Good day, thank you for standing by. Welcome to AMCIL Full Year Financial Results Briefing. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask questions during the session, you need to press star one `one on your telephone. You will hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. If you'd like to submit your questions on the web, you can type in the questions via the Q&A box in the link. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mark Freeman, CEO and Managing Director of AMCIL Limited. Thank you. Please go ahead. Okay, good afternoon, everyone. As stated, I'm Mark Freeman, the CEO and Managing Director, and Portfolio Manager for AMCIL Limited. Welcome to this full year result briefing. This is the first one we've done for AMCIL after the result. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians from all the lands we're gathered on today, and pay my respects to the elders, both past, present, and emerging. I have joining me today on the webinar, Olga Kosciuczyk from the investment team, also Jaye Guy from the investment team, Andrew Porter, our CFO, Matthew Rowe, our Company Secretary, and Geoff Driver, our General Manager of Business Development. Before we start the presentation, just a bit of housekeeping on this webinar. This briefing is based on the material available on the company's website. If you are using your computer to access this presentation via the webcast, the slides will change automatically. If you are accessing by phone only, the PDF of the slides with page numbers is available on the website. Finally, please note, following the presentation, there will be time for questions and answers. You can ask a question either via the webcast or through the operator. Turning to the presentation, the second slide is the disclaimer, just to say we're here to talk about the company. We're not giving any advice. Moving on to slide four, the financial year in summary, I'll pass to Andrew Porter to talk through that. Thank you, Mark. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Running through these in order from the top left to the bottom right, AUD 7.6 million worth of profit. That, at first glance, is down from AUD 8.1 million, but that AUD 8.1 million last year included a AUD 2 million scrip dividend from the BHP- Woodside merger. If one was to exclude that, then the profit was up 24%. The rest of the dividends were generally up from the previous year, and the contribution from trading and options was also up. This led to a dividend that's been declared of AUD 0.025 final, which is what we've been paying the last couple of years, plus a AUD 0.015 special for AUD 0.05 in total, up from AUD 0.035 in the previous year. The payment of realized gains, particularly from last year, helped pay this AUD 0.015 special. Realized gains are used to prop up the normal dividend each year, but the strength of previous gains and reserves led the board to conclude that an AUD 0.015 special dividend was appropriate. After the payment of the final and special dividends, I should note for shareholders that AMCIL still has the capacity to pay with franking credits, pay an additional AUD 0.055 dividend. We are still fairly comfortably reserved in terms of franking credits in reserve. The total portfolio return for the whole year was 13.5%, including franking, and Mark will come on to that later on in the year. We moved from a premium to a discount. I'll come on to that in a minute. As a result, the shareholder return, which is the share price, plus dividends, and again, including franking, was down 2.1%. The management expense ratio, which is the key measure of the costs of running the company, were 0.66%, up from 0.52% last year. This is equivalent to AUD 0.66 for every AUD 100 invested. There's two reasons why it went up: There was a reallocation of expenses to reflect the work that AICS does on AMCIL, and because of the small size of the expense base, that can have a disproportionate effect. The other, approximately half of the increase, was due to the fall in the average portfolio value. How the MER is calculated, it is the cost for the year over the average portfolio value for the year. The portfolio value average in 2022 was AUD 384 million, and had a drop to AUD 339 million in 2023. That does have an impact. You can see that we ended the year at AUD 346.1 million. Although that was up on 2022, the average portfolio value is of course, the average each month during the years in question. If we move on to slide five, you'll see that the NTA at the end of June was AUD 1.12, the share price AUD 1.01. We had moved from a premium of 4.5% in June in 2022, to a discount of just under 10% this year. That is why that shareholder return of -2.1% contrasts so strongly with the portfolio return of 13.5%. That's it from me. I'll pass back over to Mark to run through some of the portfolio figures and the returns. Just moving on to slide seven, which is the performance numbers. As you can see, we show these numbers when you include franking credits or grossing up the performance, and we do that for both the benchmark and AMCIL. We can see we are behind on those measures, and I'll come to some of the details