WAM Global Limited ($WGB)

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the interim results webinar for WAM Global. This is your company, and we're pleased to provide you with an update on the first half results, how we're seeing markets and give you an update on what we're doing with the portfolio. Before we begin, a disclaimer is displayed on screen. What we talk about today is general in nature and should not be considered financial advice. In terms of the format for the webinar, I'll begin by giving a bit of an update on the first half results. And then we'll talk about markets. We'll talk about the portfolio and updates and changes that we've been doing before turning to Q&A, which April Lowis will facilitate. So thank you again for joining us, and we look forward to answering any of those questions that you do have. So let's start with the first half results for the period to 31 December. During the half year, the portfolio was down 1%. And this compared to the general MSCI World Index, which was up 8.7%, and we'll go into some of the reasons around how the portfolio performed versus the market. Pleasingly, the Board declared a $0.066 interim dividend which equates to an annualized interim dividend yield of 6.1%, grossed up 8.7%. Since the inception of the fund, we've paid, including franking credits, $1.007 per share, which should be added on to the share price when looking at the returns of the fund. When we look at the TSR for the fund for the last -- of the total shareholder return for the fund for the last 2 years, it has been 21.4% and when you look at the investment portfolio of the underlying portfolio, it's been 13.5%. What's been very pleasing, particularly in the last 12 months has been the narrowing of the discount to NTA. We are trading at a slight premium now, which is pleasing. We've done an enormous amount of work in terms of educating the market on how we run the portfolio, engaging with shareholders and as I said earlier, we welcome your questions and interaction at any point. So we're always available on phone or e-mail to answer any questions that you do have. In terms of -- when we look at the next slide is a slide on the dividends that we have paid over the life of the fund. As I said, it does equate to over $320 million or $1.007 per share. And the interim dividend will be paid at the end of April. If we turn now to the investment process, it has over the life of the fund, we have shown this chart, this slide many times in terms of how we look at companies. We are looking for undervalued growth companies around the world. And when we do that, we look for very high-quality competent management teams. We look for companies with very strong industry positions with sustained companies, with sustainable earnings growth and then a valuation that we think does not reflect the long-term opportunities of those businesses. And then we look -- try to identify catalysts that we think will drive the share price re-rating. When we look around the market and the world today, there is lots of noise right now, whether it's the -- on the geopolitical front, whether it's noise around private credit, AI disruption, it has been a very interesting period. And -- but what is always core to us is staying grounded in our investment process and continuing to be on the ground, meeting the management teams of these companies that we invest in. We do over 700 meetings a year. And as we stick to our process, we think that will pay dividends over the long term. What's really interesting is that there has been some big dispersion across the market in terms of share prices. And when you look at the headline market performance. It does -- it is somewhat -- doesn't reflect some of the movements under the surface. So there's been huge dispersion in winners and losers. And when -- if we just turn to the next slide, you can see what has been performing in the last 8 months, has actually been very dispersed in terms of sectors. And yes, it has been a very interesting picture below the surface for what looks like actually very stable at a headline level looks relatively benign underneath that is some very big dispersion. So -- and I would actually differentiate between what happened from first of July to the end of December was one set of movements and then what's happened in January, February has evolved again. So if we look at what happened in 2025, we had Trump announced the tariffs, we had liberation day sell-off in April last year. And the market did fall at that point. What we then saw was animal spirits kind of kick in towards the back end. We had the big -- One Big Beautiful Bill Act announced in the U.S. We had supportive monetary backdrop and the market actually rallied very strongly after Liberation Day. And we saw what was driving the market to the end of December was actually quite -- if you -- it kind of fed us back to the time in 2021 when there was a lot of unprofitable stocks that we're running, low-quality stocks that were outperforming. And so you saw this enormous dispersion between low quality, low return businesses doing very well in that first half of the financial year through to end of December. In November, December, you had Anthropic in the U.S. announced release at the Claude LLM, which is large language model in the AI space. And you then saw them do a number of releases then again in December and February, and you saw everything particularly -- so the tech sector had been running very strongly, particularly in the hardware area through the back end of up to December. But you saw in January, February, a lot of software names get really hit with these -- the release of the Claude code products, which gave way to a lot of fear around software businesses being disintermediated and we'll go into a bunch of more detail there around the exposures we have in the portfolio and our view as we go through the webinar, but that's kind of how -- so the first half as through to December was more around disruption, and there was AI infrastructure stocks running very hard. And then so a lot of low-quality stocks doing really well, which you can see from the charts there. And then that January and February period has been more disruption concern around software businesses, kind of peaking with Citrini Research that came out in February around basically the end of the world as we know it due to AI disruption for years. So we want to be adaptable and flexible and clearly thinking about all these things when we're positioning the portfolio. But we think there has been -- there is a significant amount of fear that has seen indiscriminate selling across a lot of these names, and we actually think you have to dig below the surface and work out, which businesses are going to be disrupted and which actually are set up for long-term success and will actually benefit from AI. And we think that's the work we're doing now, and we are seeing an enormous amount of opportunities. And when we look across the portfolio and actually how the companies that we invest in did through reporting season and then all the results that they're announcing, it is actually a very positive story and we see very strong earnings growth for the companies that we're invested in and are really excited about the prospects. We have made adjustments in the portfolio over the last 12, 18 months as the noise around AI and the reality of AI kick into the -- and as we see, whether it's job cuts, et cetera, in the economy. So we are flexible and adaptable, as I said, but we are seeing an enormous amount of opportunities right now. When we look at the exposures of the portfolio. We do continue to have a high weighting in the United States of America. You do have enormous amount of high-quality businesses there. And then we do have -- are well diversified across Europe, across -- we've got a few holdings in Australia. And then in terms of when we look at the sector basis, it is, again, very well diversified. We have a relatively high weighting, about 24% in IT, and we'll go into a lot more detail around that and what those exposures are as we go through, but that is not the only story. We have a huge amount of investments, whether it's across health care, across critical assets, business services, exchanges, et cetera. So we think the portfolio is well set up to perform going forward. And as we said, we always come back to earnings growth. And can these companies continue to deliver strong earnings growth and are the valuations at a level that we think does not reflect the opportunity they have going forward. And I think if you stay grounded in consistent earnings growth, share prices eventually reflect that even if there is short-term noise and movements around that. The other point I would just make in terms of the exposure, we have slightly ticked up the cash in recent months. We had been running at about 2% to 3%. It is up at about 5% right now. We're just -- that we are slightly cautious around all the geopolitical noise, the private credit noise, et cetera. So we have taken it up a little bit. But we will absolutely deploy it if we see opportunities and even last night, we were adding some names or adding to positions where we think the share prices have come off to a level that is providing opportunities. The last one is just the company meetings chart that we often put up, which, as I talked to earlier, we do over 700 meetings a year with company management teams. We think this is a core part of our process. particularly at the moment where there is this big disruption fear, getting in front of the management teams around the world of the companies that we invest in and hearing directly from them around what they're doing is very, we think, incredibly important and valuable. And as I said, the market sells things off indiscriminately. But under the surface, a lot of the companies are actually utilizing AI not being disrupted by it. So I think having -- doing that next level of due diligence rather than just sitting behind a screen and watching you saying all software is dead is an additional layer that really differentiates us versus others. With that, why don't I hand over to Nick and Will to run through in a bit more detail around some of the exposures that we have in the portfolio and what we've been doing lately.

