Spur Corporation Ltd (SUR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning to our audience this morning, both in person and online, local and international. A warm welcome to our franchise partners, investors, shareholders and teams. I would like to acknowledge our Board Chairman, Mike Bosman, our Board of Directors, and our Spur Corp executives, who are present this morning, both virtually and in person. I feel truly blessed to have such great leadership for advice and guidance. First and foremost, I'd like to express my thanks to the leadership team and each member of the Spur Corp team, who have demonstrated their commitment to our business and through their passion and hard work, have worked closely with our franchise network to deliver the results you are about to review. This morning, it gives me great pleasure to officially open up the presentation of our fiscal '21 results for the 6-month period from July to December 2022. Cristina, who now celebrates 2 years with Spur Corp, will present the final and segmental review after market and trade in review. Cristina welcome to the agenda. We will end the presentation today with the opportunity to engage with our viewers and address any further questions. The year 2022 was a significant year for Spur Corp as we celebrated our 55th anniversary as a company and also as the Spur Brands 55th year in business. The most loved birthday destination celebrates its own birthday. Our journey continues. I recently drew an analogy for the team about a 55-year-old person. For a moment, think about someone you know who's 55 years old, someone who has walked a significant part of the journey of life, someone who has experienced both the highs and the lows, someone with wisdom. These life experience can be likened to Spur Corp's journey. In its 55 years, the company has been an incredible journey of business expansion with the introduction and growth of new concepts and brands. The business has experienced its highs and lows through economic changes, market disruptions technological advancements and more. Spur Corp has navigated through whatever challenges it has faced with resilience, wisdom and gusto. And it will continue to do so for that is what business is about. We have the insight and skill to nimbly adapt and reinvent, to conquer any market challenge we face. The past couple of years has been a testament to this. The past trading period has presented our business with yet another set of market dynamics, which we will address shortly. First, however, I am pleased to demonstrate how our journey towards leading for the greater good is unfolding with tangible performance results for the first half of our fiscal '23 year. The strategic intent to build brands that lead the experience has paid off. Our fanatical focus on customer experience in our restaurants, supported by strong advertising exposure and true value-added campaigns has delivered the results you will hear about today. Spur Corp's total group restaurant sales increased by 31.5%, higher than the prior period at a level of ZAR 4.8 billion. Group revenue increased by 35% and profit before tax increased by 103%. Headline earnings per share increased by 190.8%. For this reporting period, the Board has approved and declared a dividend of ZAR 0.82 per share to shareholders. These performance results were achieved amidst a challenging trading environment with deteriorating infrastructure. The volatile South African rand high inflation with food inflation peaking at 13.8% in January. Further disruptions to the supply chain following the Ukraine-Russia war, resulted in excess of oil price hikes, which are recovering, but oil is still sitting at an inflation rate of 18.6%. Furthermore, increase in unemployment, pressure on consumer household spend, and increased operating costs at the restaurant level have certainly added to these complexities. This has been compounded by the dramatic increase in power outages and scheduled load shedding estimated at around 208 days in 2022. Our franchisees started installing generators from as far back as 2008. So our network was well-poised to handle the power outages experienced during this period. Currently, 95% of our restaurants have generators or have access to a shopping mall generator. This has enabled our restaurants to remain open for trade during load shedding, and to continue to offer our customers a consistent dining experience. We are currently on an internal drive for improved intelligence on alternative power supply. Together with our franchisees, we are learning about the optimal way to mitigate this challenging situation by exploring alternative power supply options such as inverters, batteries and solar panels. The increased use of generators is putting pressure on franchisees operating cost for generator maintenance and diesel. In a recent audit, we found that generator running expenses account for a cost of between 0.5% and 2.6% of turnover. Our team is currently negotiating a group deal on diesel pricing to help address the issue. It is also noted that in some isolated areas, water shortages persist, which has required our franchisees to install [ George ] tanks and bringing water to continue operating the restaurants to meet our stringent operating standards. Thus, alongside the continued power crisis, water supply is at the top of our list of risks facing the restaurant industry. South Africa is experiencing the most severe power cuts to date, which have created turmoil in the food manufacturing and farming pipelines. While we do have an advantage with our restaurant menus, which offer a range of different proteins besides solely