behind that shortly. I would note once again how the AMCIL performance numbers shows the performance to the extent we've actually paid out franking credits. As Andrew has pointed out, we still have quite a considerable amount of franking credits sitting within the company, and they will only come through these performance numbers when we've paid those out. They certainly drag those performance numbers. If we move into more details onto some of the recent underperformance on the next slide, page eight. We've had some reasonable underperformance from some of our large holdings over the past 12 months. We are a long-term investor. We wanna stay with the companies generally, that, that we think are great businesses to own for the long term. But doing so means there will be periods where stocks perhaps may not do much or even pull back in the market. We've shown an example of some of those there, where the index is up around 17% for the year. Along the bottom line, you can see stocks like CSL is only up 4%, Mainfreight, 6%, Transurban, 3%. Those three stocks have been significant holdings in the portfolio, have been there a long period of time, but they've certainly not performed in line with the markets over recent times. We still think they're great businesses to own for the long term. If we move to the next slide, another area that's caused us some recent underperformance. On the left, some of the cyclical stocks, but particularly resource companies, we are underweight the materials part of the market and resources. We do own BHP, some Santos and Woodside. As a long-term investor, we see these as more, again, cyclical businesses. They have their ups and downs, and our bias is towards companies that we would describe, describe as structural compounders. It does mean when those sectors run, that we might underperform as we have, but our bias is still towards the larger resource companies and, and holding our current position. We've also had a couple of stocks where the thesis did not play out. We've mentioned two of those, Iress and PEXA, which we've now exited. Iress has been in the portfolio for a long period of time, had many of the elements we look for in companies, particularly the annuity-type revenue streams that they generate. It's had good return on capital, but this, this business has had a history starting in financial services, then grew into wealth management, where it did very well, and that's where the previous, most previous CEO came from. They invested a lot in that area, then they moved to the UK, which proved to be very challenging for them. When you reflect on their history, they just weren't generating any earnings growth, earnings per share growth, and we decided once the CEO had left the company, we moved on as well. It's been a bit disappointing for us. PEXA, we invested early in the company. We liked the monopoly nature of their business here in Australia, but there probably was a bit in the valuation when we invested for success out of the U.K.. That's probably proved a bit more challenging for them, and the stock's derated. We've decided to step out of that company for the time being. It's still very much on our watch list because we like companies that have monopoly-type positions, but with the uncertainty around U.K., we just decided to sit on the sidelines and keep watching that position for the time being. Perhaps just it's time just to reiterate our approach we take for AMCIL. If you turn to slide 10, and this pattern should be apparent in the following slides, where we're highlighting some of the transactions we've completed over the last six or seven months. We are seeking to be in high-quality companies, and this is essentially a checklist of the key characteristics we're looking for in the business that we invest in. We like companies that have an industry leadership position or a developing one, that have assets that are unique or very hard to replicate. We like companies that have conservative balance sheets. We're wary of companies that carry too much debt. We consider the outside influences on a business and are wary of companies that have too many of those. We like companies that have more consistent earnings streams or annuity-type revenue incomes. Another factor that's non-negotiable for AMCIL is backing the people. We want the management to be effective. We like management teams that are passionate about what they do, and ownership alignment's important, and many of our companies are what we call owner-driver businesses, so the people that started the company are running it. Why this matters? Those factors combined, our experience sees those outcomes leading to competitive advantage and sustainable competitive advantage in companies. Generally generates higher return on capital, which allows for reinvestment to drive growth, capture more market share, further enhance their leadership position, and deliver long-term earnings growth, because ultimately, the share market rewards companies that are growing their earnings in a sustainable way. I touched on there are always companies that have cyclical bursts. We're looking for long-term value creation in our investments. We end