Great. Thanks, Catriona. So I'll start with the software space, information technology, particularly the software space, which has seen a whole load of volatility over the recent months, as Catriona has mentioned. So there's been some real question marks on the long-term viability of these business models as AI capabilities have sequentially improved over the last few months. So today, I want to give investors a chance to see what's happened in the software sector, how we're seeing things, our view on how it's going to play out at some of the opportunities that we're seeing going forward and what we're excited about. So starting from where we are today in the software space. The software space has seen a meaningful derating. The share price of software names as a broad category has been incredibly weak. We've seen AI research capabilities from the large language models, the likes of Claude from Anthropic, OpenAI, ChatGPT as well as Gemini from Google improved their capabilities meaningfully in a short space of time. The capabilities are improving with every iteration of the new models, and that's clearly concern on these businesses, which are Software as a Service or digital platform and perceived to have risk -- perceive to have risk of AI. At the same time, these improvements are compounding. So they're not incremental. They're drastically improving all the while hardware efficiency continues to improve. So deployment costs are going down. At the same time, you've seen efficiency go up and model architectures become more and more efficient, which is driving these improvements. So from a software point of view, this is -- like we see some of the structural concerns is there, there's clearly a transition phase, and there is evidence of competitive threat within the software sector. And there are some real questions that need to be asked around the sustainability of pricing power, the availability of switching costs and what is the terminal value and the duration of the competitive advantages that these software businesses have enjoyed over the last couple of years. And we are clearly in the transition mode. However, we are in a market where the market shoots first and ask questions later. So as you can see on the chart, we've seen earnings hold up reasonably well. Earnings have been resilient, but the sector has been broadly sold off. The market has shot first and ask questions later. So this brings me on to where we stand and what our view is for the software sector. So the key to our view is that we do not believe AI is going to displace all software business models and revenue displacement is imminent. We think we're in a transition phase where the market is fairly reassessing the durability of the competitive advantages and the long-term profitability of a whole bunch of companies exposed to software and digital platform as a service. So when we look at the software businesses. We're going to -- we think there's going to be -- it's normal for there to be increased dispersion in a period of technological change. We think there are companies where the economic moats are going to be impaired and we have to be very cautious on the subsequent consequences of those businesses. At the same time, the companies which are going to adapt, deepen engagement, actively embed artificial intelligence into their product stack they're going to strengthen their competitive advantage, and they're going to have huge opportunities going forward. And these are the companies that we like. If we look across our portfolio, last year, we sold out of Adobe, which is previously a top 20 position. We were concerned about the pace of adoption of some of the creative artificial intelligence, large language models that were coming to market, even though Adobe was incredibly cheap and its earnings have held up quite well because we were cautious on the risk, we sold out of our position last year. However, there's still stocks, which we believe will be stronger on the other side. And so as a portfolio, when we think about software application services as a sector, we have roughly 14% of the portfolio exposed to this section of the economy. And we've invested in the names that we're highly convicted about that we've been close to the management team and we believe we have sufficient conviction and evident that they will be long-term winners on the other side. And today, Nick and I will talk through some of those examples. The first comment I want to talk about is SAP, and it's a company I've talked about for many of these webinars for those that have been following. So SAP as a refresher, is a leading enterprise application software business listed in Germany. It's the leader in the space, and they've had been hugely successful transitioning away from license to our own cloud business and accelerating its financial profile while doing so. The key for SAP is that its competitive advantage has never been on the technological side of things, its technological advantage has been its trust within its customers, its embedment into its customer workforce, and its unique contextual data that it has with its customers. It has industry-specific data on supply chain, human resources, it essentially runs the back end of a company and is the backbone. It's a system of record. Additionally, SAP has opportunistically moved to the cloud, have implemented a business data cloud, where they're putting all this contextual data, a unique company data in a single system of record, which they own. This is going to be open source, and they will work with the likes of Claude, OpenAI, Gemini to implement the large language model capabilities into their offering and in fact, they have their own agent, which is Joule, which is streamlining processes they're going to create real productivity savings going forward. So what we're witnessing as investors is there's a real value add as SAP moves on to the cloud. It's been more deeply embedded into its customer workflows. There's incredible upsell opportunity. And we think the software -- front-end software is going to move on to a single platform. And that's where SAP has a huge market share opportunity as well. So it's a good example of -- despite it's been caught up with the software sell off, the share price has been weak and its earnings, we're still very confident on, its cloud backlog gives it great earnings visibility. The catalysts, and we think this is quite unique to SAP within the software space is that it's still accelerating revenue and earnings. And when while doing that, it's very hard to argue that AI is displacing SAP. So we're highly convicted in SAP. It's a great example of where we see opportunities on the other side of AI, and it's one that we think has a very bright future ahead of themselves, and they're making the right actions. And with that, I might pass to Nick, to speak on Intuit.