chicken, such as beef, lamb, pork, seafood and plant-based, we, too, felt the impact of the chicken supply chain crisis. Menu items sold with chicken represent 28% of our group's overall turnover. So our procurement teams and suppliers acted swiftly to ensure that we had enough stock to trade for the year-end season, which is a high-volume period. However, the challenge continues as we juggle with higher food inflation, manufacturing delays due to load shedding and slow port clearance of containers. Our menu engineering and product selection for national campaigns has to be considered critically and the best selection needs to be made to satisfy our customers, a wanted menu item at the right price while carefully assessing what will be available during these volatile times. Coming off a higher base with the dramatic increase in food prices from May last year, we are thankfully seeing a few categories reducing in price, but still way under the pre-Ukraine and Russian war prices. To mitigate the supply chain challenges on the 1st of November 2022, we reduced the cost of the overall basket supplied centrally by 2%. This was achieved through bulk negotiations and product innovation. And we'll continue to offer opportunities for savings for our franchisees to those who use the central supply as a convenient one-stop source of product supply for our restaurants. I thank our suppliers and distributor partners, and some of them are online this morning who are on this journey with us, working closely to find alternative solutions, new product items and product alternatives. The collaboration and co-creation is the best in kind. Now for some specific details on our network and portfolio of brands. We currently trade in 13 countries with continued market dominance on the African continent. Globally, we have 642 franchise restaurants, 556 in South Africa and 84 restaurants internationally. We closed one restaurant in Tanzania, but new prospects to reopen are underway in that territory. This month, we opened our first restaurant RocoMamas' fast casual experience in Lumbabashi, Democratic Republic of Congo. So as of this month, we officially trade in a total of 14 countries. We currently trade, as I mentioned, with 642 restaurants, of which 5 are company-owned restaurants, Spur in its 55th year celebrated in the month of October, and it's 300 restaurant. Now we have 304. Spur remains our largest brand footprint at 52% of the restaurant count in South Africa with Panarottis and RocoMamas vying for second place. We have 86 restaurants trading in the international markets with 3 Panarottis and 30 Spur restaurants. RocoMamas is currently a sought-after brand in Africa with 18 restaurants and more to come. Our specialty portfolio now consists of a total of 42 restaurants, which includes the well-known Hussar Grill, Casa Bella and Nikos. The group's network development strategy that was adopted well 20 months ago, known as the RA model in the business focuses on restaurant revamps, relocation and revival strategies and has certainly gained traction across all the brands. During the past 6 months, the group has opened 18 restaurants locally and 4 internationally. In conjunction with our franchisees, we continue to rationalize marginal and problematic sites through the change of hands, relocations or closures if needed. Our internal development team coordinated around 50 development projects in this period. We are now gearing up for the second half as franchisees are eager to revamp now that business has picked up. Revamped restaurants are achieving a growth of anything between 15% to 20% and right up to 25% plus post revamp. Our new restaurants reported today are 50% black-owned and 33% are 100% owned by black franchisees. All international restaurants have black partnerships. Our commitment to growing our black franchise ratio continues. In South Africa, we currently have 157 restaurants with black franchise partners, which represents 28% of the network. On this note, we are pleased to announce that for the first time in the 55 years of Spur Corp's history, we have successfully achieved our first entry-level [ a BBBE ] status. The plan is to continue on this transformation journey and seek opportunities to make a difference for people. Our financial year commenced with a remarkable sales performance growth of 28% in July 2022. It was almost like Christmas in July, which was the second highest turnover month to December. The reporting period was concluded by a bumper year-end trading season. In December '22, the group achieved a record-breaking monthly turnover, which was shared by our franchisees who produced record-breaking trading days and months, the ability of some of the locations to serve meals equal to 400,000 or 500,000 turnover in one single days trading is simply remarkable. I applaud our franchisees and their restaurant teams who have delivered a sterling customer experience and served a high product quality. It was great joy to see long queues outside many of our restaurants with families eager to wait their turn to dine with us. Our international portfolio has traded positively for the first half of the fiscal, both in turnover and profit. We have built strong relationships with our franchise partners, which is a prerequisite to ensure an optimum business process across borders. Africa represents 70% of the portfolio with the top countries being Zambia, Namibia and Kenya in Africa. We have also seen recent turnover increases in markets such as Botswana, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Growth in Africa is 42.6%. Mauritius, with 14 restaurants represents 22% of the international