Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Eagers Automotive full-year 2023 results briefing. All callers are in a listen-only mode for the presentation. After the presentation, we will open up for the Q&A. I'll now hand the call over to Eagers Automotive CEO, Keith Thornton, to commence the presentation. Please go ahead. Well, thank you for joining us today to discuss the Eagers Automotive results for the year ending 31 December 2023. With me today is Sophie Moore, our Chief Financial Officer, and Edward Geschke, our Chief Operating Officer. Our results pack, including the slides for the presentation, have been lodged with the ASX and should be visible via the webcast. As outlined on slide 2 of the presentation, Sophie and I will provide an overview of the results, update you on key operational metrics, and then provide progress against our strategic priorities. We'll also provide the company's outlook for 2024 before opening up for questions. Let's now turn to our financials for the 2023 year. It gives me great pleasure to be able to report the results achieved by our company and the team of Eagers Automotive in 2023. The company has produced record results across a number of key financial metrics. These results were delivered by the execution of specific actions which we identified in our outlook at the start of last year and reflecting an underlying operating model that grows stronger each and every year. But more on this a little later. Total reported revenue grew by 15.3% or AUD 1.3 billion on the prior period to a record full-year turnover of AUD 9.9 billion. This strong revenue result, combined with our return on sales margin of 4.4%, produced a record underlying net profit before tax of AUD 433.3 million, an increase of AUD 28.1 million or 6.9% on the prior year. This record underlying profit result translated to record underlying earnings per share as the company continues to be relentless in its focus on delivering for shareholders. Our balance sheet is exceptionally strong with AUD 620 million of available liquidity, which included a cash position of AUD 222 million and a property portfolio of just under AUD 600 million by the end of the year. Based on this record profit result, the strength of our balance sheet, and the positive outlook the company continues to hold, we're pleased to announce a record final dividend of AUD 0.50 per share, taking our full-year dividend to AUD 0.74 per share, the highest in the company's history. Now, this time last year, we communicated two clear goals for 2023: execute on the initiatives we put in place during 2022 to deliver on more than AUD 1 billion in top-line revenue growth while continuing to manage and maintain our strong return on sales margin. I'm pleased to report today that our full-year results show the company delivered on both these goals. In 2022, we set the platform for top-line growth in 2023 via a balanced growth plan split between driving organic growth, establishing greenfield investments, and integrating scale acquisitions. Through these initiatives, we delivered top-line revenue growth of AUD 1.3 billion or 15.3%. Pleasingly, through this period of top-line growth, margins have remained strong across our business, and we've been relentless in our cost management while remaining focused on establishing new industry benchmarks for productivity. While the industry as a whole has benefited from favorable margin dynamic on new vehicles in recent years, we spent this time obsessed with business transformation to underpin sustainable, strong margins throughout industry and economic cycles, both good and bad. As a company and within our industry, I truly believe this is what sets us apart and will underwrite outperformance over the next decade and beyond. I'll touch on this a little bit more later in the presentation. I'll now hand over to Sophie to take us through the 2023 financials in more detail. Thanks, Keith. For the year ended 31 December 2023, the group has delivered a statutory net profit before tax from continuing operations of AUD 427.3 million. As Keith highlighted, revenue on a reported basis increased by 15.3% to a record AUD 9.9 billion. Underlying operating profit for the period was AUD 433.3 million, a record result, and an increase of AUD 28.1 million or 6.9% on the prior year. Underlying return on sales reduced marginally to 4.4%. But certainly, there's the opportunity for upside in 2024 as we continue to integrate and optimize the ACT and South Australian acquisitions completed in the second half of 2022. The strong margin reflects continued favorable market dynamics, margin growth in new cars, finance and insurance, and car care, but also the benefit from the ongoing tech-enabled productivity gains and cost-out programs. Slide 34 in the appendix includes a reconciliation of statutory to underlying EBITDA, including impairment and profit before tax. Eagers Automotive is in a very strong financial position underpinned by a substantial property portfolio and asset base together with AUD 620 million of available liquidity at the 31st of December 2023. This liquidity position includes available cash of AUD 222 million and undrawn commitments under corporate debt facilities. We ended the period with corporate debt of AUD 262.7 million net of cash on hand. This significant liquidity buffer provides the flexibility and capacity to invest in organic growth, technology enablers, restructuring, and acquisition opportunities. Slide 8 highlights the company's strong history in delivering growth in underlying and statutory performance. Over an 18-year period since 2006, during which we have experienced a number of macroeconomic cycles, the company has been able to deliver consecutive double-digit profit growth for each three-year cycle. The results for the period 2021 to 2023 highlight the significant growth we have experienced since the merger with AOTG in 2019 and the result of our disciplined execution of business transformation initiatives, which are aligned with our next 100 strategy over this time. For noting, the last three-year profit period reflects a doubling in size since 2019, but with net profit before tax increasing by 185%, reflecting scale benefits and a cost reset base while leveraging strong market conditions. This is a different, larger, and materially more robust business now than it was prior to 2019, and the profit performance reflects this transformation of the company. Keith will touch on these business transformation initiatives a little later in the presentation. As we have already highlighted, the company declared a record final dividend of AUD 0.50 per share, taking the full-year dividends to a record AUD 0.74 per share, increasing 4.2% on the prior period. This record dividend is reflective of a record underlying earnings per share for the period of AUD 1.124, increasing 6.9% on the prior year. Importantly, this highlights our long-term consistent track record of growing returns for our shareholders. Over the past 10 years, we have delivered returns for our shareholders through three main focus areas. First, by optimizing our business to deliver strong, sustainable return on sales margins. Only when our existing businesses are optimized do we earn the right to grow through disciplined, organic, greenfield, and accretive M&A activities. To enable us to reward shareholders, we must manage equity and capital by evaluating investment opportunities against other capital management initiatives. Once we have done these, we are in a position to reward our shareholders with dividends and strong total shareholder returns. The company remains well-placed