Yes. Great. Thanks, Will. So just touching, I guess, on SAP first to something Catriona said, we think it's incredibly important in these environments to travel around the world to talk to management teams of real businesses, making decisions around what to do with their companies. On my recent trip to the U.S., I met with a range of companies and asked them effectively, how have the developments in AI altered your thinking around software. Two companies, in particular, were actually rolling out SAP S/4 HANA solutions. I asked the CFO of each if they were debating whether SAP was a critical technology, if they were potentially slowing down their rollouts. And the message was extremely clear that to Will's point, on these critical system of record software solutions like SAP, there really is no choice for enterprises but to roll them out. It was a message which really supported the view that you can't just sit behind the desk. You do have to talk to companies, understand what they're actually doing and is very supportive of these ideas. A similar example would be Intuit, albeit for much, much smaller businesses. They offer core business software like accounting, HR, payments, payroll, and it's a similar concept. So it's a system of record, critical data, you're moving money, you just can't afford to have mistakes. The other part of their business is tax, specifically assisted tax for more complicated tax returns where similar dynamics play out. Now for Intuit, they had a really strong result in late February. Earnings beat expectations by over 10%. And since then, I went to San Francisco and saw the CEO, Sasan Goodarzi and the message was extremely clear. They have incredible opportunities taking the Intuit core product into the mid-market, where many customers are using up to 15 software solutions they can save their customers a ton of money by consolidating onto their products. And again, this is -- they're seeing no signs of slowdown. This is critical software enterprises, mid-market companies continue to adopt. On the tax side, which candidly has been where a lot of the AI risk debate has been occurring, I think there's been a big misunderstanding that meeting -- hearing Sasan talk and considering this really helps to clarify. Approximately half of this business is assisted tax with an accountant in the loop. This is extremely complicated tax returns, where if you get something wrong you'll have a conversation with the IRS. And candidly, free filing options have existed for years, and they're just not suitable for these types of tax returns. So this half of the business grew over 40% last year. Intuit sees significant opportunity in these more complicated tax returns. And again, free file options have existed for years. So this concept of AI generated tax returns we think, is a misunderstanding in the market around Intuit -- how Intuit generate their profits. So for Intuit, with strong results just occurred, saw the CEO and there's a clear message there. We think there will continue to be strong results over the coming quarters. We did take advantage of some of this volatility in February when the pessimism frankly hit quite historical levels to add in a measured fashion to this and some other positions. And we've actually seen a bit of a bounce back since then. So it is kind of a reflection of the fact that at the end of the day, volatility is good for us. So as long as we have the view that these are businesses that will continue to operate well. As Will mentioned, not holding Adobe is the other side of the coin, so making sure we're taking a very selective approach here. If I turn from software to hardware, we've actually been quite vocally of the view that over -- the development of generative AI is the most important technological advancements since at least the Internet. We've been strong believers in the technology. And as a result, have had quite a good percent of the fund invested behind the AI hardware build-out. Now of course, we are very valuation disciplined investors. So it's critical to us to not go chasing speculative investments. We love companies that are high quality that we see as extremely high conviction winners. Will and I will take you through a few of those investments today. But before we do, it's worth sizing up the percentage of the fund that's invested in this area, which is around 18%. So that goes to Catriona's point around wanting to have a nice diversified range of drivers driving the fund, not wanting to be too one-dimensional in terms of a bet on any one theme, albeit 18% is a good percentage of the funds such that we will benefit as this demand continues. So in terms of stocks, I guess, I'll touch quickly on 3, and then I'll pass over to Will. The first one would be Google. Now we love when this occurs, but about 12 months ago, the market was taking the view that Google was an AI loser, predominantly on the view that ChatGPT has been quicker to market, Google was just very slow in developing their product and that they would not improve. We took a differentiated view. We knew that Google invented this technology. And when we looked at their talent density led by Demis Hassabis, we really believe this was a company that had the ability to be a significant winner from AI. As a result, we made Google actually the top holding in the fund, and it performed very well for us in 2025. Now strong results have meant that while the stock is still a great long-term winner, it is less undervalued today. So we've recycled that capital into some other investments in AI hardware. 2 specifically, I would mention ASML and TSMC headquartered in the Netherlands and Taiwan, respectively. Now both of these companies are quasi-monopolistic providers of equipment and manufacturing to the semiconductor industry. You cannot have the AI technological wave without these businesses. And yet, at various points in 2025, these companies were being treated as if there were short-term issues, the market was getting very myopic. Again, situations we love, and we made them holdings in the fund in 2025, which go towards that 18% of the fund that's invested behind AI hardware. So with those examples, I'll pass over to Will to give us one more and continue.

Yes. I'll just reinforce what Mike said in terms of when we're looking at the IT hardware space, there's clearly a lot of CapEx coming from the hyperscalers, which is a cyclical tailwind where we're focused on identifying companies, as companies with structural competitive advantages and not just benefiting from cyclical tailwinds. They've been -- they need to have a unique product, an attractive industry structure and a good management team running the business. The one I'd like to highlight is in the small and mid-cap space, which is called Qnity, which is seen on the slide. they're a spin-off from DuPont and they spun off late last year. So they're a specialty chemicals provider, which are really the picks and shovels to the chip manufacturing plants and their clients include the likes of TSMC, Samsung Electronics, Intel, et cetera. So they're highly mission-critical because they get specked into the manufacturing plans very early on, and over 90% of their revenues are occurring in nature, given they've developed their consumables that go into this manufacturing process. They're very important to their process, even though they're very low cost. There's a high cost of failure for TSMC and Samsung. It's very unlikely that they will move away from these materials providers. especially one of scale like Qnity and so they benefit with volume. The thing that's really interesting with Qnity is that wafer equipment is going up, which is going to be a tailwind for volume for their business, but also the content per wafer is going up. So that's going to apply a multiplier effect to their earnings. We saw last year where wafer equipment spend was largely flat. They still grew their revenue 10% to 11%. This year, wafer spend on equipment is going up mid-single digits and consensus only has been growing revenue at plus 7%. So we think there's still massive consensus earnings upside still to come for this year as this plays out. It's a great example of a less discovered small and mid-cap consumable company that's only covered by 6 sell-side research analysts that people are not talking about, but it's an undervalued growth opportunity with multiple ways to win going forward. Importantly, it's one of a few scale players and it's the only pure-play electronics materials provider, and it has end market exposure to leading edge logic, advanced packaging, all key bottleneck of memory and a high-performance compute going forward. So it's a name we really like and it's a business that we think is solid going forward. The next thematic that we wanted to touch on was critical infrastructure. So we've been looking at the industrial economy for a long time, and it's coming out of a -- it was coming out of the 3-year cyclical trough. Earlier this year, we started to see PMIs inflecting. When we spoke to management teams, we saw some stability as tax got digested and lower interest rates were starting to come into front of mind. And we were still a little bit cautious. So we didn't fully go into the industrial side of the economy. And subsequently, we've seen, obviously, oil prices go up with the tensions in the Middle East. And this brings another layer of uncertainty in terms of the inflation pulse for the U.S. economy over the subsequent period. So how we're approaching this is, we're still finding pockets of the economy that are doing well irregardless of the macroeconomic environment. And this is clearly seen in critical infrastructure. So we've been investing in assets, including in areas such as aerospace and defense, the data center build-out, the electrification of the grid. And those are secular growth drivers that will work and will have strong earnings growth irrespective of what's happening globally. And I'll touch on one example of a portfolio company that we own in the top 20 positions and that's Amrize. So similar to Qnity, Amrize was a spin-off from Holcim, which is listed in Switzerland, and is now a pure-play North American building materials company in aggregates and cement, and they also have a roofing solutions business. These businesses are great because they have irreplicable assets, hard assets, where no one wants to build a new cement or aggregates plant in their backyard and the permitting requirements are very stringent. Amrize has -- is the scale position. And more importantly, their geographical footprint is inland in North America, which gives them great pricing power along the coastal regions of the U.S., you have competition from imported cement and ready-to-mix cement, which creates a more volatile price environment. Whereas if you're inland, there's not a lot of options for you out there. You have pricing power, and the U.S. is actually undersupplied in cement and aggregates. So you have a favorable industry dynamic going forward, and that's evidenced in Amrize's leading profit margins and pricing that they get for their products. The other part of Amrize that's a structural advantage for them is that they have a better cost base. They have an irreplicable logistics network, which includes barges along the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes in the U.S. What that means is they have a cost advantage versus their peers as well. And you can see that in the margin. So those 2 structural competitive advantage form a really interesting investment case for Amrize. At the same time, as they spun off to an independent company, you've seen them take out costs as low-hanging fruit. You have a more focused management team who have been buying stock and there's clear prioritization of shareholder returns, where you see them announce a new dividend and announce a stock buyback. We still think its valuation is cheap relative to its peers, including Vulcan and Martin Marietta in the U.S., and it's one where as they show their earnings rate going forward, we think it will be rewarded with a re-rating. So it's a great business that we like. It is part of the critical infrastructure along with many other names that we own. But with that, I will move on to health care and Nick might touch on that one.