portfolio. Mauritius too has grown at 45%. It continues a good trend this year despite Cyclone Freddie earlier this week, which resulted in closed restaurants for almost 2 days. In this reporting period, restaurant openings in Africa included two new RocoMamas in Ghana, one RocoMamas in India and one Panarottis in Nigeria. In July '22, shortly after the South African scrapped its travel restrictions. And by the way, we've banned the sea route from the organization. South Africa tourist numbers went up by more than 0.5 million tourists in July. This equated to 3x more than 2021 in July. In December, we saw a further significant increase in tourism, which grew by 19.8% from November to December, a shift from one month to another. For the whole of '22, however, tourist arrivals climbed up by 152% year-on-year. 62% of these were visitors from the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands and France. Many of our restaurants were beneficiaries of the increased tourism, which included growth of our restaurants in Oliver Tambo Airport. The Western Cape across all brands delivered a growth of 32% over previous year. In December 2022, Casa Bella in the Western Cape was up by 55% and the Hussar Grill restaurants were up by 65.8%. Hotel occupancy levels rose by 40% in December. Our portfolio of just over 30 restaurants in resorts and casino sites produced an increase well over the 2019 levels. Our top-performing inland casino restaurants, Hussar Grill and Casa Bella grew by higher months, respectively. Major malls. It was evident from the sales performance of our top restaurants in major malls, both super regionals and regional malls that represents 26% of our network, enjoyed a good share of the Christmas spend. Note such as Canal Walk, The Waterfront and Mall of Africa were amongst the top locations that performed well above the national growth average. We had some isolated incidents where landlord generators could not cope with a continuous load shed in, and we had a few days of downtime for repairs. Some neighborhood malls were not fully geared up and still aren't fully geared up with alternative power supply. Our concern, however, is that new installations at shopping malls, generators, inverters and solar panels plus maintenance are driving up the cost of occupancy for tenants for our franchisees, another pressure for the restaurant operating margins. Perhaps the most ubiquitous buzzword of last year was Davos. At the Davos gathering was the word Polycrisis, a great Greek word. The ongoing global and local multiple crisis is creating concern and anxiety for consumers as they struggle through their own polycrisis. I forgot to mention just the total turnover and just go back to that slide. Just group total turnover. As you can see, grew by 31.5% and like-on-like, which is really the measure of real growth 28.6%. And I do highlight RocoMamas, which I'll address a bit later in terms of the heavy discounting on the third-party aggregator during 2021. But a great result, both in system-wide sales and like-on-like. So to continue with the personal crisis consumers are going through. There is economic -- the concern is economic downturn and job insecurity. Concerns about their personal and families mental well-being. Past experience of the pandemic and social unrest. Research shows 57% of South Africa -- South Africans are extremely concerned about their personal financial situation. 86% are concerned about product price increases. Consumers are becoming increasingly focused on cost-saving measures and nearly 99% of shoppers are planning to adopt behaviors that will help them save money. 63% of consumers are willing to share their personal data for loyalty programs and will offer benefits such as rewards and discounts. To date, the Spur Group has 4.4 million family club members, of which over 50% are active monthly. Our new branded apps have been launched for Spur, Panarottis and John Dory's, with the RocoMamas app next in line to launch. Physical and digital B2B gift cards for the year-to-date were over $16 million. The ZAR 50 bar redemption rate shifted from 36% last year to 74% this year. This illustrates that our customers find great value in the benefits offered by our loyalty programs. The health of our brands continues to be closely monitored by our brand custodians to ensure that each brand remains relevant and appealing to our customers. Our most recent tracking study, a biannual survey conducted by Kantar was published earlier this week. It confirmed that the consumers' spontaneous awareness levels are high for all our brands and that the Spur brand delivers a healthy conversion rate of usage and trial. Spur continues to lead the way with the strongest brand power score in the casual dining category. The group's customer count for July to December 2022 was up 21% on previous year. Spur now trades with 305 restaurants in South Africa and 30 in Africa. Spur has maintained its leadership position in the market, and has performed optimally this year, ideally positioned as a family destination that ignites joy. Spur's introduced many innovations this year, such as Just Wings, Candy Straws and the Springbok rugby sponsorship. Spurs bold present on out-of-home billboards, confirms the stature of this brand in the market. In celebration of Spurs' 55th birthday, franchise restaurants hosted over 304 parties for over 9,000 underprivileged children gifting them the special experience of a Spur birthday celebration. This event was a true example of leading for the greater good and simply put, these are our future customers. Spur opened seven new stores this past period with the iconic site of