I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Keith Thornton, CEO. Please go ahead. Thank you for joining us for our half year 2025 results briefing. Sophie Moore, our CFO, joins me this morning and together we have the privilege of presenting the company's results. Our results pack, including the slides for the presentation, has been lodged with the ASX and should be visible via the webcast. On slide 2, we provide the agenda for today's briefing. We will touch on an overview of the performance, talking to financial, operational, and strategic highlights before Sophie will talk us through the P&L, balance sheet, and funding in more detail. After that, I'll talk through the business performance and strategic updates before providing our outlook for the second half of 2025 and beyond. There will be the opportunity for questions after the presentation. Let's start with an overview of the financial results for the half year. The company has delivered strong revenue growth again in the first half of 2025. Total turnover increased by $1 billion on the previous period alone. This is an 18.9% increase on the first half of 2024 to a total of $6.5 billion. This growth is well ahead of our outlook, which guided to $1 billion or more in revenue growth for the full year of 2025, and we've achieved that in the first half alone. The underlying profit before tax result was strong, up 8.3% on the first half of 2024 to $197.7 million, an increase of $15.2 million. This strong result was up on guidance we provided at our AGM, reflecting robust May and June trading and foreshadowing improving industry conditions for the second half of 2025, removing the impact of the current interest rate environment and non-cash depreciation. We produced a record ever half year underlying EBITDA for the company of $296.7 million. This was 11.6% or $30.8 million up on the first half of 2024, and when we normalized for OEM one-off year end payments, it is circa $20 million higher than the previous best half year recorded by the company. Now, in a half that's still characterized by an industry in trough margins, this is an incredible result and demonstrates the growing strength of our underlying business. The company remains very well positioned with gearing ending the June half down 7.9% on 2024 first half to 0.82 times. I think it's noteworthy to be able to reduce gearing while growing top line revenue by $1 billion as we have done in the first half. This demonstrates our growth is a healthy balance of organic and acquisitive and our unique opportunity to leverage our market position and grow material share. An interesting statistic that I'd like to share. Since 2020, which marked the beginning of the new merged Eagers Automotive after AP Eagers took over AHG, we have grown the business by 201 additional dealer points in that 5 year period. 121 have been organic or greenfield and 80 via acquisition, which is almost an ideal 60:40 split. Underpinning this strong financial result was a number of operational and strategic highlights. Starting with the operational highlights, in the first half of the year we grew our new car deliveries by 22% and our used car deliveries by 16.7%. This growth in new car volume translated to material new car market share growth, up 2.7% from 11.1% of the new car market this time last year to now 13.8%. We're on track for more than 240,000 new and used cars sold this year, almost a quarter of a million new and used vehicles sold in Australia in 2025. Growth in the overall business, when combined with our obsession with productivity improvements, delivers a lower relative cost base when measured as a percentage of sales and excluding interest and depreciation. The first half of 2025 recorded our lowest cost base by this measure in our history. Growing our share allows the cost base to be fractionalized, which supports a more resilient and defensive business throughout cycles. As a reminder, in a rapidly evolving and consolidating industry, Eagers Automotive's unmatched scale provides compelling operating leverage and unique strategic leverage in tandem. This underwrites both short and long term value creation and means our structural advantages continue to grow with our performance simply aided by and not dependent on the cyclical tailwinds the industry is expected to benefit from. Turning now to some of the strategic highlights of the first half of 2025, Eagers Automotive is committed to a clear, consistent strategy. While any strategy needs to evolve over time to be relevant to current challenges and opportunities, we believe one of the key fundamentals to Eagers Automotive's growth is disciplined execution of a well understood strategic direction. Our Next 100 strategy has been in place for close to a decade, which means that it's been executed over multiple years to build a business fit and getting fitter for the times we currently face and times that we largely anticipated almost a decade ago. Slide 6 highlights continued progress on this front. The evidence of our sustained execution is clear, whether it is record productivity now at almost $1.5 million sales per person per annum, a dominant plug-in or new energy vehicle market share, our Easy Auto 123 profit up 22% on last year which was already operating at better than global benchmark, or the continued consolidation of our like-for-like property footprint. We continue to build a more productive operating model, which in turn becomes an ever-increasing competitive advantage. Before I hand over to