Yes. Great. Thanks, Will. Yes. So the last theme we'll run you through today. And look, so these 4 things, they do represent a good proportion of the funds. So we're trying to give you a look into the drivers of the fund. It's not an exhaustive list, but it is a good list of the various drivers of the fund. So our reasons for wanting investment in health care are quite simple. Frankly, they're not changed from a few years ago, which is we view demographics as destiny. And we can see as clear as day that the societies globally are aging. We're in the steep part of the curve of this process. And we know for a fact that an over 65-year-old will spend over 2x more than a working age person and over 5x more than a person under 18. So when you put these 2 facts together, it's kind of mechanical that health care spend will increase as a percent of GDP going forward. And so we do want good exposure here. Currently, we have about 10% of the fund invested in the health care theme. So I'll touch on the name. I'll pass back to Will to touch on the name to kind of give you some color around the ways we're looking to invest behind health care. So the company I want to discuss is Edwards. They are the global leader by far in minimally invasive heart valves. They had a very strong result in February, where revenues exceeded expectations and you've got -- and I got a lot of forward color that the growth drivers would continue for the business. Since then, on my travels in the U.S., I met with the CFO and the team of Edwards. And the message was clear. The drivers for the 2 core parts of the business, TAVR and TMTT are really strong with clear catalysts in 2026 and including product rollouts and NCD for TAVR, which will unlock additional growth. And just a really clear message around the revenue growth prospects of the business over coming quarters and years. At the same time, talking to the CFO is always nice because you get to grill them on costs and margins. And the message there was very clear. There's a lot of cost line items that they can hold fairly constant and get great margin expansion as they achieve these good revenue growth. So we think putting that together, you get a great earnings power growth in the mid-teens or above. For one of these businesses, which is global leader in their space, a great management team, the kind of company we look to invest behind and clearly a beneficiary of aging societies. So that's a top 20 position in the fund. I'll pass back to Will for another health care example.

Yes. The one I'll talk about is Thermo Fisher, which has been a core portfolio holding in the fund since inception, even though we've produced and added at certain periods. So Thermo Fisher, the infrastructure and picks and shovels for health care, essentially. They do tools, reagents, materials, services for medical research, drug discovery and clinical diagnostics. They're a very, very impressive company, and I recently had the opportunity to go down to Orlando to meet with the CEO, Marc Casper. And it was a really constructive meeting, and it sort of reaffirmed the conviction that we previously had that, a, the biotech and pharma end markets were sequentially improving, which is going to be really strong for Thermo Fisher's earnings going forward. Secondly, we suspected that management had guided prudently. They guided this financial year to the slightly lower end of the midterm targets. But we believe that's an element of conservatism, especially as end markets are improving. And they just don't want to disappoint investors after a turbulent period over the last 2 or 3 years where you saw destocking, inventory build outs, et cetera. So we're in a clean place for the management to execute well, which they historically have done and we're highly confident on the earnings trajectory going forward. The other piece of information that I thought was quite interesting and the market is still underappreciated is their new Accelerate program where they're vertically integrating drug discovery. So they're combining manufacturing capabilities, research organizations, logistics and services, and that's going to increase the speed to market and the cost for their customers, and that's a hugely valuable proposition to them. That's still in its very early innings, and we think they're undercharging for that service given the sheer scale of the cost savings that they're giving to their customers. So Thermo is a name that we still really like. We've been using weakness to opportunistically add. It's a top 20 position in the portfolio. And we think there's a number of positive catalysts yet to come, and the valuation is still trading at a very attractive level. So I hope that gives you a feel for some of the portfolio companies that we invested. I know that's quite a lot. It's not just AI, there's AI involved as well, but we're looking across a broad group of companies trying to find the very best opportunities. And with that, I'll pass back to Catriona now.

Yes. Great. Thanks, guys. As Will said, we're sort of trying to give you a flavor of the exposures in the portfolio, which are well diversified and we are very cognizant of obviously taking into account the macro backdrop. But underlying, we stay true to our process in terms of trying to find these great businesses around the world. That really do have the outstanding management teams, strong industry positions, sustainable earnings growth and are undervalued in our view and then identifying those catalysts. So I hope that's given you a bit of a flavor for some of the holdings in the portfolio. With that, why don't I turn to April to facilitate Q&A from you, our shareholders.

Thanks, Catriona, Nick and Well, for your insights. Before we get into Q&A, I just want to say that this April, we'll be traveling to Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart to meet with our shareholders. The event will include insights from the investment teams. And you'll also have an opportunity to hear from our future generation companies. You can register to attend the event using the QR code on the screen. So thank you, everyone, for joining the webinar. And we've had quite a few questions come in already. Maybe I'll start with Catriona, a question from Gwen. You've covered off AI in the presentation in terms of the impact on the investment portfolio. But do you use AI in your investment process?

Thank you for the question, Gwen. Yes. So I think we're all integrating AI into our lives and investment process generally. And we've all -- we're taking a very fluid approach in terms of testing out all the models across the team and the business. And you've obviously got to do this in a careful way. So -- but we do think it has enormous benefits in terms of the research process when we're looking at stocks. It very much speeds up the information gathering process, et cetera. But then when you overlay that, we think there's some critical parts of the process that can't be replaced with AI. And that's, for example, those relationships with company management teams and so forth. So I think from my perspective, I think it is an enormous time saver in terms of filtering through information. And getting up to speed, whether it's on industries or on current issues in -- around the world. But I think there are core parts of the investment process that won't be replaced by AI, but Nick and Will, any other additional thoughts?

No. Look, I think that absolutely nails it. As people who want to invest both in companies that are potentially disrupted by AI as well as benefiting from AI, you need to understand the technology literally. So we make sure -- and I guess it's a message for everyone, make sure if you're wanting to understand the technology you're using the paid versions. The free versions often offer AI that's far less capable, but as Catriona mentioned, we're not wed to any one provider. We will move around just to make sure we understand where the state of the art is at. I mean, also going and seeing the leaders of these businesses and understanding what they're thinking does give you a bit of a look into the future path for the models, which we expect to continue to improve. So not taking a static view, like things are constantly changing as well.

Yes. I think what's becoming scarce is conviction. And as our process, we look for undervalued growth properties, information is being disseminated more widely now. However, how you analyze that information, how you speak to management teams, how you build conviction in a name is becoming increasingly difficult because there is so much information out there. So what we've been spending time on is making sure we're making the right decisions, having conviction and you're seeing that with just how volatile the market is trading. Attention is moving from one area to the other and it's clear that the conviction on underlying quality and earnings growth is a little bit missing in today's market. So we're focusing on what our competitive strengths are and then with AI, it's game changing, but there's also still mistakes. Like we're in the business of managing people's money. We need to make sure our information is accurate. And so we're constantly cross-checking that information with industry sources, the company management team and not just using what AI is spitting out as gospel. So I think that's a really important point because when I've used, I've noticed mistakes and if you didn't know any better, you could just take it at face value. So that's the other thing to consider.