Tulsa spring Morningside as the 300 per restaurant. If you ever visit in Morningside, definitely pop in, it's phenomenal. Baltimore Spur in Hammanskraal, Gauteng, which is just north of Victoria is a fully black-owned restaurant of a black multiple franchise owner. The decision to remove Grill and Go brand from the network and changed all five existing Grill and Go to a standard Spur has been a wise decision. This has been well received by franchisees and customers and an overall growth of 25.4% of turnover is reported since the conversion late November. Spur was also voted the coolest restaurant in South Africa, obviously, and the next-generation awards in 2021 and won the best of Joburg and Pretoria for breakfast, ribs and kids. RocoMamas. Our Rising Star brand, RocoMamas, now with 88 stores in South Africa and 18 internationally is performing well. However, our franchisees' margins are under pressure with the high incidence of third-party deliveries for this brand, particularly burgers or Smash as we call it, which is the second most popular takeaway item after pizza. The RocoMamas restaurants in the Western Cape participated with local discounting campaigns with a new third-party aggregator Bolt in 2022. Turnover by Bolt came at a low margin and accounted for $23 million of sales nationally, 24.5% for the Western Cape. RocoMamas turnover, sadly, we realized that this is not a sustainable strategy, and we requested that our franchisees cease the heavy discounting. However, RocoMamas' USP of Build your Own Smashburger continues to peel the market. Rockets won the best of Joburg for burgers eating, burgers takeout and best shakes, the RocoMamas G-shakes. RocoMamas also opened five new restaurants in South Africa, including their second drive-through in Queensburgh, Victoria, internationally new Roomers have opened 2 in Ghana, 1 in India, and as I mentioned earlier, 1 in DRC. These are just some images of some of the new local stores, RocoMamas Cape Gate just up the road, RocoMamas Spring, hating, the new Ocean's development in KZN and [indiscernible], we have 3 stores, one is a RocoMamas. So that just gives you a view of the wonderful restaurant experience that we've created. The group's takeaway sales since we're talking about fast casual are at 15% of turnover and RocoMamas is producing the highest takeaway sales at 47%. Collect, which is call click and walk-in remains at 53% of the group's takeaway sales and the balance of takeaways for the group was generated by Mr. Delivery and Uber Eats. Panarottis. Panarottis has shown a positive turnaround. The new look Panarottis is now currently at 4 sites, the Val Mall where the pilot site took place, Clearwater Mall in Western side of Johannesburg, Fluor Down Mall, a new store in the Free State and Cape Gate, which are performing well above expectations at 24% right up to 49% post the revamp. Franchisees are eagerly opt in to implement the new look Panarottis and 12 more revamps are due this year. Panarottis' pizza and Express QSR concept prominent in Zambia will soon be upgrading with a new look in this high delivery market it trades. Let's take a look at some of the store photos. This is Panarottis Fluor Down, a new development in Bomonti also performing really well. Panarottis, CapeGate, one of the highest results after revamp. And this is the concept of Panarottis pizza, you can see the branding doesn't say Express. It says Panarottis pizza and has a strong foothold in the Zambia market, and this new look is launching soon. Our brand marketing focus will continue for Panarottis with two new restaurants in Half 1, the restaurant count is 8 in South Africa and 34 international. Panarottis is the second highest contributor to the international turnover at 33%. John Dory's isn't that a magnificent photo. John Dory's opportunity to spread quality seafood experience to a broader market continues. Soon, Cristina will show you the improved operating margin this brand has delivered and a new strategic site in Northgate, Johannesburg has been secured, which is due to open in April, May 2023. The procurement of seafood has been excellent. And during a time when competitors could not supply their networks with Hague, our John Dory's franchisees had a full range of seafood. Sushi continues to grow and is now 23% of sales. The brand's commitment to environment continues and beach and river cleanups continue in key regions. John Dory's currently has 44 restaurants in South Africa and 2 internationally. Specialty restaurants. Our specialty portfolio has produced a simply stellar sales results and profit. The portfolio now consists of 26 Hussar Grills, 2 international, 6 Casa Bella's and 8 Nikos. Four new Hussar Grills were opened late last year. For such a small chain, 4 was phenomenal. These were Hermanos in the Western Cape; Oceans, KZN; Forest Walk in Pretoria; and Harvest Place in Kempton Park an outstanding growth spurt for this Grill House experience. It is our intention to expand the specialty portfolio going forward. Casa Bella has also produced a sterling result even though it is a small portfolio and 80% of the turnover is from the inland region. And Nikos, we are looking to rationalize some of the restaurants, but also showing a good growth, 35.8% with the top 3 stores being [indiscernible], Panslips and Monty Casino. I trust at this point, you have received a good overview and a clear picture of our restaurant sales performance over the past 6 months. We are truly pleased with the results to date, and I applaud all who contributed to them. Cristina will now take you through the financial and segmental overview. Thank you. Over to you, Cristina.

