, but supply issues are again holding back some drivers from actually making the switch. The planned tax changes are likely to get an even faster ramp-up as the idea of salary packaging a vehicle will now become a very appealing option for an additional pool of drivers. And again, our experience in the U.K. show that those incentives created the momentum. But that momentum continues even if the incentives ultimately disappear, but you need to start. So some of those incentives have started to disappear in the U.K., and we completely have not seen a slowdown quite the opposite in the interest. So it needs to kickstart and it needs the stock, short answer. But again, we've got to get the stock out. As I said, but we are certainly ready to cater for that demand. Our in-house expertise is growing. The size of the team that's able to sell this product and understand the product and guide customers through the product is growing. And so we're very, very focused on this very large opportunity. So in both channels, we're in a perfect position, as I said, to deploy that expertise and our relationships with manufacturers and charging providers is growing every day in this area. And certainly when supply improves, we'll be able to execute, we believe in a very leading position in the market. Please now turn to Slide 30 to see how we're evolving our offering in the zero emission space. As I mentioned, there's been a clear trend in the past year towards a greater environmental focus in tender documents and in presentations. We conducted a customer survey earlier this year and found that fleet managers identified decarbonization as having a very significant impact on the operation of corporate fleet. Again, a major change from a few years ago. A large proportion also reported setting sustainability objectives inside their organizations is becoming important. Customers are now increasingly asking us to be a partner in that decarbonization program. And they've identified fleet emissions as a very key lever in the pursuit of their objectives. In line with that, we're rapidly evolving our eStart solution into an integrated approach to decarbonization of transport and the setting on emission reduction targets. eStart is now a full-scale change management product that meets the needs of those changing corporates and their ESG agendas. An initial trial of this product has received very positive feedback, and we look to deliver the solution to a very wide cross section of our customer base imminently. This will obviously allow us to develop new customer relationships over time as well using this product as an entrance to new customers. So an entirely new segment will open up for us out of this initiative. Additionally, in February, I mentioned that we made a small investment in Zoomo, which provides a fully vertically integrated eBike and eCargo product. This investment is in line with our strategy to invest in know-how and expertise in areas that help us build a very comprehensive and multimodal mobility solution for our customers. This micro mobility market is expected to grow significantly during this decade. And there's no doubt that it will rapidly become a sustainable and efficient solution for last mile delivery and for personal transport. Since we took a stake in this business, we worked closely with the Zoomo team to put together a value proposition for both our Corporate and our Novated channels. We'll be introducing Zoomo to our corporate and government tool-of-trade customers, and we have many use cases that are already showing interest in the solution as well as through our Novated leasing channels, and that's both here and in the U.K. market. Together with our Bookingintelligence asset booking tool and the subscription services provided by Carly, Zoomo solutions will play a very important part in how we will shape the future of delivering sustainable mobility to our customers. Having already spoken about how we assist our customers with their ESG agendas, please turn to Slide 31 for a few words on our own ESG approach. As mentioned before, many of our customers look to us to help them manage transport-related emissions. As a fleet manager, we do, of course, have the expertise to map out a path to minimize the environmental impacts of fleet generally. And while we are an office-based services company with limited impact on the environment, we will ensure that our day-to-day operations minimize resource consumption, waste and emissions. In addition to our customers, we work with our business partners and suppliers to assist them with their own environmental impact reduction initiatives. We firmly believe we need to lead by example in terms of how we manage our own environmental as well as our social and governance risks. We established a sustainability committee a few years ago and published our first sustainability statement last year. We've now also put in place an ESG strategy and an accompanying action plan, which will set out a yearly set of activities to improve our performance in the ESG categories that we've identified as material to our business. Highlights for the '22 financial year include our Climate Active Carbon Neutral Certification in Australia and a significant reduction in energy consumption and our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. We continue to put in place initiatives to support our people. And during the year, we introduced wellness days in addition to standard annual leave entitlements. We've also made further progress with the way we identify and mitigate against modern slavery risks, and we continue to look for opportunities to increase our percentage of spend through Supply Nation, which aims to promote and support procurement through indigenous organizations here in Australia. Across the organization, we ensure we adopt responsible and ethical business practices in all aspects of our operations and a comprehensive governance regime is in place to monitor and manage our performance in that regard. We also ensure that our people are aware and observant of these policies by conducting regular e-learning sessions for them in this area. If you could please now turn to Slide 32 for a recap of today's presentation. So in summary, despite the continued impact of the supply environment on our ability to turn strong order growth into revenue, the second half of the '22 financial year has again been a period of strong progress for us. We grew underlying NPAT by 39.4% over the previous year, which in turn allowed us to increase our total dividend by over 20% on 2021. The Australian Corporate channel continues to build its customer book and widen its products and services range. And demand in the Novated channel has seen further growth in part thanks to a number of newly introduced initiatives that support our customer interactions. In New Zealand, new business activity is rebounding from the lockdown lull. And in the U.K., we continue to go from strength to strength. We are perfectly placed to deploy our industry-leading EV expertise as our corporate customers target continued decarbonization of their operations and have added drivers seek to benefit from a range of incentives that are expected to be introduced. The LeasePlan integration is progressing very, very well, as I said earlier, and we'll continue to look for ways to further accelerate that integration. Every day, we are witnessing the positive results of bringing 2 exceptional businesses together. These outcomes will become more impactful as the integration progresses over the coming periods. During the second half, the combined business has really started hitting its stride, and I look forward to maintaining that momentum and extract the full potential of our strength and market position in future periods. Assuming a continuation of the current environment, we expect to deliver continued progress in our performance in the 2023 financial year. Thank you all for your time, and we'll take your questions now.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Tim Lawson from Macquarie.