to fund growth with significant gearing capacity, enabling the ability to deploy this available liquidity in a disciplined and strategic manner. I will now hand back to Keith to take us through some operational highlights. Thanks for that, Sophie. But before we go on, I just wanted to add a comment to this slide. This focus on rewarding shareholders is something we take very seriously at Eagers Automotive. In 2023, we turned 110 years old as a company. We've been listed since 1957, and we have paid a dividend every single year that we've been listed. Now, it's worth reminding people of this fact occasionally. It may not be totally unique over the same period, but it's certainly something that is rare and something we are very proud of at Eagers Automotive. This focus on execution and delivering for our shareholders and our stakeholders in general is part of our DNA, and we'll continue to protect this proud track record. Let's turn now to some key operational metrics for 2023 and start with the new car market. Improving new vehicle supply conditions and strong order banks across the industry produced a record new vehicle market in 2023. The total market was up 12.5%. It's worth noting that a strong new vehicle market creates multiple benefits beyond just the new car department. It acts as a catalyst for used cars, with reduced delivery times being a key driver of trade-ins. It drives an increased car park for service and parts business, noting cars sold due to their first service usually 12 months after delivery. And as normalized supply returns, so does our significant point of sale advantage to finance, insurance, and car care, of which we're already seeing very positive green shoots. All of these components of our business have been subject to headwinds in the tight supply environment since 2020. This industry dynamic provides a hedge against any softening in new car performance and demonstrates the resilience of the automotive retail business model. But turning back to the outlook for new vehicle sales, and we've shown the graph on the right of this slide before, it highlights supply and demand levels relative to historic averages. The new vehicle market over the last three years remains significantly below the average for the eight years through 2012 to 2019. Even with a record high market in 2023 of more than 1.2 million new cars delivered, the four-year 2020 to 2023 average is still only 1,066,000 units per annum, some 71,000 units per annum below the prior eight-year average. So based on this, there remains a 285,000-car hold in new cars delivered into Australia over the past four years compared to historic averages. This shortfall, even before factoring in net migration to Australia, real wage growth, strong employment levels, a buoyant property market, plus the multiple mandates, incentives, and proposed emission standards compelling the transition of private buys and fleets to new, cleaner, and greener vehicles. These factors combined should underwrite consistent new vehicle demand and continue, at a minimum, to act as a hedge against general economic conditions. As you'll see on this next slide, the large imbalance between orders and deliveries moderated over the second half of 2023. It's important to note, however, that demand remains resilient, running in line with the record delivery rate evidenced in the industry reporting. We continue to see orders higher than deliveries in our business even early in 2024. There does continue to be a cycling from long-term order banks, however, reflected as cancellations, into vehicles that are available for immediate delivery from some manufacturers that have improved or even normalized supply. It's important to note that supply is not normalized equally across the industry. It varies by OEM, and even within any specific OEM, their product portfolio varies. Any general industry-wide assumptions on demand and supply will lead to a misread of the dynamics at play in our industry. Eagers Automotive continued to have a net order bank of more than 40,000 units at the end of 2023, even with the record deliveries in the second half of the year and the net effect of cancellations. Remember, this is a factor of six times as large as any period prior to 2020. At the current rate, this order bank provides a run-off well into 2025. Finally, the gross profit in this order bank remains at historically high levels. It must always be remembered that the addressable market for Eagers and the industry as a whole does not start and end with new vehicle sales alone. The Eagers business is multifaceted, with large opportunities in used cars, which is a market three times the size of new cars, industry-leading parts, both wholesale and retail, and a service business that does more than 1.5 million repair orders per annum. In addition, we have a finance and insurance business that writes more than AUD 2 billion in net amount finance each year. We have an unrivaled geographic and brand portfolio position, which supports these segments and creates greater opportunity and a stronger hedge against changes in industry dynamics. Now, despite these market-leading positions, we still have considerable opportunities for growth geographically, where we're less than 8% of New South Wales and where we're less than 4% of the Victorian market, the two largest markets in Australia. We also have growth within segments such as premium and luxury OEM brand representation. We have growth with new market entrants and adjacent markets. Eagers is very well-placed in terms of both the opportunity and the hedge, irrespective of the cycle in the industry. And while the dynamics driving the economics in automotive retail will shift in the current cycle, we're very confident in our ability to profitably and sustainably grow through it. Now, this next slide is a very important slide. It outlines the confidence we have in our transformed business and the confidence we have in the outlook. The groundwork for this confidence has been laid with genuine business transformation of our operating model through the key components of our next 100 strategy. Internally, we have made sure that any positive economic or industry tailwinds have been used to accelerate the rate of transformation. We certainly haven't been passengers to good conditions. The figures on the slide represent real evidence of how this has occurred. On a true like-for-like, dealer-for-dealer comparison to our pre-pandemic business, you can see how margin growth has been complemented by equally meaningful cost-out and productivity gains, all driven by sustainable, structural, and tech-enabled changes to our business processes. In a true like-for-like sense, we're operating with 1,488 less people, a lower property footprint, and a 25% increase in productivity per person. This is true business transformation. On an EBITDAR margin basis, which excludes the impact of interest rates and better reflects the underlying health of the business, we have lifted margins from 2.8% to 5.5% over this period. Now, the key industry margin metric is return on sales%. On the next slide, we see how the existing business has performed despite material inflationary cost headwinds, while also highlighting the upside inherent in our recent acquisitions and greenfield investments. Firstly, looking at the slide on the left, you'll notice that on a like-for-like basis and even accounting for material cost pressures such as interest rate rises and higher inventory levels, our business operated at broadly the same return on sales margin as 2022, 4.85% return on sales versus 4.9%, even absorbing all those costs. This