Thank you, Val. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We'll spend some time on the income statement, and then we'll progress to segmental overview with some comments on financial position and cash flow. As Val mentioned, restaurant sales increased by 31.5% over the prior comparable period and 21.1% increase over the second 6 months of the previous financial year with a remarkable performance in July 2022 and another peak in sales in December 2022. Along with improved restaurant turnovers, higher sales in the retail company stores and increased sales from the manufacturing and distribution division led to a continued strong recovery in both group revenue and profit. And as you can see, revenue is then reflected at ZAR 1.5 billion for the period and profit before finance income at ZAR 158 million. Now the most material one-off item in the prior year results is a charge against earnings of ZAR 22 million, as previously disclosed and as previously paid to the South African revenue service of this charge, ZAR 14 million is reflected as an income tax expense and ZAR 8 million is reflected as an interest expense. Thus, the net finance income of the prior year of ZAR 4.9 million reported includes the charge of ZAR 8 million on the SAS matter mentioned earlier. The interest income in the current period increased due to higher cash generated by the business and higher interest rates received. In addition, the tax charge in the prior year includes the ZAR 14 million relating to the SAS matter described earlier. The current year thus reflects a more normalized rate of 30%, closer to our South African tax rate in the prior year of 50%. Further, as previously reported, there's been some restatements to the previous comparable reporting financials to align with the accounting that we applied in the 2022 full financial year. The changes included at the basis of accounting for marketing fund contribution revenues as well as the revenue earned on the sale of goods by an [indiscernible] distributor to franchisees, all to rely with IFRS 15. So what the impact of this? Well, this resulted in profit before tax for the prior period, reducing by ZAR 20 million to ZAR 83 million, as you see reflected and thus a lower comparative base. And this then results in net profit increasing by 183%, as you see on the bottom right-hand side. Finally, as will be covered in the cash flow statement a little bit later, during the period, the group repurchased company shares and these repurchases plus those in the prior year reduced the weighted average number of shares in issue from 84 million shares in December 2021 to 81.8 million at 31 December 2022. Thus, the group reports a 198% increase in earnings per share. Let's continue. We'll move on to the segmental overview. Sorry, one moment. This slide provides a number of data points, quite a busy slide, but it includes on the left, the materiality of each brand and division relative to the group, as well as the segmental growth in revenue and profit and on the right, the margins for the period. The significant takeaways are as follows. The Spur brand accounts for 69% of the group's South African restaurant sales. Followed by RocoMamas and Panarottis, which represent 10% of the group's South African sales. All brands showed a pleasing growth in revenue and profit and all brands report enhanced margins. If you look at the RocoMamas margin there, it does look like it's lower than the prior period, but I'll expand on that in a later slide. If we move to the next slide, we see that this slide reflects the results from the group's South African franchise business and the Spur brand being the most material contributor at 70% to revenue. It reflects revenue and profit for the current period as well as for the previous 2 years reported in financial halves. And the intention is to assist with trend analysis and comparability. Volume growth in South Africa was mainly driven by our other brands per, which increased revenue by 38%. However, they continue to increase profit by 46% by a strong focus on cost control and the current period reflects a remarkable margin of 87.2% from Spur. If we look at the other brands within the group, excluding Spur, all brands reflected an increase in revenue and profit over the last year and over the last 6 months, with Panarottis reporting an increase of 36% in revenue. The Specialty Brands increased revenue by appeasing 68%, driven by a strong performance by Hussar Grill and Casa Bella. All brands showed an increase in margin. Although RocoMamas margin appears to a decrease to 70.2%. It does include a ZAR 1 million contribution by the franchisor, the franchise company to the RocoMamas marketing fund to enhance marketing activities. Thus excluding this sort of nonoperational franchise or contribution, the margin is actually reported at 75%. If we moved to the retail company stores, a strong performance by the company-owned stores, with Hussar Grill benefiting following a recovery in both local and international tourism and margins are reported at a net 8.2%. Our manufacturing and distribution segment, the 32% increase in revenue in the manufacturing and distribution division is directly correlated to the increase in restaurant sales with the bulk of the revenue generated from sales by the group's outsourced distributor. Profit of ZAR 45 million is a contribution from, a, the group's [indiscernible] distributor as well as be the income earned from its central kitchen we have manufactured sources for use in our restaurants and then the source is manufactured by external parties for sale in the retail environment. Our retail source range, which includes 27 SKUs, continues to build the Spur brand experience in our consumer's home. The range has recently been expanded to include these following our products for home consumption. Our retail sources have grown in line with the growth that we are seeing in leading supermarket chains. For the past period, our retail sources have performed 60% above period-on-period. The popular Spur salad dressing, more fondly known as the Pingsauce, is delivering a growth of 68%. All our retail sources are currently manufactured by outsource partners including the renowned and reputable [ in apartment ] source facility, which you can see a picture of their facility on screen. And we have currently commissioned an FMCG specialist to work with us and accelerated the growth of this exciting segment. If we