AI tells you what you want to hear often. So if you ask AI, is -- like a year ago, if you'd asked AI, is Google disrupted, you're going to generally get the consensus view that it is and so on and so forth. So just having your own opinions has never -- strongly held convictions has never had more value.

We have a question from Jeffrey who's asked, does the fund have any exposure to gold?

So we don't directly have investments in gold. I mean Intercontinental Exchange, which we own in the fund does trade -- so it's -- the exchange does trade gold. So we benefit from trading through that, but it's small in the perspective of their business, but we don't directly hold gold positions.

George has asked, have you been topping up on ResMed R&D after its share price fall of recent months?

Look, we think ResMed is a great business. I've known it for many, many years. And we actually -- we invested in ResMed on the back of GLP-1 fears. So there was a narrative a couple of years ago that ResMed's sleep apnea business was going to be destroyed by GLP-1. So the weight loss drugs. And actually, they've done a fantastic job in terms of subsequent to a big sell-off at that time, educating the market on actually how they think GLP-1s will benefit their business. More recently, we've actually had a plethora of opportunities with the volatility in markets to top up lots of things in the portfolio that we've had. ResMed isn't one of the ones we've actually been adding to. But given the share price move, it is one we could look to add to. Nick last week was in the U.S. and caught up with members of the management team. So you might have some additional thoughts, but it is one we could look to. We do think it is doing well, but we have lots of opportunities at the moment, given the volatility in markets.

Yes. Look, I think absolutely. The meeting with -- it was the Dr. Carlos Nunez, the Chief R&D Officer, as well as some other members of the team. And it's exactly what Catriona mentioned. When GLP-1 first came out, there was a fear that people would no longer need CPAP machines, rather what's occurred is that CPAP is such a prevalent and undertreated issue that going to a doctor and getting on GLP-1s is actually coincident with getting on CPAP. And so it's been actually a wonderful driver for the business. With GLP-1s, we are seeing a significant increase in usage over the coming years as the price comes down and so the adoption will increase. So we'll act as an additional catalyst over the coming years. So it's actually -- it was a very strong meeting. And yes, absolutely, like the share price offers opportunities, we think.

We have a question from Robert on SAP. Do you ever consider taking profits on SAP? Or have you been adding over 2025 and 2026 as the share price is plummeted, I know Will covered off in the presentation as well.

Yes. It's a good question, Robert. We have taken profit. Unfortunately, when the share price has acted the way it does, you never feel like you've taken enough off the table, but at its peak, SAP got more than over a 6% portfolio position. Today, it's just over 4%. And we've taken profits off at various points throughout '24 and '25. We took some off at the $250 to $160 price level. And I distinctly remember being on regional road shows in October 2024. And Nick and I had a chat about selling some SAP to buy Google. So we've definitely taken some profits off but unfortunately not enough. I guess where we sit today, it's a business trading on low 20x GAAP earnings and with accelerating financials, potential to be in our AI winner, we'll be much more on the side of adding to the position today than trimming. But yes, we -- there is a lesson in terms of taking profits and making sure that you're managing the sizing correctly, and that's what we've aim to do throughout over the course of the fund and across all our positions.

We have a few questions on the Middle East. Peter has asked what will be your strategy going forward and Mike asked about protecting the portfolio from oil disruption.

Yes, sure. I mean it's a very fluid geopolitical backdrop over the -- where it's been the past 18 days with the rising issues in Iran. And I think it's interesting. There's a lot of debate on how quickly the conflict will end and enormous dispersion again in views. And it's funny, I had an Oxford graduated Iranian history professor who came into the office yesterday with view. And I think you can look at the history of Iran and come to some conclusions. But the reality is the unknown here is probably Trump and you can have some views around how quickly -- I mean, his view is certainly that the Iranians will -- this will -- they will hold out and keep going and make this a long war, et cetera, which may be the case, the unpredictable one, as I said, is Trump though. And I think making any forecasts on what he will do is very, very difficult. So look, we are watching it closely. Clearly, the impact has been around the oil price and what's happening in the straight. So we're taking a view that we will watch it closely. The portfolio has a large investment in Intercontinental Exchange, which, as I've mentioned earlier on the gold side, they are -- they have a much bigger part of their business involved in the energy space. And so they are sadly to when it's a beneficiary of war, but they are benefiting from the increased volatility in trading in the energy complex. So we benefit from that exposure. But yes, the oil price is obviously a watching brief. And the impact of that has the flow on effect towards inflationary expectations, which then feeds into interest rates, which then ultimately feeds into discount rates that you put on stocks. But yes, we're watching it closely. And would say that -- and actually Tradeweb is another example, which benefits from interest rate moves. So there is lots of flow-ons and first order effects and then second order.

And I think, I guess, that's absolutely correct. And then the point I would add, I suppose, if you think of the companies we hold in the fund, we don't hold airlines. We don't hold companies that have significant exposure to the region. Over the past few years, we've collectively looked at a number of businesses that, for example, are benefiting from exhibitions in the Middle East being a big driver for a certain business. There's a company I can think of that benefited significantly from Saudi Arabia's NEOM project. Our collection of businesses, if you think through the kind of names we talked about like SAP or Intuit or Edwards or Thermo Fisher, they tend to be less exposed to this. So to the extent it impacts the global economy and interest rates, it would have second order effects, but as we run through our list of companies, we actually think from a first order perspective, it's a very good collection of business for this type of uncertain environment.

Yes, absolutely. And then the other point would be just we tend to love businesses with pricing power. So as inflation expectations potentially go up, generally, our businesses are able to pass that on.

We have a question from Philip on travel. He asked, how genuine do you think the engagement actually is when you travel and make companies. He says, these business people have businesses to run as a primary focus, not continually meeting with earnest analysts.

I can kick us off. We were discussing this actually yesterday. Even in a world of AI, there's just so much value to getting in a room and talking to a person because you actually get these really useful information from body language, how they approach certain topics, whether they're trying to steer the conversation to certain topics or away from other topics. There's an example I've used in the past of a company we met as a potential investment, KBR. And every time I started discussing this government contract, the CFO would get extremely uncomfortable and kind of rub his finger. And it just didn't feel right. And I know it sounds very qualitative. But after that meeting, it came out that they had a significant downgrade on that project. There was another example of a company I met in December, which we don't hold in the fund. But every time they talked about 2 markets, in particular, they were tense and the body language changed. I just -- I think there's just incredible value to being in the room with people and talking through the topics and understanding where they're most comfortable, where the confidence is, where they're less comfortable, where they're trying to kind of divert the conversation away from. It's forever valuable.

Yes. And I think, look, there's -- these management teams only allocate a certain amount of their time to -- in meeting with investors. So it's not -- if they are running -- focused on running their businesses, but then they allocated -- particularly in the U.S. because it's quarterly reporting, they allocate a certain amount of time post reporting their results to meeting with the market. So you get these windows where you can meet, but they are generally more focused for the majority of their time on running their businesses.