up with a ranking of stocks that we're open to buy, but it's just as important is to buy when we see value. What we're looking for is price opportunities. The two areas we think about that is either a continuation of a trend. A stock may have gone up, but we still think there's a long runway of growth, we're happy to buy. That's a continuation of a trend or a price dislocation occurring. This could either be some sort of event that causes the share price to fall, which gives us an opportunity to buy a good company well or a discounted capital raising is another event that can allow us to buy well in a good companies. These are the, the frameworks that we put around our potential transactions, and we're gonna talk through some of those that we've been doing over the past six months. I'm very pleased with the way the transactions have been occurring over this period, have been creating value. An outcome of that, we're very pleased with the performance over the last six or seven months, and the discipline we'll have is just to continue the trend going forward that we're about to outline at the moment. At this point, I'll pass over to Olga to talk through, three of the companies we've bought, and in some cases, we've bought a little bit, some cases we've bought a lot. All of these outcomes, though, I always used to get taught, if you look back through your transactions and, and all you say is, "I wish I'd bought more," we're on the right path, and I can say that about all these transactions. Olga, over to you. Thank you, Mark. Good afternoon, everyone. On the next three slides, we provide examples of how we translate our investment philosophy that Mark just described, into transactions in our portfolio. The market concern about what RBA interest rate rises mean for household disposable income and the housing market, translated into a broad-based sell-off of consumer discretionary companies. We took advantage of this price dislocations to add to our high quality holdings that meet our investment criteria: ARB, James Hardie, and Reece. ARB is the founder-led, leading four-wheel drive accessories producer in Australia. The leadership is underpinned by their outstanding engineering and high quality products, which is recognized by leading car manufacturers around the world. More recently, ARB started producing branded products for Ford and Toyota. We see this opportunity as a multi-year extension to their growth runway. With this in mind, the recent pullback in price presented an opportunity to add to our holdings at a very attractive price. James Hardie is the leader in fiber cement home siding with a 90% market share. Fiber cement is a lightweight product with a wood look and feel. Fiber cement's superior performance, as compared to alternative products, has translated to consistent market share gains in the U.S. residential housing market. The growth runway is long. Capital allocation has been strong, with the company generating a return on invested capital well above its cost, while maintaining a strong balance sheet, making it an attractive long-term investment for our portfolio. Finally, we also added to our holding in Reece. Reece is an owner-driver business and Australia's largest plumbing and bathroom supplies company. We have high confidence in their management and believe that they can replicate their Australian success in the U.S., where they entered the market only five years ago via an acquisition. This gives Reece a large growth opportunity for years ahead and a staple holding for our portfolio. I will now pass to Jaye. Sorry, I'll just jump in. I just hope it's very clear from the slides. Those little green dots means where we were buying, and I didn't point that out on the slide. It's, it might be hard to see, but if you've got color slides, you'll see the green dots. That's when we were buying those companies. Sorry, Jaye. Thanks, Mark, and thanks, Olga. Good afternoon to everyone on the call. On slide 12, we've provided examples where AMCIL's taken advantage of short-term price dislocations to add to stalwart companies at attractive valuations. Many on the call will be familiar with Medibank. They're a market-leading provider of health insurance in Australia. We have followed the company closely since IPO, given their leading position in an essential industry, combined with a strong balance sheet, high return on equity, and a backable management team. Despite these appealing attributes, the relatively low growth nature of the industry, combined with Medibank's valuation, has kept us on the sidelines. Following the news of the cybercrime event in October 2022, which is very clear on the chart there on the left, we noted that policyholder numbers was relatively resilient despite the negative news and sentiment around the cybercrime event. This created an attractive opportunity for us to establish a position in Medibank at a discount to what our view of fundamental value was. Moving on to NAB, sentiment during the period was poor, mainly due to two reasons. Rapidly increasing interest rates caused some concern in the market around borrowers' ability to service their loans, and there was also negative sentiment