analyze the marketing funds segment, as you all are aware, the group receives marketing funds to be solely applied to marketing activities. And the group accounts for these activities over a period of time in line with IFRS 15. And hence, the amounts reflected in profit is limited. Instead, the group reported a value of ZAR 69.7 million in deferred marketing contributions as a contract liability, reflecting future marketing spend. So the consolidated marketing funds thus remain healthy. I look at our other segments. On the left-hand side of the slide, you'll see other shared services as stated. It includes all services directly related to franchise operations. So it will include things like decor, training, export and call center and improved performance from the decor apartment in support of new stores. and of the export department in support of new international stores and the improved training department efficiencies has resulted in a profit for the period of ZAR 708,000 compared to the loss of ZAR 3.6 million in the prior year. On the right-hand side of the slide, we discuss the corporate costs. And you'll see on the bottom a net ZAR 63.8 million reported for the period, which includes interest income as discussed. If we exclude interest income, the comparable -- or not the comparable with the shared overhead for the period are then ZAR 81 million, which equates to the value in the prior period. However, if we unpack this further, if we unpack ZAR 81 million further unpacking it by extracting some of the noncash items, as I listed there, highlights that corporate overheads are actually ZAR 78 million for the period, as compared to ZAR 70 million in the prior period, and the increase in cost is deliberate, and it mainly relates to project costs for specific initiatives being undertaken by the executive offers and an increase in transformation and sustainability initiatives. For a further breakdown is available in the appendix of the presentation. If we look at a segmental overview on international, the profit before income tax has increased to ZAR 7.7 million following improved trading in the Rest of Africa. Africa excluding Mauritius represents 70% of the international portfolio with good performances in Zambia, Namibia, Kenya and Nigeria, as well mentioned. In addition, Mauritius represents 22% of the international franchise restaurant sales. The Spur brand is most prominent with 43% of the group sales in International, followed by Panarottis at 33%. This comparable profit analysis attempts to reflect the profit for the period adjusted for any nonrecurring items or nonoperational items in both periods for clarity and transparency for shareholders. Marketing funds is listed as a reconciling item, but now less of a material adjustment following the change in accounting treatment adopted in June 2022. In the current period, only a few adjustments are reflected including the RocoMamas marketing contribution previously mentioned and the traditional IFRS ECL adjustments in terms of IFRS 9. Adding back losses in the prior period, however, notably the SAS matter that I've mentioned a few times. And the Nikos contingent consideration that you've seen before results in the comparable profit of the prior year, increasing to ZAR 97 million, and thus, the percentage increase and a comparable profit before tax basis moved from 103% to 80%. The group's balance sheet is largely unchanged. PPE is our investment in our own occupied offices and plants. Our right-of-use assets is our group's lease properties, intangibles and goodwill, largely unchanged. Other noncurrent assets is mainly deferred tax assets, which reflects temporary differences. Note inventory at ZAR 150 million includes ZAR 137 million relating to the inventory held by the outsourced distributor, which is an increase of ZAR 53 million over the ZAR 85 million in June 2022 as a result of increase in peak season trade. Due to the seasonal nature of the business, the receivables line item are also higher than in June and represents a higher level of trade. Restricted cash on our balance sheet of ZAR 65 million represents cash on hand for marketing activities as well as cash on hand from unredeemed gift batches. On the debt side, the sum of the long-term and short-term project liabilities is ZAR 69.7 million. And it's made up of -- well, sorry, the ZAR 70 million is the deferred marketing contributions and ZAR 32 million is the deferred initial license fees received. So the total contract liability is over ZAR 100 million. The trade and other payables include the corresponding credit to inventory of ZAR 139 million being the liability due to the outsource partner, again, due to higher trade. That is ZAR 256 million higher than the ZAR 86 million in June 2022. So it's comparable to the inventory increase. So if we then move on to the cash flow, we see an operating profit of ZAR 189 million. It is simply the profit before tax of ZAR 168 million, add back of depreciation of ZAR 9 million, deduct interest income of ZAR 11 million, the movement in employee-related accruals of ZAR 13 million and then the movement in contract liabilities that I mentioned earlier, those deferred marketing contributions and the license fee of ZAR 21 million, and that brings you to the ZAR 189 million. Our working capital changes is unpacked between payables, receivables and inventories as you can see. And what you can see is that the trend other payables of ZAR 67 million is, in essence, the increase in the liability due to the outsource partner. The trade and other receivables, normal trade. And then the increase in inventories is exactly the value of inventory move relating to the stock held or outsource distributor. Thus, the payables and inventories are an offset, and the net outflow really a higher trade relating to our receivables. If we then move to our next slide. What we have is our net -- I mean, tax paid of ZAR 43 million and dividends paid of ZAR 68 million, as you can see. Key on our cash flow from financing activities, you'll see an outflow of ZAR 36 million. And the bulk of that reflects the ZAR 32 million spent during the current period to purchase 1.5 million treasury shares in addition to the ZAR 1.5 million that we had purchased in the prior year. And that then results in a net movement in cash of ZAR 3.5 million and a closing cash on hand of ZAR 358 million. I will now hand over back to Val to continue the rest of the presentation.