Sophie, I'd like to present our half year scorecard, and it's something we present at each half year. We at Eagers never profess to always get it right, but we'll never shy away from being transparent and accountable. On this scorecard, we've highlighted the industry dynamics and the outlook we provided earlier this year for the first half of the calendar year 2025. Each item is then marked as either ahead of with a green tick, in line with marked by an orange dash, or behind expectation with a red cross. At the bottom of the scorecard is our summary of the guidance we provided for the half. We provided guidance to grow our business materially. We expected to pass through trough margins at some point during the first half of 2025. We highlighted that we thought it would be a challenge to match our strong half one 2024 result, but that we expected to build momentum into the second half, all while maintaining our competitive advantage relative to the industry and peers. Our results have shown that our full year revenue guidance was exceeded in the first half alone. The first half profit exceeded last year, which was better than our expectations. Industry headwinds of the first half have shifted, with green shoots of tailwinds evident even before June 30th, and we continue to leverage our competitive advantage with our message being that consistent structural improvements to the business beats cyclical rises and falls every time. With that very pleasing scorecard, I'll now pass over to Sophie. Thank you, Keith. The headline numbers that Keith has highlighted is a strong result and demonstrates the growing strength of our underlying business. Today I will focus on some of the further key insights into the financials in a company that has expanded by over $3.6 billion in turnover in two and a half years since January 2023. It is crucial to provide detailed commentary around the various moving parts to accurately assess. As Keith recalled earlier, Eagers Automotive delivered record revenue for the half, up 18.9% to $6.5 billion, exceeding the $1 billion full year growth target we foreshadowed in February. Our underlying EBITDA reached a record $296.7 million for the six month period with an EBITDA margin of 4.6% compared to 4.9% in the first half of 2024 but still well above the long term average of 4.1%. A key highlight is that underlying costs before interest and depreciation relative to turnover are the lowest ever recorded on a reported basis including acquisition. This cost leverage excluding interest and depreciation as a percentage of turnover was 12.1%, a record low and well below the long term average of 13%. This reflects the benefits of scale with the combined growth of our overall business, an optimized operating model and a relentless and sustained focus on productivity and cost efficiency. To measure cost control we focus on like for like performance, removing the impact of acquisitions and divestments on a like for like basis excluding interest and depreciation. Our controllable cost base increase was restricted to 3.8% or $25.4 million on the prior period. Excluding our fast growing retail joint venture, the same like for like cost base increase was $12 million or only 2%. Slide 36 in the appendix includes a reconciliation of statutory to underlying EBITDA and profit before tax. In the first half of the 2025 financial year statutory profit before tax was $193.4 million, slightly lower than the underlying PBT of $197.7 million. The $4.3 million difference primarily relates to items beyond our core underlying operations which primarily includes AASB 16 and business integration restructure cost. Eagers Automotive remains in a strong financial position supported by a substantial property portfolio and asset base. Our approach to capital management links back to our culture of business sustainability, growing the group's profitability while also strengthening our underlying asset base. One should not and has not come at the cost of the other. We are well positioned to continue to fund future growth with strong gearing capacity and a disciplined approach to capital deployment across multiple funding sources. The group's total liquidity capacity is backed by $1.6 billion in committed core debt facilities with maturities extending from 2028- 2044. As of June 2025, net corporate debt was $447.2 million net of cash, down from $813.1 million in December 2024. Excluding a one-off working capital benefit, the net corporate debt net of cash on hand was still only $653 million. Our long-term debt supports our $891 million property portfolio anchoring our presence in key strategic locations. As at June 30, 2025, we held significant equity in the property portfolio of $319 million and $254 million in inventory, reinforcing the strength and resilience of our asset base. Most importantly, Eagers Automotive continues to focus on its proven track record of executing a balanced capital management strategy based on four key pillars: investing in our business through capital expenditure, growing our people and proprietary technology to drive organic growth which is seen in the first half result this 2025, disciplined acquisitions maintaining a rigorous approach to identifying and executing strategic opportunities, and the property-backed balance sheet supporting our transformation strategy with strong asset-backed financial flexibility. This approach reflects our long-term commitment to make continual meaningful progress on sustainable material and accretive optimization