is a noteworthy result in the context of the industry performance and the material inflationary pressures the economy has faced. We're very proud of it. You'll also see the recent acquisitions. You'll also see that recent acquisitions. Pardon me. We've given a brief loss of connection with the speaker line. Please continue to hold, and the conference will commence shortly. Hello, everyone. I'm not sure whether we've still got people on the line. I hope we do because I was just about to talk to some very exciting news. We're on slide 15 talking about our return on sales margin in our like-for-like business compared to acquisitions and greenfield investments. So I have no idea when I dropped off the line to those listening, but it's a very important slide. You'll see that our like-for-like return on sales was broadly in line with last year, 4.85% versus 4.9%. But equally, you see the upside available in the acquisitions we've made, which are running at 2.9%, and the greenfield investments. So looking at this slide, and I hope everyone can hear me firstly, and secondly, they can see the slide, on the right-hand side, you'll note that there is more than AUD 30 million of net profit per annum available as we mature greenfield investments and as we integrate acquisition. We believe this dynamic will continue with future growth as we buy businesses operating at lower productivity without our scale benefits and with a lower finance and insurance performance than the underlying Eagers operating model. This is a genuine and unique competitive advantage and will help drive our growth in coming years. Okay, let's move on to our strategic priorities. As part of our strategic update today, we'll touch on a number of examples of how the execution of our next 100 strategy over a sustained period has optimized the Eagers business model. In addition to improving the health of the underlying business, we have a clear strategy for growth focusing on four key pillars. One, the continued expansion of Australia and New Zealand operations. Two, organic and greenfield growth by playing the leading role in the transition to new energy vehicles. Three, investing in preferred partner arrangements. And four, exploring the opportunity to enter new geographic markets as partnerships with key OEMs consolidate globally. Let's start with how we've optimized our business via our property, people, and technology initiatives, which are all key to operating with materially higher productivity than historic industry norms. You'll hear me talk a lot today about productivity. Let's start with property. We continue to use our retail footprint across both sales and service delivered for both innovation and consolidation, focusing on a more customer-centric experience on a sustainably lower cost base. Since 2019, on a reported basis, so this is the total company since 2019, we've exited 144 external leases. Now, that includes business divestments, but it also includes acquisitions. Oh, sorry. That includes all, sorry, divestments and leases exit. Apologies. While we've also invested AUD 300 million into owned property as part of this strategy. Now, this has helped to rebalance our owned property ratio. It's removed inflationary cost pressures evident in external leases and ensured any capital investments we make into new retail developments are to the long-term benefit of Eagers shareholders rather than external landlords. The optimization of our property is supported by the development of proprietary technology, which responds to customers' wants and needs and supports process efficiencies in our business. Over the past four years, we've developed and rolled out a number of proprietary initiatives that provide an enhanced customer experience while leveraging technology to improve our employee experience, allowing them to do more in their role by streamlining and automating tasks where possible. The property and technology initiatives have generated significant productivity gains across our workforce. Higher productivity, while delivering a better customer outcome, is a measurable and highly valuable competitive advantage. Our progress in these areas is evidenced by two key measures: headcount and revenue per employee. Since 2019, on a reported basis, we have reduced total headcount by more than 35% and, during the same period, increased sales per employee by 39%. As a company, our internal ambition is to achieve 1.5 million sales per person and have a property portfolio with a cost base no more than 6% of the gross profit generated by the business. These metrics are both materially below industry benchmarks and will set our operating model further apart from the industry averages. Our journey of business transformation and relentless execution of our strategy will provide further business optimization opportunities in 2024 and beyond. Moving on to financial services, which will represent a key margin driver in 2024. The last three years have been a period of considerable headwinds to finance penetration, which in finance, penetration is a surrogate for volume, caused by long lead times associated with tight supply, which in turn diminished our point of sale advantages. It also saw low-rate finance campaigns from the captive finance companies, largely absent in the market. Despite this, Eagers are proud of our relative performance, which you'll see on the graphs on the slide in front of you, relative to the industry as we continued our company-wide focus on finance, insurance, and car care, which is another example of where we execute regardless of external influence. Our relative performance to the industry penetration rates is as good as it has ever been. In 2024, we've already seen the point-of-sale advantage return and the reintroduction of some low-rate campaigns. This has translated into an immediate increase in penetration rates in these examples to levels not seen since well before the pandemic. We will continue to focus on our relative outperformance of the market, our industry-leading margin performance, and continued growth of ancillary products to leverage the expected tailwinds to come. This acts as both a hedge and an opportunity in 2024 as the industry dynamics continue to evolve. Another key opportunity in 2024 will be used cars, and we're excited to be entering a period of considerable tailwinds with a record 23 behind us. The graph on the right demonstrates how our Easy Auto 123 business continued to improve quarter-on-quarter throughout 2023, with continued improvement in net operating profit per unit. Our independent used car result, consisting of the integrated Easy Auto 123 and Carlins auction businesses, on a net profit per unit basis, now compares with the global leader in this space, CarMax, as you'll see in this slide. The results achieved by Easy Auto last year occurred at a time when many other startups closed and exited this space in the industry entirely. As inventory is largely normalized, we are seeing the trade ratio materially improve and allow our dealerships and independent used operations access to better quality stock at better pricing for our business. Scaling the volume while maintaining the economics we have built over a number of years and various iterations will be fundamental to what is still an enormous opportunity for value creation in Eagers Automotive. I would remind you that we are the leaders in this space, the only truly national fixed-price used car category participant with economics that match the global leader CarMax in a market in Australia that is three times the size of the new car market, all of this supported by Australia's