stemming from the regional bank meltdown in the U.S.. What we tried to do is, I guess, step back from some of this noise, and having assessed the sector and the differences, I guess, between the Australian sector and the U.S. sector, and reviewing the capital positions of the bank, we believed it was a good opportunity to take advantage of this weakness and add to our position in NAB. NAB's well-capitalized and well-provisioned. We like the management team and think they're backable. Their return on equity is solid, and at the time we were purchasing stock, the 9% gross dividend yield was very attractive. We do note, though, to Mark's earlier commentary around favoring companies that will compound earnings in the long term, that AMCIL remains underweight the Big Four banks relative to the S&P/ASX 200. Finally, ALS is a leading global laboratory testing business servicing the life sciences and commodity sectors. The life sciences division's well-positioned to win market share in a growing market as demand for testing increases. The departure of well-regarded CEO, Raj Naran, and market concerns around the outlook for the commodity testing cycle, created several opportunities to add to AMCIL's position, and you should be able to see those in the chart of the green dots, as Mark highlighted. Our assessment of the people within the businesses we invest in is a very important component of our investment process. Obviously, when a new CEO steps into the role, that's something we look at very closely. The new CEO, Malcolm Deane, has held several leadership roles within ALS, including a strategy role. Having met with him over two occasions now, our initial impressions have been very positive. Now I'll pass back to Mark. Okay, thanks, Jaye. Moving on to slide 13, which just highlighted three other stocks that we put money into during the six months. Yeah, WiseTech's been an amazing company. It was ticking all our boxes around an owner-driver company, strong balance sheet, high return on capital. It had established a leadership position within the logistics industry as a software provider. We're observing some of the biggest logistics companies in the world signing up to use their product, annuity-type business, and a long runway of growth. Even though the stock had gone up, we say, "Well, this is in the bucket of a continuation of a trend." We wanted to put that in the portfolio. The biggest mistake I made with that one is just not putting enough in, but we've got a position which we're, we're happy we've got some, but it would have been great to have got more. The next two, Xero and IDP, these were sitting in the buckets of price dislocations. Xero had a really strong run since it first came on to the Australian market, and it got perhaps overpriced, hitting prices around AUD 150. With some uncertainty about the profitability of the business and the ability to grow overseas, the stock got sold off. There was a change in CEO, which created a lot of uncertainty. The company started to talk about what they're doing to reestablish growth in the company. A couple of things were reducing the cost base, and they announced a significant staff reduction in cost there. This certainly got the market reassessing the profitability. Another factor, they talked about the ability to put up prices in this inflationary environment. When you have a software product, you can get a lot of leverage to the bottom line. Throughout this period, where the market was a bit down on it, we, we took a position, and once again, it would have been nice to have bought more, but it has similar characteristics with a strong balance sheet, annuity-type revenue streams, sticky customers, and there is still plenty of growth to come out of the U.K. If they can get the U.S. to work at all, that would probably provide further upside. At least we bought some in that opportunity. IDP was the last one. IDP, really, it's IDP Education. They've got two areas of business. One is in English language testing, which is a global business, the other one being student placement, which is also a global business. There is competition in the English language testing part of the market. Most of the markets they operate in, there's competition. There is one big market for them, which they essentially had a monopoly over, which is Canada. Canada announced that they were gonna open up for competition, and that caused the share price to sell off significantly, and we thought it was an overreaction. This company had been on our watchlist because when you look at the student placement part of their business, they are the market leader-... They still have significant opportunity to grow market share, and I think their market share is around 10%. They're investing in technology, trying to create differentiation from their competitors. Universities need them to get students into their institutions, so it's an essential business. It's got an exceptionally strong balance sheet. We think management are backable, a long runway of growth, particularly in the student placement part. This price sell-off allowed us an opportunity to build a position. We've taken a good position there in that