Yes. The only other point is a lot of it is cross-checking information. So sometimes, we'll speak to a company that we own, but we also speak to all of their competitors, all of their suppliers, all of their customers and cross-check information to make sure that our investment thesis is playing out. And so there's some nuance in speaking with management teams in terms of what you're really trying to get out of it because a lot of the information is available online. It's more just building conviction in the company, is the management trustworthy and asking the right questions to try and triangulate information to make sure that the thesis is playing out to how -- to the reason why we initially invested in the stock.

That's a great point. The examples of asking companies how their SAP rollouts are going and how they're feeling about it. That's not their core business. That's wonderful read across for a different investment.

Yes. We have a question from Michael. What is your view on Axon?

Yes. So look, we've looked at Axon in the past. I think historically, it's probably been at the valuation that we've found somewhat prohibitive in terms of our process. Clearly, this is a company with great growth drivers and a great opportunity set in front of it. But I think the valuation has been the primary limiting factor. The beauty, I suppose, evaluations is they can change. So it will stay on our various ways of looking at the world. And should it get to a valuation where we think it's attractive. It is a great growth business for us. So there is potential there, but we just prefer to stick to discipline around valuation.

Yes. I met them in Arizona probably a year ago in their offices. And for those who don't know Axon, they do like body cameras, they do like TASERs, equipping policemen and like that side of things and having a cloud business for court filing. So the earnings story is actually quite interesting, but their valuation is extremely privy and there is competition in this space. I feel like it's been such a good story that people feel like they're -- there's no competition, but Motorola has a solution which competes with them. They really need to sustain the excess profits that they're generating right now to grow into that valuation for it to be with like an investment that suits our investment process. So we don't own Axon for the time being.

Paul has asked, does the fund hold Microsoft or Amazon? And what are your views on these businesses?

Yes. Why don't I? I can kick it off on Amazon. We actually -- we have a very positive view on Amazon at the moment. So similar in circumstance to when Google was trading well below the underlying merits of the business. When we look at Amazon today, we see a company that is, on the one hand, in our opinion, 1 of the best 3 or 4 retailing businesses in the U.S. It would be up there alongside Walmart, which trades on 45x earnings. It would be up there alongside Costco, which trades probably north of 45x earnings. Amazon has the structural benefits around cost to deliver scale, the wideness of their SKU availability, a wonderful retailing business. On the other hand, you also have a company that is the leading hyperscale provider, they have their own hardware assets in Trainium3, which actually helped Trainium2 trained the Claude model, which is the leading model in the world. So this hardware business is not to be ignored and is actually very strong. So the way we see it, you've kind of got these 2 businesses together, which on each of the merits are fantastic, and the business itself is in the low 20s PE. We recognize this is a large company. But similar to Google, when you see the quality of the assets and the growth prospects of these kind of valuations, we do take a positive view on Amazon. So we do hold it, and you will see it in the top 20 of the fund.

And investment in Anthropic?

Good point. Okay. And so if you start -- and I like companies like this because you start listing all the merits and you can often just forget to say things which on another business would be a huge beneficiary. They hold 1/3 of Anthropic, which goes for itself, but this company will be probably worth more than $1 trillion one day. I forgot to mention it, talking to other investors around it, this seems to be the most underappreciated fact on Amazon as well. So it's just a kind of a range of benefit -- range of positive views on a company trading exceptionally cheap.

Yes. And on Microsoft, we're looking at it very closely, and we've -- it's not in our top 20 portfolio positions, but it's at a really interesting juncture where you've had valuation come right down. It is a scarce asset. You have the hardware part of the business where data center CapEx is going up. They're seeing good ROI from that. And Azure is growing almost 40%, at the same time, they're the ones who are probably very early in a similar vein to SAP, integrating Copa across their software offering. So when I look across the software space like SAP and Microsoft are probably 2 of the most embedded software companies in any given organization, and they've been first movers in terms of adopting AI into their product stack and tech stack. And we think these application software, they'll start to show some of that productivity improvements come through over the next 1, 2, 3 years. So we're looking at it very closely. We owned a little bit of Microsoft, but it's -- we're cautiously building that position. In a similar vein, Microsoft has a significant ownership and rights to OpenAI's IP. And these research labs are where a lot of the value is currently being accrued within generative AI. And I'm not sure what OpenAI latest round of valuation is, but it's moving in the right direction.

Stuart has asked, is there any impact of the exchange rate on returns?

Yes, sure. So I mean there is because the majority, we have very small holding -- number of holdings in Australia. So the majority of the fund is invested offshore. And so every time -- and it's an unhedged portfolio. So every time the Aussie dollar moves relative to those other currencies, there is an exchange rate impact. In the half year to the end of December, there was about a 1% impact and -- but the Aussie dollar has moved much more in January and February and when -- February, and when you look at the impact to the end of February, it was about a 5% impact on the NTA, detraction from the NTA because the Aussie dollar has strengthened. So I mean when we set up the fund, we did say that we -- the feedback from shareholders was we have very much a majority of our assets in Australian dollars. So we want to have diversification. So we have kept the fun unhedged. We do have the ability at extremes to hedge the fund, but it does remain unhedged. So we'll be -- the NTA will be impacted by exchange rate movements.

And we have a question from Nava on this topic. Do you all track the World Central Bank sale of U.S. government treasury bills and notes and their purchases of gold to form a view on exchange rates and Australian dollars. And could you also provide some color on how oil risk play out on U.S. dollar dedollarization? Yes, maybe start the first, I can reask...

Yes. So look, I guess when we talk about FX and exchange rates, foreign central banks, that is not the U.S. Federal Reserve increasing their holding in gold and reducing their holdings in U.S. treasuries absolutely has an impact. But if we look at other dynamics, if we think of Australia, we've had slightly higher inflation than we would desire. And the RBA is now talking about increasing interest rates well ahead of the rest of the pack. And so you've seen the Australian dollar strengthen. So there are many dynamics that drive the FX of a given country relative to others. Inflation, certainly one, the stance of the Central Bank is another. Yes, these foreign holdings of U.S. treasuries and other interest rate securities matter. So we do keep an eye on it. But it is part of kind of a broader mix around what drives FX. The question around US dedollarization. I think like if we had half an hour, we could kind of really go into it, probably the primary thinking is if you look at the amount of international trade that's conducted in U.S. dollars today and you compare it to 10 years ago or 20 years ago, the concept of US dedollarization has been in play for many years and kind of the facts on the ground are that the U.S. dollar as a trading currency remains dominant, remains very strong. If because of this Iran situation, you do see certain oil being sold in Yuan, that at the margin would reduce their strength a bit. But you're really talking about an extremely strong thing in the U.S. dollar. And I think it would take incredible geopolitical events for that to change. So the broad thesis around US dedollarization probably isn't absolutely front of mind on how we're investing today.