largest new car operator. Moving on to strategic partnerships. A key pillar of our growth strategy is investing in preferred partnership arrangements to create a competitive advantage in adjacent markets that we believe will act as enablers to our mutual growth ambitions. Key market drivers, including evolving customer preferences, incentives and mandates for lower-emission vehicles, and normalization of new vehicle supply, create a compelling opportunity for Eagers to invest in the adjacent market of novated leasing and asset management. To capitalize on these market conditions, Eagers and McMillan Shakespeare have entered into a strategic partnership under which we will provide complementary services on a non-exclusive basis across various business units, including new vehicle supply, but with a specific focus on EVs. The material equity investment in McMillan Shakespeare taken by Eagers in 2023 reflects the materiality of the opportunity and the strategic alignment between stakeholders. Eagers continues to proactively position the company to be a clear and dominant leader in the transition to lower-emission vehicles. Within the Australian market context, Eagers leads NEV sales with approximately 10% of our total deliveries already full battery electric vehicles, and with the introduction of more affordable NEV options across our partner portfolio expected in 2024. Now, this 10% compares to the dealer industry average, which excludes Tesla because of their direct-to-consumer model, which sits at circa 3.5%. We believe considerable opportunities will present for Eagers due to our unique national market position. And as such, we continue to identify opportunities in both the passenger and light-duty commercial segment and are moving rapidly to capitalize on these. In addition, and as previously highlighted, enabling adjacent industries such as the fleet management and novated lease segments provide an opportunity for Eagers to be strategically positioned for mutual success with key partners. We continue our disciplined approach to growth via acquisition. As announced to the market in October of last year, we are acquiring a large-scale multi-brand dealership group within our Victorian business, a key market that we've previously identified as an opportunity for growth. This acquisition includes a high-quality, well-balanced portfolio of 12 leading premium and volume brands situated in key locations across Melbourne and the Mornington region of Victoria. The inclusion of three strategic properties representing 53,500 square meters in high-profile sites in Brighton and Mulgrave will provide the footprint to continue progress against key property components of our strategy. The acquisition is expected to add more than AUD 900 million in additional turnover on an annualized basis. In addition to this Victorian acquisition, we're pleased to announce that we are expanding our large and highly valued partnership with Toyota through the acquisition of Alice Springs Toyota from the Peter Kittle Motor Group. The business has an annual turnover of approximately AUD 60 million and operates across three properties, which will be acquired by Eagers as part of the transaction. The business is a longstanding iconic dealership representing Toyota, who are the dominant OEM in the Northern Territory market with a share of more than 35% of the market. When linked to our Bridge Toyota business in Darwin, we expect to be able to leverage considerable scale benefits in a territory where Toyota has a long-held history of clear market leadership. Finally, turning to our outlook. The last three years have seen consistent performance culminating in a record second half of 2023 with AUD 226 million underlying net profit before tax at a 4.5% return on sales margin. This consistent performance is something we can gain confidence in as it's been achieved in a period of unprecedented external disruptions from the pandemic and global conflict leading to material supply issues, which have affected different brands at different times, labor shortages, natural disasters, significant port congestions, biosecurity issues, and most recently, a cyber attack. It goes to demonstrate that Eagers is uniquely positioned to withstand and thrive regardless of market conditions by focusing on what we can control and strategically moving to where the market will be. It also demonstrates the resilience of the automotive industry, where different levers can be used to respond to different market conditions. On the slide in front of you, you will see the industry and Eagers-specific dynamics that outline where we see the offsets in 2024 to any potential headwinds in new vehicle deliveries or margins. A record 23 market and normalized supply will be a tailwind to used car supply, finance and insurance penetration, service, and parts. These specific industry tailwinds, combined with our productivity benefits, our material order bank, and expected revenue growth in 2024, all underpin our positive outlook. Now, talking of revenue growth, and as we did this time last year, we expect to add another AUD 1 billion in revenue growth in 2024. This will take growth in turnover of the company in the two years since 2022 to circa AUD 2.3 billion, or almost 30% growth. We expect this growth will incorporate a healthy mix of organic, greenfield, and acquisitions. So, in summary, we expect a consistent new car market characterized by a continued shift in demand for lower-emission product and with a skew to business and fleet management type buyers. We do expect industry dynamics to shift, which will support our independent used operation, Easy Auto 123, support materially higher finance penetration, and grow our fixed operations. We expect our results will be supported by our industry-leading productivity and our reset operating cost base. We will continue to be uniquely placed to leverage our geographic and portfolio advantages, plus the partnerships set up over the last two years, which anticipated the industry dynamic we are now entering. And finally, we will optimize the value from the work done in 2023 to deliver another expected AUD 1 billion in revenue growth in 2024. So, on behalf of Eagers Automotive, I would apologize for that blip in the middle where we lost a connection. I'd also like to thank you for your interest in today's financial and strategic update, and we're happy to now open for questions. Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Russell Gill with JP Morgan. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. Couple of questions. Just the first one on the inventory balance went up a lot at the end of the period. Is that just a hang-up relating to the cyber incidents and deliveries, or is there, I guess, a higher level of inventory that you're now carrying across the network going forward? Hi, Russell. Thanks for the question. I think that inventory positions two things. It represents where the industry is at. So there is materially more inventory in the business. It also represents a growing business. It also represents that in our retail JV, we hold all the stock for one of the OEMs that we're in a retail JV with. If you take out that, on a like-to-like basis, there was a 24% increase in inventory at the end of the year compared to December 2022. So it's a little bit distorted by the structure of our inventory holding on one particular brand, but certainly there is more inventory in the industry. Just to finish on that, we're running with 63 days' stock at the moment, but it is not linear. We've got key brands that are sub 30 and others that are over 100. Keith, just so we can unpack your billion-dollar sales uplift, it looks like based on the acquisitions, you're getting close to that billion-dollar uplift just on those acquisitions alone. You're calling out, I guess, a flattish outlook in volume terms. I guess two questions around that. What are you seeing, I guess, from an OEM Eagers delivery dynamics? Because you skew to Toyota, and Toyota was pretty soft in 2023, how that delivery dynamic rolls through 2024. And then maybe a better way of asking it could be around your order bank expectations. So you think it's coming down. What do you reckon the differential in 2024 will be between order rate and actually delivery? Good question, and there's a number of parts to that, Russell. At the moment, and I think everyone would be surprised, but over the second half, I'll start with the second half of 2023, which might then point to what's happening this year. First off, order right was literally 246 units less than deliveries over the second half for Eagers. Now, that's over 60,000-odd orders and deliveries. There was a cancellation and a cycling of the order bank, however, which is, that's where you see the reduction in our order bank. As we've started this year, we are taking more orders than we're delivering, and VFAX was strong in January. So generally speaking, the market's a hard one to call in 2024 because there's a number of dynamics at play. We don't see it materially falling away from what it did in 2023. So we think the market is going to be a very hard call, but call it between north of 1.1 million. We're fairly confident that's where it'll be, and it could actually be anything depending on some external influences that are being bandied round at the moment. So we don't really know what the 2024 market. Pardon me. We've temporarily lost connection with the speaker line. Please continue to hold, and we'll comment shortly. I'm not sure if I'm back in again. Russell, can you hear me? Yes, I can. Keith, can you hear me? Yes, thank you. That's the second time we dropped out. I have no idea what's going on. So apologies to everyone listening. I got you up to saying that you're expecting 1.1 million deliveries, maybe a little bit more based on different dynamics in the industry. Exactly. So then going to your question about our billion-dollar turnover increase expected for next year, certainly a large portion of that could be underwritten or expected to be underwritten by the acquisitions that we've outlined. But in addition to that, a number of the greenfield investments from last year will become organic growth this year. So last year, our retail JV and a number of new brands that we picked up will see organic growth as they mature this year. And we've got greenfield investments. We've got a number of, to be honest, less material and smaller partnerships that we've picked up that are totally new partnerships for us across light-duty trucks and even in passenger cars that will add some turnover as well. So it will still be balanced across those three categories. There will be some significant organic growth just in our portfolio, but the large portion will be underwritten by those acquisitions. I mean, just to clarify, when you're thinking through 2024, you're not necessarily thinking that you'll be drawing down that order bank much at all. You expect the order right will be running similar to what the deliveries will be across your portfolio? I think the order bank will diminish over the course of the year, Russell, but not based on demand falling away relative to deliveries. The reduction in our order bank has been through cancellations, not through the order right and delivery dynamic. Great. Okay. And then just final question on the because I didn't see a mention of impact around the government's fuel efficiency standard on their current proposal, and the timing for the industry is pretty quick for the OEMs from early next year. What do you see as the potential repercussions for order rate at the back end of this year if the current proposal goes forward and potentially there's changes to new vehicle pricing around high-emission vehicles? What do your expectations are of potential order rate and how you geared up for that at the back end of this calendar year? Well, we're not gearing up for it yet, Russell, because it's so fresh. I mean, we started the discussion on this in detail this week. It's been fairly all-encompassing, and it's obviously a massive change to OEMs' product portfolios, which will then flow on to dealers around Australia. At the moment, to be fair, we are still actively, and we're playing a fairly active role in engaging with government on how this fuel efficiency standard is best rolled out. We're very supportive of fuel emission standards in general, but we're also very supportive of any changes being done in a way that doesn't have a net negative impact on the economy, on the industry, or on consumers. Having said all that, the way it stands at the moment, there may be a distortion in this year's number. So the market, that's why I'm saying it's hard to say what the market could be this year compared to the following year. But as I said, that's as it stands at the moment. We're hopeful to engage with the government and play our role in that to make sure that whatever is eventually brought to market is something that's manageable. We don't really want a distorted market where it's strong for one period and weak for another or the opposite. So I'll probably leave it at that, Russell, at this stage, and we'll just see how it plays out. It's a little bit early, which is all speculative at the moment. Okay. Thanks, guys. The next question comes from Scott Murdoch with Morgans. Please go ahead. Thank you. Thanks, Keith and Sophie. Just a quick question on BYD expectations, if we can. I think you delivered roughly 12,000 vehicles from one model last year, just interested in, I guess, embedded in your AUD 1 billion turnover uplift, what the expectations for BYD and intertwined with that are. Hi, Scott. It's Keith. We're back again. Apologies for the third time. Your question, I got a little bit cut off over. It was if you want to go back. Simply about BYD, just expectations embedded with guidance and investment and ROS outcomes for that particular JV. We think that in general, this year, there'll be a continued uplift in all EV models that we sell across multiple brands that we represent. BYD's one of those brands. I mean, BYD, or EV Directors, the distributor, have got expectations to bring in 2 new models this year, or actually 3 new models this year, 2 SUVs through the middle of the year, and they're still expected to have a dual-cab ute in due course later in the year. I think, again, we've had their volume expectations communicated to us to be north of 20,000 units. And across the BYD dealerships that we represent in Australia, we'll continue to invest. I would say there was a reasonable degree of investment last year as we ramped up and as we filled out the network. But there shouldn't be excessive CapEx required for the business this year. The ROS is still to be seen. We've called out exactly what it was in our JV partnerships on one of the slides here today. So we expect it to be broadly in line with that going forward. Okay. Thank you. Just, I guess, a little bit more color on the margin outcome forward-looking. You've obviously given the moving parts on the outlook slide there, the main one being, well, new car down, the rest up. Just interested in the balance of that offset. Obviously, new cars are higher skew of the sales. We've also got the acquisition coming in. You called out F&I