company. Hopefully, you can see that there is a bit of a pattern there of linking the way I talked about our investment process and the frameworks we, we use, and how they're now flowing into transactions within AMCIL. Moving to the next slide, in terms of how the portfolio is positioned for the future, I'm not going to go through all these companies, but it probably provides an opportunity for questions. You can see here, these are what we call our growth companies. We're looking for those characteristics of leadership position, and annuity revenue streams, where we can, backable people, strong balance sheets. Those patterns are what we're looking for in the companies we invest in. Just moving on to the next slide. We talk about our stalwart companies. We're happy to, it's not all about owning growth stocks. We're very happy to own store-type companies, like Wesfarmers and Computershare, BHP. They all have the characteristics we look for in companies: great return on capital, well-run, and when we see price opportunities in those, we're happy to add them. They also provide stability to the portfolio. There are companies that we see as more income providers, and we gave an example of why we added NAB. You can see we've got Woodside Energy there. Some of these stocks, actually, we sell call options against. Woodside Energy, we're actually quite well covered in terms of call options, so we get great franked dividends, plus extra income from options. We've had some options against Medibank after it bounced quite strongly after we bought it. We have a few options on Commonwealth Bank as well. Those sort of companies, we can actually get double income streams using our skills with options trading. Then we might move on to the outlook and then open up to questions. Obviously, the outlook for inflation and, and interest rates globally, globally remains uncertain. Obviously, recently, we saw the U.S. again lift interest rates by 0.25%, but today, in Australia, no increase. The U.S. and Australian economies, they're seeing some signs of a slowdown in pockets due to this tightening. I think the market was expecting a bigger slowdown. I think the market was expecting a decent sell-off. The term you'd say is that investors are perhaps being caught short, and you've seen a lot of buying come back into the market. Markets have held up incredibly well, and it just shows you, it's very hard to predict short-term movements in the share market, and we're close to fully invested. Energy prices, obviously, have stayed high. There is some fall in consumer demand. Certainly more recently, the feedback we are getting is that the consumer is slowing, but as I said, I think people are expecting it to really slow quickly. It's been a slow slowdown from the economy. Some slowing in China. Put these together, and we think there perhaps will be some increased pressure on economies going forward, and then ultimately, earnings. I mentioned that, but markets have remained quite buoyant. Because of that, we are now quite cautious. We've had some good opportunities over the last six months. We feel like we've taken advantage of those, but we could have always had more. We'll now be cautious. We're going into reporting season, so companies will report our results. We usually get some volatility during that period, and we're certainly ready in the stocks we follow closely if there's any opportunities presenting. If there is downturn in markets, we'll never be immune. We also have a focus on quality companies, so if resources run hot, for example, we can underperform for a period. Certainly, when we look through our holdings, we think we are holding very, very good companies for the long term and believe they are good businesses that will drive long-term profit, earnings, and dividend growth. With that, we'll now open up for questions. Thanks, Mark. Just to remind you, you can ask questions through the operator, star 11, or on the website. I've got a couple of questions here about stocks. Have we added to Macquarie and CSL through the recent weakness? Well, certainly, there's. Well, I'll just have to clarify. CSL, we, we actually, we've already got a pretty good holding in CSL. Again, Harry Hindsight, it perhaps would have been good to trim a bit. I think it's starting to look like interesting value here. Given the size of our holding already, we're probably just gonna be a holder. It's certainly looking more interesting. In terms of Macquarie, we have consistently added in dips in Macquarie, so again, we probably feel like we've got a good position there. That's Macquarie Group, what used to be Macquarie Bank. I will point out, we do have another Macquarie, which is Macquarie Technology. They actually did a capital raising during the period. That was one of those, again, an event that gives us an opportunity to buy a fair value. We actually participated in a capital raising they, they did. For those that don't know, Macquarie Technology, they've changed their name slightly. Their key business is they actually open, operate a very strategic data center, up in Sydney. They're also doing some work around cybersecurity as well. The strategic asset is, is the