Thank you, Cristina. Over the slide, please. Okay. Just in terms of the SPU foundation, it is pleasing before I move on to the future outlook. I just want to talk briefly about the Spur Foundation. This year, Spur Foundation raised ZAR 2.1 million, 4 ECD centers, which is really awesome. When you look at that by person, we know that the full tummy fund feeds 950 children daily. We also sponsored education for 20 teachers and 20 head mistresses I was going to tell you to guess because it's his question mark there. So really an awesome contribution. We also have plans in place to look at increasing the contribution that the Spur Foundation has. What I'd like to do now is just talk about our own people. Our commitment to people first continues. Our commitment to skills development continues. And in September 2022, our 17 rising leaders graduated from our leadership program in partnership with UCT. Two of our rising leaders were promoted to COO positions at the start of this fiscal. Donovan Cronje, COO of John Dory's; and Cornelis Schutte, COO of Panarottis. As part of continued development, Keith Kamala another rising leader from our KZN region will accompany Amanda Fanback to the USA in May for a trade visit an industry expo. Amanda is the group winner of the Spur Corp's CO Leadership Award for 2022. Two other rising leaders also received awards Archie Moto and Daryl Damon, which is a testament that we are building a pipeline of future leaders in our organization. I applaud all our rising leaders. A further group of candidates will be selected soon to participate in the fiscal '24 rising leaders program. And in addition, Spur Corp continues to fund the education of our staff's children and the investment this year was ZAR 1.1 million. As I mentioned, the Spur Foundation has raised ZAR 2 million and also to mention that Panarottis have ventured onto a new scheme to supply wheelchairs and walking equipment for disabled children. This has started November last year. A real chair often the individual was 5 to 6 years for one. They cost ZAR 200,000 each. So this is really an awesome contribution that the Panarottis brand is doing in their business. If we can just move along a new development, which is the Sedema Sisters. Sedema means Dignity in isiZulu. And this was an all-female initiative that was started in the organization, and we partnered with Inbumba Foundation and Caring for Girls to basically support school girls with sanitary wear. We are also offering the same support in our own facilities for our female staff. So these are just a few examples of some of the incredible initiatives we're doing to give back to communities. If we can just move on just to close off, I think it is important to talk about what the future holds. So as a business, we will continue to accelerate our strategic initiatives that we commenced at the first part of the year. We will be accelerating those. But as we look at the changing market dynamic out there. It is important that we respond to it nimbly. And these are some of the areas of focus and key initiatives that we've highlighted. The first one is a new focus on ESG, raising it to a new level, technology advancement because of the disruption that's happening with automation, the importance for our brands to adapt to consumers' changing demands. The reinvention acceleration. This year, we launched our Ignite or last year, we launched Ignite 67 innovation hub. There are three projects on the go already. We're looking to build that reinvention muscle in the organization and more to come on that in the short term. And then, of course, key to us is the franchise business model of the future. We know that the franchise model is under pressure because of the increase in operating costs and together with our franchisees, we're going to look at and determine what are the strategies we need to put in place to ensure sustainability of franchising in South Africa. One of the items that we've already highlighted is the need to attract the early adopters of franchising into our business. Those young black entrepreneurs that perhaps want to spend $1 million, $1.5 million to get into the franchise business for the benefits that franchising offers you. So that's all from me today. I hope that you have understood the results of the first half. We've got the second half already underway. January and February also look good. We're hoping that the good trend will continue if we're blessed and we do everything we set out to do, but we've got a strong team. We've got a committed franchise network and we're really quite blessed to have delivered these results today. I'm now going to ask Cristina to join me again and we'll open up for some questions. Thank you.