pretty strongly as a lever. On balance, do you think you can sort of hold that GP percentage in the year forward? The best way to look at it is we think the GP hedge will come out of, or the total margin. Let's talk to return on sales because that's what matters. That's the bottom-line margin. It will be driven largely, the biggest lever to be pulled this year will be our used car performance and our F&I performance. Can't give you an exact number, but ultimately, our return on sales is driven by our productivity and our cost base. Our focus has been for three years, and we've spent a lot of time, particularly today, calling out the transformation that's occurred over the last three years. When we went into 2020 in a tight supply environment and new cars became and new car margins were stronger than historic levels, we immediately pivoted to, "We're not sure how long this particular period will be, but we want to transform the business, reset the cost base so that we're going to be stronger for longer when we come out of this cycle." So to be honest, Scott, most of our focus will be on productivity and people, property, keeping costs down, and making sure the return on sales margin is managed. But the biggest lever on the gross profit part of that equation will be finance. Okay. Thank you. You've got plenty of analysts. I'll jump back in the queue. Thank you. Thanks, Scott. Pardon me. We'll just pause for a moment while we get a better connection for the speaker, and then we'll continue with the Q&A. One moment. The next question comes from Sarah Mann with Molas. Please go ahead. Morning, guys. First question for me is just on the new vehicle efficiency standard, obviously cognizant that it hasn't kind of been fully signed off in its final form, but just interested, given that you've got a reasonably large or sizable New Zealand business and they've had kind of a similar scheme implemented, just wondering if you could give us any color around, I guess, what you saw then in terms of, I guess, the lead-up to the clean car tax getting implemented and then how, I guess, the model lineups shifted in the year it was implemented and how that all kind of flowed through to GP. Hi, Sarah. It's really going to be there are so many moving parts to the industry here in Australia. The New Zealand experience, the only thing I would say that the New Zealand experience is relevant to the Australian is that when a standard or emission standard comes in like this on a short timeframe, and at the moment, the talk is that it's a January 1, 2025 implementation, OEMs cannot move quickly to change their product portfolio, their emissions, their pricing, or anything between now and January 1, 2025. So any emission standard needs to be carefully considered because it can distort the market. It will move consumers. It doesn't move OEMs because OEMs cannot move that quickly. Consumers do. They move around to where the economics push them. With one proviso, there needs to be a product that's fit for purpose for them to go to. That is probably the challenge in the NVS in Australia in general is that Australians do have a unique appetite for cars, and the cars that Australians buy are right-hand drive in a fairly small market, and they're very specific dual-cab utes and SUVs. So as it stands, again, I think there is, hopefully, some great opportunity to engage with government and discuss with them how this emission standard, how the targets can be supported, but in a way that doesn't distort the market. But to actually talk about how it's going to play out will be probably futile just at the moment, Sarah. Understood. All right. Thanks for that. And then the other thing you called out in your presentation was just an opportunity around kind of the light commercial vehicle market with EV. Can you provide any more color on what you're saying there? The simple issue there is the dynamic it plays that there's probably no part of our portfolio of whether it's cars or trucks or by segments that there is a greater demand and a greater lack of supply. And by that, I mean that there is the fleets who run light-duty last-mile logistics are desperate for fit-for-purpose, low-emission product. At the moment, it's coming, but there is still, and this goes back to the similar sorts of challenge around the new vehicle emission standards. It's coming, but it's a little way away. What we are doing is positioning ourselves with a number of existing partners and also taking some material representation partnerships with some brands that may well be able to perhaps get a jump on that segment and deliver product in an affordable way that's fit for purpose, that's got the right range, it's got the right low capacity, etc. So this is a really, really material, smallish part of our total portfolio, but it's one that we've moved to aggressively because we can see the demand, and we know that if we can get the jump on representation and make sure that we've got a more material and an overweight representation of the products that respond to that demand, we're going to be well positioned. Right. Thank you. Then last one, just any commentary on supply? You mentioned it's kind of a little bit mixed depending on brand by brand or model by model. Just thinking as well about the Red Sea kind of disruptions, has that had any change to what you're saying from a supply perspective? No, Sarah. To be fair, it hasn't really had a big impact, and it's not being reported as having a huge impact. As I said, I think Russell asked a similar question. We're sitting at 63-day stock at the moment. That's across all our portfolio, across the whole business. That's not excessive. It's certainly up on where it's been, where we've been sitting at more like mid-40s. But it varies from literally one of our larger brands at 25 days to 150 in one brand. So that's the variation across brands. It's highly variable, and it really does. And even then, inside a brand, you might have free and available stock in perhaps some of the models that are harder to sell, and it's tight, and there's a long order bank on product. So it's nothing clear at the moment. If I look out 60 days, it's got our portfolio dropping to under 50-day supply based on arrivals and cars on order. So I think it's going to be a little bit bumpy over the course of the year, but the general trend will be back towards normal supply, and that normal supply will be around 60-day supply. I would work on that. If you ask me what sort of supply we're going to have over our portfolio for 2024, I'd be saying we'll be running with 60-day supply. Great. Thanks very much, Keith. Thanks, Sarah. Your next question comes from Phil Chippendale with Ord Minnett. Please go ahead. Hi, Keith and Sophie. Thanks for your time. Just on the strategic partnership with MMS, you've mentioned it's not exclusive, but I just wonder if we can just unpack that a little bit more. You said it is all obviously focused on EVs, but can you talk to, does it involve preferential volumes? Can you give us a little bit of meat around the bone, please? Well, Phil, I won't be able to unpack it in any way that's breaching any agreements that we've got in the background to keep it confidential. But in general, what it is, is to work as preferred partners with each other where there's opportunities to mutually grow our business. It's as simple as that. And if you think about the dynamics of what a novated lease company is, where they largely respond to inbound inquiries as opposed to a dealer who largely also responds to inbound inquiries, but in a different way, where we provide test drives, where we've got people