data center, and it's a very interesting company because it's an owner-driver. Two brothers started the company, they're still running it. They've been very conservative around how it's financed. They've got a great long-term track record, so again, backing the people. Effectively, they've got a planning permit in the moment to actually convert their car park, so it's land they already own, and actually build on that, another data center to complement what they, what they've already got. We think that would be a great development, if that finally gets ahead. They wanted to make sure they kept a conservative balance sheet, which is the right thing to do, so we supported their capital raising. I guess that leads to the question about concentration in the portfolio. Are there concentration limits on, on the portfolio in terms of individual stocks? Well, we've had it in different ways in terms of. We do look at it in terms of, you know, income, stalwart, growth stocks. There are some cyclical stocks there, such as ALS and BHP. We look at. When we look at our portfolio, the portfolio structure that gets shown into the investment, committee, we have our positions relative to the index, and we have the absolute portfolio. There's no limit as, as such, but there's no stock that has, for example, a position that's, that's sort of 5% greater than the index position. We're not really. We've got an eye for the index, but we're not driven by it. Because we've got less than 40 stocks, you're always going to be concentrated. You know, generally, most of the positions you hold, most of them are going to be decent positions when you compare that to the index. I had a question here about 10-year returns. What would they have been relative to the ASX Accumulation Index if you had not engaged in options trading? I guess that getting back to the point, have options actually impacted the team? Yeah, not, not really, 'cause we don't really do a lot of it. You know, I talked about that tax as being a bit of a drag, but, you know, it's just, I think it's just having clarity on the process and being consistent to it is, is, is the key going, is the, is the key going forward. I mean, ANCIL invests across the market. Has the weighting to large caps versus small companies changed dramatically over the last 12 months with small companies underperforming? What are our thoughts on the sort of basis support for? Yeah, look, it's... Look, it's a good question because, in fact, the stocks that we invest in have actually changed their nature over time, particularly the stocks that have been there for a long time. When we first invested in stocks like Reece, which is, you know, some time ago, now ResMed's been there for a long time. Some of these we used to classify as small caps, and now they're sort of mid caps and becoming large cap stocks. We have had periods in time where we've had more small stocks. We've probably more recently had less, but we think there's probably some opportunities there. We did take a new, a position in a new stock called Gentrack, which is more of a smaller company. Again, it's a software company that sells product into the utilities industry, annuity revenue streams, very conservative accounting, strong balance sheet, so the usual process. It depends where there's opportunity, and as I said, when we're not sort of feel like we have to be in a certain part of the market. We wanna make sure that the pool of stocks we're looking at does cover stalwart-type stocks, large caps, mid caps, and some emerging small. We don't want to shy away from those. You know, we had a couple over the last couple of years that, you know, that didn't work for us, but we feel like we've sort of really honed in on the characteristics that we look for. It's, it's, it's really when value presents. We really want to go where there's, where there's value. Again, we've showed you quite a few transactions in this period, and if we see more opportunities come through in small, we'd be happy to put more in there. A couple of questions around the dividend. I think this one's coming from the perspective of paying the special dividend. There's also quite a lengthy question about dividends and also the uneven size of dividend that we distribute, and has that sort of led to a position where investors are really not rating shares a reliable dividend player and, therefore, contributes to the discount to share price in relation to the NTA? It goes on to say, "Given the healthy level of retained profits, reserves, and franking credits, and the consistency of earnings, which have varied between AUD 0.022-AUD 0.027 per share over the past few years, will the board commit to pay a more consistent dividend over the coming years? Yeah, I'll just pass on to Andrew in a sec, but I'll just give some background. We did have a policy of paying out all franking, and we did move from that because we felt like we were just, every time we made a capital gain, we're paying it all out, and it made it difficult to manage the portfolio. I guess the challenge for us, though, is that now that we've, I guess, saying we're not going to pay it all out, it means you've got franking credits