We have a question on the share price from David. The share price has not increased in over 5 years despite the world index rising. How can you improve the share price? And I think probably worth calling out when you add back the dividends over that 5-year period that it is in positive territory? And maybe just calling out one more thing is over a 3-year period, that total shareholder return is around 16%. But I'll had over to Catriona.

Yes. And no, that's both good points, April. So absolutely, the headline share price looks like it hasn't done much. But as April said, you've got to add back the dividends that we've paid over that period. And this is the thing with listed investment companies. Your returns are a combination of capital growth and income growth. And we have over the life of the fund paid over $1 in dividends, including a special dividend last year. And we do have over $0.75 in the profit reserve. So have visibility at this current level of dividends for the next 5 years. And so there is always that combination of the discount or premium that the fund trades at relative to the share price, the dividends that you've paid over that time and then what the underlying investment portfolio has done. And as I said earlier, we are pleased that the discount has narrowed and we're trading at like about NTA about -- or tiny, tiny bit of a premium. We have paid a significant amount of dividends over the life of the fund. And then the actual underlying portfolio has gone up since. But I take your point that when you look at the headline share price, it doesn't look like it has done a whole lot, but you have to add the combination of those elements.

And we have a question from Dennis on dividends, and that's obviously a board decision, but I'll read out the question. How do you maintain the high dividend payout ratio and what part does realized capital gains play?

Yes, sure. So what we try to do with all our listed investment companies is to pay consistent dividends over time. And if we can increase them. What we have managed to do with the WAM Global portfolio is paid fully franked dividends for the life of the fund. And the franking -- so the underlying portfolio, what goes into the profit reserve is a combination of unrealized -- it does include unrealized gains. What generates franking though, is only realized gains. So when we pay tax to -- because the WGB is a company listed in Australia paying tax to the ATO, we generate franking from paying tax. So that's from realized gains. So the profit pool -- the profit reserve is at that combination of unrealized and realized and the -- but the franking is generated from paying from realized gains. So yes.

And the second part of Dennis' question was how confident are you of continuing this payout ratio?

Yes. So in terms of the paying -- the ability to continue to pay dividends at the level we have now, we do have $0.75 in that profit reserve, so the 6.6x 2 divided -- adding that into the $0.75 is over 5 years of dividend. So we do have strong confidence in the ability to continue to pay dividends at this level. And as I said earlier, the equivalent yield annualized of the interim dividend is 6.1%. So a very strong dividend yield. And when you gross that up 8.7%. And that compares to when you -- if you invest in global markets, a dividend yield for the overall market of about 1.5% and in the U.S., about 1%. So very strong yield relative to the market and the benefit of the franking because it has been fully franked.

We love to do mental math here. I thought you were going to put it to us $0.75 divide by 6.6x 2. So thank you.

We have a question from Greg on the NTA. He said since the end of October, the pretax NTA seems to have fallen from $2.50 to $2.10, which of your main stocks have contributed to this? And which ones have you been adding to or reducing?

Yes. Great question, Greg. So I guess the reason we did really kind of try to double-click on that software exposure is 2 of the primary detractors were SAP and Intuit. We hope we gave you enough color around how we think there is a disconnect between the underlying fundamentals of these businesses and the share price performance. What we're doing about that is being opportunistic. We are adding when we think you get to these extremes of sentiment. But we're also trying to make sure we take a measured approach. As Catriona mentioned, we love a fund that's invested behind a number of different thematics, so we do want to make sure we don't get the weighting of any one thematic too high. So it's taking advantage, but in a kind of measured and opportunistic fashion.

And we have a question from William. Are you investors in WAM Global?

Yes.

Yes. That's quite an easy one, I think. WGB, so main investment. Yes, like main investment for -- I assume all of us.

Yes, absolutely.

Yes, absolutely. My house is our biggest -- or if you have a house, a mortgage that is, our biggest investment is the stock, yes.

Peter has asked, do you have any exposure to defense stocks?

We do. So I guess the structure of the fund is to try to always find the best undervalued growth companies. I didn't discuss it today, but Safran is a company where we've talked about in the past as being a wonderful critical infrastructure investment. They also provide a lot of defense equipment in a good way for the European defense industry, which has actually seen considerable growth in budgets over the last few years. So Safran is one we hold in the fund today. It's in the top 20, we -- I actually was a defense analyst a decade ago. So I kind of know a lot of these U.S. and European defense companies quite well. I think going forward, we will continue to invest behind this theme where the -- it fits our process. So growth, undervalued, we love the management team, we love the quality of the businesses and we can see catalysts to drive the stock.

We have a question from Ben, with WAM Global investing in some large cap stocks, has there been a change to the investment strategy? And what's the differentiation compared to the MSCI world? He mentions concentration risk as well.

Yes. Great question. So no, what we have said since the life of the fund is we invest -- we can invest anywhere across the market, but we tend to love small mid-cap companies. And across the life of the fund, over 50% of it has been invested in small mid-cap companies. What's been fascinating and is a historical anomaly is that small and mid-cap companies have underperformed large for the entire life of the fund. So actually, the bigger contributors to performance have tended to be the bigger companies. That is an historical anomaly when you look over the history of the market, it is usually small companies outperformed large because they have faster growth profiles, et cetera. And we are at 20-year lows for small mid-cap companies relative to large. So we still do see enormous opportunity in that end of the market. And as I said, have more than 50% of the fund invested there. But we have seen those mid- and large-cap companies contribute much more to the index and then have been a contributor to the portfolio performance. And I think what we are is very strictly disciplined in our investment process. So if we identify undervaluation in a larger company, then we will invest there and Google being a great example, where the threat of AI disruption gave us and that they were behind the tech gave us an opportunity in Google, which we hadn't owned for the life of the fund about 12, 18 months ago. So we will go up in the big end of town if we see undervaluation, but it's very much sticking to our process and being consistent in that when we're looking for ideas.

Karim has asked, what are the cash levels of the portfolio? And how do these change over time?

Yes, great question. So the cash level is currently about 5%. We -- through last year, through -- after the April like Liberation Day sell-off, we were -- we did run -- we had our cash -- we took advantage of the sell-off there and added -- brought to added to stock positions that we thought had been sold off and brought down the cash. So we were running closer to 1%, 2% cash. With all the uncertainty in the last month or 2, we have taken up the cash level to close to 5%, but we are very, very opportunistic. So as I said, we have been taking it up, but where we think there's undervaluation and where the share prices present real opportunity, we will bring that down. But we have been a little cautious in the last few weeks. So we have taken it up -- had taken it up a bit.

Eric has a great question. How do you manage position size? Is there a maximum minimum percentage for each company?

Yes. Good question. I think when we think about position size, it's overlaid with quality of the business, confidence of the earnings trajectory and also prospective returns going forward. So when you look at our top 20 positions, it ranges anywhere between 2% to -- we've been as high as 6.5%, 7% for...

I think Google got towards high 7s.

Yes. The nuance is also like we are looking at small and mid-cap companies combined with large companies that we're taking into consideration liquidity, how long it takes to enter or exit a position. And so there's no required minimum or maximum, it's a function of those broader factors.