walking in who are maybe naive to the novated lease opportunity, who may or may not be a customer of novated lease company A or B, there's a real opportunity to drive further volume. But the whole intent of the partnership is not to move existing volume around at McMillan Shakespeare's level. It is about to grow more novated leases for them and to sell more EVs for us. It's also the opportunity to integrate things like Easy Auto, which provides remarketing and new cars, novated leases on a national basis. So there are actually multiple parts to this. But there is not the preferred basis is, "If we can work together, all things being equal, to grow your book and grow our volume, let's do that." What do the economics look like? Well, they need to work for both parties. Okay. Thanks. Just second and final one from me. Just on the headcount reduction, I think over the course of the year, it was 2.7%. I think the year prior was sort of 3%-4%. Just thinking about the next 12-18 months, you've been a business that's really been focused on efficiency. I imagine that further headcount reductions would be natural to assume. But are you getting to a point where there's sort of a natural sort of leveling off here? We will eventually, but it's a long way away, Phil. And the reason for that is there is two things that drive it. One is the tech rollout, and our tech is not rolled out across our company. In some cases, it's 60%. In some cases, 30%. This varies by different tech, I mean. So our new and used vehicle wholesale deal processing, which is a proprietary tech we've got called DARTI, I mean, that is running at maybe 40% of our business. So over this year and over next year, we'll roll it around across the other 60%. Our automated accounts payable, which is a system we call SAM, 60% of the total invoices in the company were last year processed through SAM. There's another 40% to go. I can give multiple examples where the tech has not been rolled out across the whole company. So there's quite a runway yet to get efficiencies and further productivity. The other thing that drives productivity is property consolidation. So that's a decade-long. That's an ongoing journey. And the best example is, again, I'll talk to Osborne Park over in Perth, where you're going from 7 leases onto one 24,000-square-meter site, putting 7 brands onto one site, taking used cars off that site and putting it into Easy Auto 123, running one service factory, and you get structural change and headcount efficiencies through property transformation as well. So you need to link both, but eventually, there'll be a tailing off, but it's a long way away. I'll be quite frank. This year, we will accelerate our productivity. We had the team in here yesterday working on Dealership of the Future, which is basically what our existing tech, if we were at a clean sheet of paper and we rolled out our tech across every single part of our business on day one, what would the productivity look like? What would the design look like? What would the roles look like? What would the outcomes per employee look like? What would the roles we need, and what are the roles we don't need? And also, how can we reward best so that we actually reward the best in the industry? Now, that is a really powerful thing, and we're very close to having that finalized, and that will be a template that we will use. Now, doing that three years ago even for Eagers would have been an exercise in theory. This is now an exercise in practice and reality and evidence. Let's roll out this across the board. So we've got a pretty exciting runway when it comes to that. The other thing that we're really pleased in is this doesn't involve redundancies or targeting people. What we do is we roll out the tech, and as there is attrition in our business, we resize our business. And I want to be really clear. We have an internal ambition. This is not about a headcount reduction. It's about a productivity improvement. And what goes with high productivity is better pay and reward for staff. Okay. Thanks. I'll jump back in the queue. Thanks, all. Your next question comes from Jack Dunn with Citi. Please go ahead. Hi, Keith. Hi, Sophie. Thanks for taking my call. Just firstly, I was hoping to just unpack that revenue guidance a bit more. I know you're saying AUD 1 billion, but if I look at acquisitions doing close to AUD 800 million-AUD 900 million for the year, and you mentioned BYD at 20,000 units, which is 6% growth, and then you've got organic growth of the business, it seems to be it would imply a lot higher than AUD 1 billion. So I wonder about the other segments of your business which you think are going to face a tougher operating environment. Jack, it's a really good call out, and I'm glad you asked the question in the way that you did. We're just a conservative company. AUD 1 billion should be fairly achievable. We'd like to overachieve like we did last year again. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. And then just on your expectations for, I call it, underlying like-for-like PBT margins, do you think sort of the productivity initiatives can sort of help offset that falling new car GPU and rising bailment costs, or how are you thinking about your like-for-like underlying return on sales? So this is the most interesting thing to be because we think the revenue is conservative AUD 1 billion next year growth. So if people were looking at our turnover at the end of 2024, we were going to be circa AUD 11 billion, hopefully more. So that's less at risk, if you like. We're really pleased that we went from 4.4% in the first half sorry, yeah, we went from 4.4% at reported basis up to 4.5% in the second half. So our second half actually improved. On a like-for-like basis, our cost base actually reduced in the second half last year, so we were seeing benefits flow through. The other thing that we really wanted to call out is that upside in the acquisitions in the greenfields. Our like-for-like business finished last year at 4.85% return on sales. If you took out the impact of interest, it was 5.1%. So the underlying business where we are rolling out these tech initiatives, the property consolidation, and our F&I performance, our ancillary products I mean, car care, we're running it over we're AUD 520 or 30 per new car in car care. That's industry-leading. We've got regions that are over AUD 700 a car. So we're driving gross well. We're quite happy with that, but we always focus more on cost out because that's much more controllable with the exception of finance penetration. So where I'm leading to here is that going into 2024, we see that that underlying business was 4.85%, and probably interest rates have peaked, and there may be some moderation over the second half of the year. And then you've got upside as we had a record year out of the ACT acquisition. The return on sales we achieved out of that business was higher than the independent expert report and what we bought it on. So we've already seen some improvements, and we expect further improvements out of that business. Greenfields were a loss last year. They'll move into a profit this year. Our retail JV should be broadly the same but with upside risk. So if you consolidate all those together, we're still confident that the return on sales in 2024 shouldn't materially fall away. We actually are quite confident. A big part will be how quickly the finance performance lifts. But to that end, we've already seen some really positive green shoots early this year. A couple of our key partners have come back to the market with finance campaigns. One particular campaign, we saw 