in the company. What we're trying to do with this dividend is strike a balance, where we've got an operating amount we're paying out of operating income. It's to what extent we feel like we want to add to that through special, through a special dividend, some of the capital gains, without feeling like we have to pay it all out, which restricts the ability to invest but- Yeah, that's, that's a very fair summary. Just to clarify, it's a AUD 2.5 final dividend, which is what we've paid for the last couple of years. We've paid a AUD 0.01 interim dividend. We've done that for the last couple of years, and we've added to it AUD 0.015, a special dividend, because as Mark said, franking credits, when you generate them, don't appear on our balance sheet. You've paid the tax out, but they're not part of your NTA. If you don't pay out those franking credits, then your portfolio performance, and your returns as a shareholder can be impacted. The only way to get those franking credits to have any value is to pay them out to shareholders. The board do have a look at the balance between consistency of dividends and enabling shareholders to benefit from those accumulated franking credits. With regards to whether that has any impact on the share price or not, we have another company called Mirrabooka in the stable, as it's called, of LICs. That pays, one could say, a very inconsistent dividend. It's got a AUD 0.10 ordinary dividend it pays every year, but it does pay differing levels of specials each year, depending on how that has performed. That was trading at a discount at the end of June. All LICs in the stable were, most LICs on the index were, because of the increase in interest rates, meant that equity investments had fallen somewhat out of favor. Historically, Mirrabooka has traded at very decent premiums, and the, the lumpiness of the dividend through those special dividends has not hurt Mirrabooka. I haven't got a crystal ball. I can't see what drives all shareholders, but generally, we think it's the performance of the LIC and the liquidity of the shares have the major impact on the share price. Just while we're on the dividend, we obviously did introduce that interim dividend of AUD 0.01 to try, and we're aware that it's quite uneven between the two periods, but I think it's something the board will probably discuss going forward, perhaps when we look at the next interim dividend. Because we understand that, you know, having a more consistent dividend across the two halves, is of interest to investors, but it's something we'll, we'll keep looking at going forward. Yeah, as Andrew alluded to, the issue around discounts is driven by a number of different factors in terms of the size of the fund, liquidity around the shares, and also performance. Yeah. Clearly, there's some of the things that are working, potentially not in our favor at this point of time. The other question around is, the MER seems relatively high compared to other slightly bigger LICs. It, it, it, as Andrew pointed out, it has changed quite a bit over the last... The last couple of years. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's back to historical norms. Yeah. It was 0.66% in 2020, and 0.72% in 2019. We still think that compared to... We do do an analysis of other investment vehicles, and we believe that even at 0.66%, it still is a relatively low-cost vehicle. We would like it to be lower, and if the portfolio improves, it would be. Yeah, obviously, there's no performance fees. Correct ... on that. Yeah. Question, getting back to, to stocks. Can you outline your investment thesis for Beamtree and outline if you participated in the May capital raising? In particular, could you comment on when you expect the business to be cash flow, free cash flow positive? Our level of conviction in the company clearly. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Look, this is one we've, that, that, came to the portfolio a couple of years ago, look, in hindsight, it was probably, it was too early for us to really, perhaps, to have gone in that. You know, with it being there, you know, we've done more work on it, going forward. This company sells software into the healthcare industry. It's not yet making a profit, it is close to. They did do a capital raising in May, yes, we did participate into it. We met with the management again. It does have a lot of those characteristics we're looking for in terms of the business model with the annuity revenue stream. The people who run it have got big equity positions in there. They are forecasting that this, you know, we are hopeful that this is the last capital raising, by 2 025, that they will be cash flow positive. 