Well, we've got two questions to start with that relate to load shedding. And the first one comes from Jovan Jackson at Laurium Capital who says, "Well done on a good set of results. Will you assist franchisees in installing backup power, given the 125% tax allowance that was announced in the budget speech. There is a short window to do this. Are you able to get landlords to work with you before the allowance disappears?"

Okay. Thank you for that question. As I mentioned earlier, 95% of the restaurants already have power -- alternative power in generators mainly. Some do have inverters. RocoMamas, in fact, is almost 100%. It's 97%. So the opportunity would be for probably new restaurants or add different power solutions. But what we -- so it wouldn't really be needed in the network because we already are fairly represented in terms of generator power. Hope that answers your question.

And then the next one from Rune Ahmed from Denker Capital who says, running generators comes at a cost to the franchisees. Are they pushing for royalty relief from Spur to compensate for this?

Franchisees always want royalty brands. No. What we're doing is we're very aware and as with the past, -- in past trading periods, there have been many dynamics in the marketplace, food inflation, labor, wages, moving to LED lights years ago. We take the same approach with the generator issue at the moment, where we will offer support to try and negotiate better deals on diesel, where we'll try and advise on the best systems, and together, we have to look at how we build the business model to accommodate these additional operating costs. So we will take the same approach as before.

Then another question from Denker Capital. Now that the [ sea route ] is behind us, can you give us a sense of where you expect the H1, H2 seasonality split to normalize on revenue and earnings?

So what I'll -- the comment I'll make is that we are accustomed to the first half being stronger than our second half. And I think on a normalized basis, we would expect that to continue with the restaurant trade just because of the seasons and the festive seasons that are attached with it. I think that, in essence, post the [ sea route, ] we would expect trends to follow the prior environment because we are seeing customers head back to our restaurants.

And then a question from Nick Richer, Signal Asset Management. How should I think about the international stores given the absence of economies of scale, for example, advertising? Are these just pilot stores to test the market?

The international market is a very interesting one. So if you look at the nodes like Zambia, Mauritius, Kenya where we have a larger portfolio, up to 14 stores, 16 stores in some of those markets. A lot of that is locality marketing. Part of the arrangement with our franchise partners is that they run the locality market in. And then we do have a resource at head office that advises them on marketing, but all their marketing funds are deployed back into the market. So no, certainly not in some of the bigger territories. They've got quite a formidable presence with even outdoor, out-of-home advertising. So that's the way it's run. Yes. Maybe the single independents, and we don't have many of those, do have to rely on just local marketing.

Thanks, Val. And then a question for Cristina from Ziad Park from Ion Asset Management. Could you please expand on the future capital allocation considerations, given your strong balance sheet? Will it just be offshore? And is organic growth preferred? Or is M&A a consideration?

Thank you. That's a very good question and quite a meaty one. So Graham, you'll remind me if I haven't covered all the areas. I think -- the group has done well in terms of its organic growth structure and being able to expand with strong operational controls in place supported the -- by predecessor's implementation of financial control. So I think we've done well organically. We've also done small incremental acquisitions with varying levels of success specifically on the cross-border operations. So if the question is what are we going to do with our capital? I mean I think the first thing to note is that it is -- we are very aware of the level of free cash on our balance sheet. We're also aware of the level of rand per share that it represents of our share price in the market. We are actively looking at how to best deploy that, and it is a regular engagement with our Board members. Would we be seeing international? I mean I think it's safe to say that we are still cautious in terms of our growth process in international. But we would want to see the ability to deploy the capital in the best possible manner, and we are not ruling out M&A opportunities although we are conscious that companies do only one or the other. And of course, all of that is subject to shares approval depending on size of transaction. So it is something we are actively working on at the moment. A point to note also that we have, in the current period, generated only a net ZAR 3 million, as you saw from our cash flow statement. In the period, we paid out dividends, we paid the tax man and we bought that sheet. So the free cash that we've retained comes from the period before because obviously, we have utilized our funds in the 6 months.

And then a question for Val also from Ziad. Is low treating broadly net positive or net negative for the group? Are you seeing more people eat out during periods of load shedding.

It's an interesting one because we saw an upturn in the business from July and the low chilling wasn't as pertinent as it is now. So I think it's a combination. I think late June when the masks were taken off, we saw a change in sentiment in the marketplace. So people shopping and visiting restaurants. So I think it does have some correlation perhaps in neighborhood sites. Where you often hear, you even see people SMS in saying, there's load shed in for 2 hours, let's go out to eat. It's easier for the children, easier for cooking. So I think there's a degree of it. But I think overall, consumers are just using restaurants more than ever.

Then the question from [indiscernible] from Weather Capital. She says, congrats on the good results. Can you talk us through the process on the discussions held at Board level on the decision made to commence the share buyback and/or dividend?

The decisions undertaken by the Board, okay? So detailed solvency liquidity calculations with the assessment of any contingent assets and contingent liabilities. And then an evaluation of the various opportunities we have in front of ourselves always compared against the ability to enhance value by buying back shares. And so mandates provided by the Board in terms of quantum, overall quantum, individual price per share and the executive execute on that basis.

Okay. Then it looks like the last question here is from Boamela Mohuda from M&G Investments. He also congratulates the team on a good set of results and asks are the revamp and relocation costs entirely for the account of the franchisees?

Yes, they are. So the asset itself, the restaurant, the property, the restaurant itself and all the equipment and assets and always belong to the franchisee. So part of the agreement in the franchising model is any upgrades and improvements for the franchisees account because that will enhance their value when they sell or exit the business.

Thanks, Val. So there are no further questions. If there are any late questions that do come in, we can respond directly via e-mail to these questions.

Okay. Thank you for the questions, and thank you for your attendance and support, and may the journey continue for Spur Corp. Thank you for this morning.