Yes. And with the Google example, as Nick pointed to earlier, it was up at the end of December towards the 6.6% of the portfolio. It's now back at the 2% level. So we have trimmed because we've seen the share price has had an enormous run and we did see better opportunities elsewhere. So we are nimble and opportunistic, but yes, that's probably the upper band. And that has got there through share price performance, it wasn't -- that wasn't the position it started at.

We have a question from Peter on franking. Will you be able to maintain the 100% franking?

Good question. So that is a function of the tax that we paid to the ATO here. We don't -- the domestic funds, WAM Cap, WAM Leaders, et cetera, benefit from pass-through franking that comes from investing in Australian, particularly the leaders portfolio investing in Australian banks, they get the pass-through of franking that way. At WAM Global, we only -- we generally generate franking from paying tax to the ATO. So it is a function of the ability -- the need to keep paying tax. But we do have the next couple of dividends covered in terms of franking, and then we hope that we continue to frank that going forward, but it is a matter of generating franking credits over time.

Kenneth has asked why you're increasing dividends given recent performance?

So the underlying portfolio performance had been actually very strong when we look at both the last few years, and so the special, for example, was a direct result of the portfolio having generated over 20% returns for the last few years. So we had generated a very strong profit reserve that enabled us to pay the special dividend and also increase the underlying dividend for the fund. So we will -- it is a -- as I said, that balance between capital growth and providing returns to shareholders in the form of dividends and the dividend went up very slightly from 6.5% to 6.6% for the interim dividend. So we will always be balancing what we have in the profit reserve, what the underlying portfolio has done and then what we think is the right balance between capital and income.

We have some stock questions. Where do you think CSL is headed?

I guess it's a good example of the benefits in Wilson Asset Management of having different teams, I suppose, because CSL is a large Australian company, the leaders team cover that very closely. We talk to them all the time. So on a stock like that, it's a great situation where we can say, hey, you've just met the management team, what are your views? And so in that circumstance for me, I would say they're a better team to ask. I wouldn't have...

Yes, I mean, I have views on the stocks more generally just having known it for many, many years. And I think it has been a like a wonderful business over time. More recently, they've had issues, super interesting that they've actually bought Gordon Naylor back in as CEO, who, when I covered the stock 15 years ago plus, he was the CFO. So it will be interesting whether bringing someone from the glory days of CSL back in as CEO will be the right call in a business that has changed in a market environment that has changed because it absolutely has all the history in terms of knowing it in the good days when it had first -- when it was absolutely humming. He was actually responsible for the Seqirus acquisition. So that's an interesting dynamic. So we'll watch and say we aren't invested but we do know the stock and are aware of, obviously, the issues that they've had in more recent years, but it has been a super high-quality business.

We have question from Peter. What are your thoughts on DroneShield, DRO and Electro Optic Systems, EOS.

I don't think -- I think we'll leave that to the Aussie small mid guys. We don't have strong views. I mean watching from the sidelines around the DroneShield CEO share sales, et cetera, but I don't have that kind of a view.

I guess the only extra color is I did speak to a company who's in that kind of drone and defense space. And at least with regards to DroneShield, they were quite complementary of the technology. But that's as far as I would go to say in terms of the stock itself and so on and so forth, leave that to the small cap Aussie team.

Yes. Nava has asked, I observed MFF has taken a position in WAM Global. Do you have any comments?

Not really. I mean we speak to Chris Mackay and have engaged with him. I actually -- they had a webinar yesterday where I listened and they were asked the same question. And they very politely said that they have -- I think we have a strong investment process and hope to work like -- have some engagement in the future and potentially work with us. So it's a team that we respect, but no other comment.

We have a question from Nathan. Could the Board restructure the dividend payment dates. He gave some examples. And so investors can do the dividend reinvestment plan every fortnight or retirees have for fortnightly income?

Look, we -- I mean, how we've structured WMX was so the WAM income maximizer was to provide monthly income and be that combination of debt and equity. So that's the product -- because we very much recognize there was a gap in the market as the bank hybrids rolled off. So we specifically created that monthly income product to fulfill that need for a lot of our shareholders. So where we do see opportunity and to create products that shareholders want, we will do that. So that if you are after monthly income, I mean, it's not a global fund investing around the world. It is investing in debt equity really in Australia, but that provides monthly income. For the rest of the funds, we do pay dividends 6 monthly. And in terms of those dividend dates, we tend to like to have the funds trade come dividend. We think the share prices trade better with that, and we have tended to have varying dates between, say, for the April, May period because of boardroom and the need to space out when the dividends are paid. So there is some dynamics of dictating that. But there isn't at this stage, a plan to move to a fortnightly income payment model. But yes, we take any feedback on board. So absolutely happy to have a conversation around the benefits, et cetera.

We have a question from Saranjit. In the non-software/hardware companies, the CEOs are going to be key in adoption of AI initiatives and adoption. Do you agree? And do you get to meet the CEOs?

Yes, completely agree. You're spot on there. And what we've seen is the Chief Technology Officer, combined with the CEO, playing more and more important role in the adoption of AI. I guess from a broad strokes feedback perspective, when we do speak to CEOs, there is a necessitation to modernize their take stack. A lot of them are so far behind where they can't even adopt AI because the back end isn't on a modern tech stack. And the beneficiaries of that is include the likes of moving on your system, legacy ERPs systems onto SAP. So you can be in a position to adopt AI tools into your back-end system and create a productivity savings. And we're in a period where because technology is changing so rapidly, there's a catalyst for them to do so because if they don't, they're on the risk of being left behind, ceding share to the competitors. So it's a really stressful moment for the CEO, like there's definitely a need to modernize the tech stack. There's a bit of unclarity on how to best use the AI tools right now, but they're trialing and error -- trialing and seeing what works best. And that thematic is going to play out for the years to come in our view.

Yes, absolutely. I guess just a bit of anecdote I'd add to that is we absolutely think your question is great. The CEOs matter. I was talking to the CEO of the largest hospital operator in the U.S. on my trip. And it's -- as Will mentioned, there's a lot of trialing. I think we are reaching the point where management -- like trialing has been occurring for a year or 2 years, and management are really starting to speed up the adoption of software. So it's -- I mean these conversations are so interesting. The challenge sometimes is to not take the entire meeting and just say, what are you doing with AI? What are you doing with software? What opportunities are you seeing? But yes, I think it's a fascinating conversation.

That's all we have time for today. To stay informed with our latest investment insights, joined our community of 100,000 subscribers. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X and Facebook and visit our website for more. I'll hand back to Catriona for closing comments.

Great. Thank you. A big thank you to April, Will and Nick for joining me today. But the biggest thank you to our shareholders for joining us for your great questions. We look forward to updating you again soon. If you have any questions or feedback please reach out, but a big appreciation for your time. And I guess rounding out, we're just very -- we're excited about the portfolio of companies that we own at WAM Global and the prospects for those businesses over time. But thank you again for your time.