2024. Oh, yeah, 2024, cash flow positive. They, they are winning some interesting customers, and so that's what we're looking for. If they keep winning good customers, then we will be happy to stick with it. The, the people running the company, we like, they've got good equity interest, and it is a large market potential. Our bias is, at the moment, that perhaps now would be the wrong time to get out of it, given that some of the characteristics we look for are starting to line up. It's still up the risk curve a bit. As I said, there's certain things we're looking for for this company, so far, certainly over the past six or seven months, it's ticking those boxes. We'll see where they go from, where they go from here. Thanks, Mark. Just a reminder, want to ask a question through, through the website, you can do so, or through, through the phone. Just got a question here about the outlook for iron ore in China. What, what are your, what are your thoughts around that, and particularly in the context of dividend for, dividends for, for our holdings? Yeah, well, look, I mean, the iron ore prices held up incredibly well. It's still around AUD 117 a ton, which is still well above where the market will have longer term expectations, even though those longer term expectations have been creeping up over time. Look, we, we like BHP. I think, we like Rio as well, but we don't have Rio at the moment. We like the mix and the way BHP have built up their copper exposure. Long, long term, they might get something out of potash, and so we like that business generally. We are a little bit more cautious, though, on that iron ore price because, you know, increasingly, China needs to get more of that growth from the consumer rather than to keep doing these large asset builds, and I think that's well understood. I think it's been challenging for China to do that, but the economy has slowed its growth rate. We're still probably a bit cautious that longer term, the iron ore price comes off. I mean, in the long, long term, you know, we are expecting to see at some point, iron ore coming out of Africa, which is very high quality iron ore. As we know, with commodities, small increases in volume can change prices quite a lot, so that probably sets us with a more conservative exposure. In the meantime, you know, the company is, is well set up, and that's why we hold some of it to, to pass their profits into shareholders through frank dividends. Thanks, Mark. Do you see value in any other consumer discretionary stocks you don't currently own? If so, who? Well, I've got a couple of them, you know, there's a couple we like. We mentioned, you know, we did buy the dips in those stocks. We mentioned ARBs, and Reece, and we've held on to our position in Temple & Webster. We did take, we did take a little bit out of that, just to sort of de-risk it, but the stock's performed incredibly well. It's interesting that some of the updates we've been hearing from Temple & Webster, for those that don't know, they're an online retailer. They sell a lot of household furniture and goods, but they're simply a marketplace, so they don't actually don't hold stock themselves. It's a capital light model, and their sales numbers have really held up much, much better than the market, even during this period of weakness. It means that those that are shopping for furniture are understanding the value that Temple & Webster offers, and so their business has held up really well. They've got net cash on the balance sheet. It's an owner-driver business, so we've maintained a position in that one. And we do have a small holding in Breville, but once again, so far, the business has held up very well. It's probably because they're a global business. They're growing into new markets, so that's just provided a buffer, if for that company, because there's a lot of areas, particularly in Europe and still in the U.S., where they're still growing. Look, there's a few other stocks we look at. I mean, Wesfarmers is also a consumer discretionary. You know, we think JB Hi-Fi is a good company. That's, that's on our watch list, potentially, 'cause we still think that's a very good business. We think it's a great quality, high return on capital, good frank dividends. They're probably the main ones, but, you know, we're, we're wary of more cyclical type stocks. Thanks, Mark. I'll, I'll wrap it up after this next question or so. Have we considered taking a position in Washington? that's- No, we, we do follow the, that group of companies. But we're trying to sort of stay pure to investing in an actual operating company that we can really get our heads around. That's our focus. All right. Thanks, Mark. Look, there's no more questions online here or through the phone. I'll hand it back to you just to wrap it up. Okay. Well, thanks, everyone, for attending. Obviously, there's now sort of key four points over the year to get updates on AMCIL. You know, starting in January, going forward, there will be one of these webinars for the half year result. March, we're doing investor roadshows around the country, so you'll get to come and meet with us and ask us questions and hold us to account. Obviously, this presentation for the full year result in July, and then in October, the AGM will be webcast. There's plenty of opportunities to hear AMCIL, to get, how it's going. Hopefully, we've sort of given some clarity today about the process we're undertaking, the frameworks we used, and given some examples of how we put that into, to action. Thank you all for attending, and hopefully, we can meet you in person at some point. Thank you. That does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.