100% penetration. Another one, we saw north of 80% penetration. Now, that is a massive margin hedge against any change in new cars performance over the course of the year. The other thing is that we still have this north of 40,000-car order bank to deliver. So that will support margins as well. So very hard to call out, Jack, what the year will look like, but we're reasonably confident. Of course, we're proceeding with caution. I guess I would say that compared to the industry, if you look at our return on sale return on sales, we're pretty proud. It shows that our cost is holding it up, and our relative performance in these sort of non-new car gross areas are also holding it up above the rest of the industry. Lovely. Thanks. That's very helpful and clear. Just last one, on the F&I new penetration on that chart there, it just goes to 2021. Would it be fair to say that the Eagers' top 30% would be reflective of where the business was pre-COVID? It's actually close. That's actually not a bad call out. So the industry benchmark, just to be clear, is the average of the top 30%. Eagers' average of the top 30% is into the 40s, closest to the mid-40s, and it is almost double what the industry's at. Now, first off, that delta between us and the industry, we've never had that big a delta compared to the industry, and that's the light data. Into the sort of low to mid-40s, certainly, our benchmark dealers pre-COVID were well above that, but our average was probably getting close to the 40s. Okay. Perfect. Thanks for taking my questions. Appreciate it. Thanks, Jack. Your next question comes from John Campbell with Jefferies. Please go ahead. Thanks, guys. I know it's been going on a while, this call, so just a couple of quick ones. Just on the easyauto123, Keith, those numbers you put up comparing with CarMax, and CarMax has obviously been out a lot longer than easyauto123. Do you sort of still, and given that your net operating profit per retail unit, it's lower than CarMax, but it's in the ballpark, do you sort of still see a lot of upside in easyauto123 in terms of that growth per retail unit, or is it more going to be a volume story going forward? Well, John, I think just looking at that slide, just to be clear, our net operating profit per retail unit in easyauto123 in Carlins last year was $911, and CarMax was actually $788. But the issue is so what we're calling out there is. But that's U.S. dollars, though, isn't it, Keith? That's U.S. dollars. Oh, yeah, but we haven't normalized for U.S. versus AEB. But either way, the AUD 911 shows that we've always had a nice internal ambition of being AUD 1,000 per car. That is a really strong result at a profit per unit basis. The difference is CarMax have been around, as you rightly point out, John, for decades. They're dominant in the U.S., and they're selling I don't even know their volume, but it's sort of 1 million-plus units. The biggest challenge is to scale these businesses and retain that return on sales per vehicle. So that's our net profit per vehicle sold. In the past, as you try to scale these businesses, sometimes the profit falls away. What the key will be, and we've talked about this for a number of years, is that as the industry evolves and I'll talk now about over the next decade, as brands come to Australia and our retail JV with BYD's an example. So in that business, there are no used cars in the BYD business. They all go to Easy Auto. There is another large EV player that we provide inventory portal expertise for and get a number of their used cars. As other brands have come to Australia, they're less focused on a used car business in the traditional way. As we restructure property, that Osborne Park example I spoke to before, as we put 6 franchises together, we don't have used cars attached to each individual dealership anymore. All of those trade-ins go to Easy Auto. So as the industry evolves, more and more, we will have used cars sold through our national fixed-price model, which is Easy Auto. That is what will scale it. You can scale profitably if you trade or buy the cars at the right price. It is as simple as that. No more, no less. The challenge is if you try and scale and you don't have cars coming in, usually through the trade channel, if you need to go and buy cars - excuse me - from auctions, you are going to pay too much. There's multiple margins being made on that car. So we are uniquely positioned to be able to scale it. I think Easy Auto is one of those businesses that if we try and aggressively double the volume this year, we will impair that profit per unit quite badly. Over time, this is going to continue to grow profitably. There's a couple of things that we're working around in the background on how we can perhaps create a step change in it as well, but they're just things we're looking at. Yeah, that's really helpful. Thanks for that, Keith. Just the last question, just in terms of the Victorian acquisitions, that 2.9% return on sales versus Eagers' 4.8%, that's a big gap, and it's sort of a little bit surprising. I mean, obviously, the Victorian businesses were very well-run businesses. I'm sure everyone would agree with that. So where is the upside in or what is really the sort of gap? What is explaining that big gap and why you can close it so easily? So that actually represents three key businesses. It represents the ACT business. So that was actually the ACT last year. That was bought, and even in the independent expert report, when we bought that, we called out that was running at low 3% return on sales. Now, that's indicative of the ACT market where there's a lot of government buyers, and it is generally a slightly lower return on sales business. We've improved that business. We also bought a business in South Australia called Newspot. To be fair, that was a business that had grown exceptionally rapidly by the previous owner. They'd done a fantastic job at growing that business, but it had got a little bit unruly. In the first 12 months, we bought that business. We bought it on a very reasonable multiple, but the first 12 months have been investment and tidying that up. That business has been significantly below 3%, probably lucky to be 2% last year. The third business was Cairns, which had some impacts around natural disasters late in the year. The reality is Cairns will be fine. Newspot will improve this year considerably because it was a very disappointing first year with investments and tidying up and fixing up and putting the right structure in place. ACT will be a slow burn. ACT went off-bounds to those levels we achieve everywhere else, and the dynamics in the market in ACT might mean that it's always slightly below the rest of the business. There is significant upside in those three businesses. We're absolutely confident. Yeah. Okay. So sorry, that chart on 15, that excludes Victoria. Yeah, Victoria settles at the end of this week. Oh, 29th. Sorry, at the end of this month. Yeah. Okay. That's really helpful. Thank you very much for that. No worries. Thanks, John. Thanks, John. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time, and I'll hand back to Mr. Thornton for closing remarks. Fantastic. Thank you, everyone. We apologize for the disrupted call today. Technology got the better of us. We appreciate your interest. I'd also like to say to any Eagers employees that may have dialed in, thank you for your fantastic efforts each and every day. You're responsible for this result that I'm very lucky to be able to report on your behalf. Thank you for your efforts. Thanks, everyone. We'll talk later. It does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.