Just a first one, just a clarification, just on the supplementary presentation. Is that the only line that's been out of there, the underlying NPAT of $81 million? Is that the only change in that slide?

Yes, it is, Tim.

Just in terms of the abolishing of FBT, can you just talk about what sort of behavior changes you're seeing? Maybe it's just inquiry levels at this point, but both across fleet and Novated?

Yes. Look, it's obviously -- it's just inquiry levels at this point because we haven't seen the final legislation yet. So -- but we're certainly seeing increased interest. We're seeing many more questions being asked about what the effects of that might be. So it is an additional driver that's driving people to think about an electric vehicle. And I think what it will also ultimately do is drive, when there's unavailability of vehicles, it may drive a change of vehicles earlier that might have come in the ordinary course. But that is going to depend on availability too.

Yes, yes. And again, it's probably only at the acquirer level, but are you seeing different behavior across sort of corporate employees versus groups that already have an FBT sort of benefit or exemption?

Look, the behavior we've seen in corporate is about them thinking about their whole decarbonization strategy. It's not about the tax legislation only the greater drivers in that. And as I've said, we've been seeing that for a while. Unfortunately, because of supply issues, we cannot execute on it nearly as strongly as we'd like to.

And particularly on Novated, is there a difference between the inquiries coming from corporate versus those groups that already have a benefit?

Look, most of our Novated business, as you know, is corporate business. So there's certainly a difference, absolutely.

Yes, okay. And it appears that the funding of an EV will be high because it's more expensive to own a nice vehicle. But you win on that, you lose...

Sorry, I missed that.

Sorry because the price of EV is typically higher than maybe the equivalent ICE vehicle, you win on funding. Do you think that offsets the sort of impact from fuel and maintenance that you might see or other areas that you might speak with?

I think it's early days to make that call. We still need to cycle through those assets. And used prices are very elevated at the moment. So it's hard to give you a whole of life estimation. But I think it's simplistic just to say that fuel and maintenance are necessarily going to be less. They will be different, they'll certainly be different. But there are different drivers in those vehicles that make some aspects of driving them more costly than ICE vehicle, car is being one example of that.

Our next question comes from the line of Allan Franklin from Canaccord Genuity.

Just a quick one, perhaps, Kevin, on the cash flow point. Yes, so in the second half, inventories lifted by sort of $25-odd million. Any sort of commentary you can sort of point to on that in terms of -- does that flush out into a future period? Or is that now a normal number? And then on that same cash flow question, just in terms of the reduction in vehicle maintenance fees. Is that just the normalization of people getting back into the vehicles and using them, i.e., a one-off? Or can we expect there to be another sort of cash flow headwind into 2023?

Yes, Allan, I'll deal with the second question first. So the vehicle maintenance funds throughout COVID, were at an artificial high because people just weren't using their vehicles, so they weren't incurring maintenance and weren't incurring fuel. So what we started to see now is people are starting to use their vehicles, so they're incurring maintenance. And then on top of that, the fuel price has gone up materially. So that's also producing a -- causing a reduction in maintenance funds, which is a cash outflow. For us, it's not completely normalized yet. I think it will -- it probably has had some way to go. And of course, it will be impacted on where fuel prices settle ultimately. In relation to the stock levels, the 32 number is higher than a normal -- it's higher than normal levels. Don't expect it to stay at that level. There's a number of tactical things within that. We were sitting with -- over the sort of months leading up to the year-end, one of our customers returned a tranche of vehicles that are fairly similar. So we typically wouldn't sort of flood the market with the same sort of type of vehicle. So tactically we are drip-feeding those into the market so that we don't influence market pricing. And then also June, the early part of June, the market did soften somewhat because school holidays and weather and that kind of thing. So we held some back. And into July, the market recovered strongly. And so we will dispose of those on an orderly basis over the coming months. So I expect the number, the inventory number to be probably a bit softer in December.

Helpful. And just on the RV front -- the vehicle risk front, I appreciate the numbers are there in printed. Just sort of interested in terms of to what extent there's a limitation on the numbers in the second half as a result of obviously shifting LeasePlan back into your model. And just trying to get to an end point of just thinking about what a more normalized disposal number looks like in the region sort of 15,000 to 16,000 if the market allows you to obviously push that level of disposals into the market?