and growth opportunities. This will continue to ensure we deliver the final pillar, rewarding our shareholders with strong returns, which we address on the next slide. Keith Thornton highlighted several of Eagers Automotive's financial, operational, and strategic highlights which have continued to strengthen during a rapidly evolving and consolidating industry landscape. Importantly, this highlights our long-term demonstrated ability of delivering returns for our shareholders through all economic and business cycles. The company declared a first half dividend of $0.24 per share, maintaining the prior period record. Over the past 10 years, we have delivered an 8.2% compound annual growth in the Eagers Automotive earnings per share. Furthermore, we have consistently delivered more than 9.8% compound annual growth in dividends, demonstrating our strong track record of business growth and shareholder returns combined. This reflects again our commitment to rewarding shareholders while maintaining the flexibility to capitalize on the strategic growth opportunities which Keith will talk through later. Now I will hand back to Keith to talk us through the operational highlights. Thanks, Sophie. Let's move to the business performance and start with some observations on the industry environment. The new car market in Australia remains resilient with the number of vehicles delivered cycling against a record first half in 2024. The first half of 2025 was the second strongest industry on record, only marginally down on last year when looking at respective monthly performance. March was a record ever for that month, while February and June were the second best recorded for those respective months. The momentum has continued into the second half with July a record ever July, and the year-to-date gap to last year's record now only 0.5%. As we have pointed out many times before, there is still a 125,000 car gap to the pre-COVID new car delivery rates in Australia. When you combine this with more normalized supply and the tailwinds expected to eventuate from RVA rate cuts, there is no reason to see any fall away in the demand for new vehicles. I'd also like to point to the comment to the right of Slide 13. Automotive retail is a much more balanced and resilient business than many observers give it credit for. Automotive retail transacts in mobility, whether it be providing new mobility, selling a new car, maintaining and repairing existing mobility, which is looking after used cars or existing cars in our workshops, financing and insuring mobility, or even subscribing to use mobility, and mobility is a fundamental need irrespective of macro conditions. To be mobile is not a discretionary decision. How you consume mobility is when you operate at the scale Eagers does. We provide material mobility solutions throughout cycles and are a much more resilient and defensive business than our consumer discretionary classification may lead casuals to believe. Coming back to the headline new car market performance and now looking more specifically at Eagers, the slide in front of you demonstrates how Eagers quite uniquely is both hedged in tough times yet equally able to leverage tailwinds. Through our scale, the quality of our partner portfolio, and the unique businesses we've built over recent years, Eagers Automotive has outstripped vehicle deliveries in the first half of 2025 by 10.1%, with this dynamic continuing into July. This order right reflects our overweight position with the highest quality OEMs in Australia. We are the largest partner for 13 of the top 20 brands in Australia plus we have a unique position with fast-growing recent entrants. We've matched strong demand with disciplined inventory management, but despite returning to a more normalized supply environment in the industry, we are very pleased to report that our stock position remains at only 58 days, which is ideal and supports strong margin outcomes. Noting 58 days, our measure includes all sold, all unsold cars, all demonstrators, every car that we fund. Eagers Automotive still maintains a material order bank running at a factor of four times pre-COVID levels, which further underpins our margin profile and our confidence in the outlook. Looking now to see how this has translated into market share outcomes, this slide is one that rewards those that give it closer attention. To fully understand how Eagers Automotive will be our continued net winner during industry transformation, we've regularly communicated that in Australia the consolidation, which means fewer dealer owners and dealers being consolidated largely through M&A, through evolution, and by that we talk about a change in go-to-market models that's been forced in this once-in-a-generation transition from combustion engines to low emission vehicles, and rationalization where some OEMs are taking an approach where they need to rationalize either dealer points and/or owners. These three themes will accompany the journey to low emission vehicles, and it's a journey that will be characterized by a material share of plug-in or new energy vehicles referred to as NEVs. We've also consistently communicated that Eagers Automotive will be a net winner in this transformation with market share gains not solely achieved through acquisitions but also through greenfield and organic share growth through new part market entrants and consolidated OEM business partner approaches. At a consolidated level, we have grown our overall new car market share in Australia from 3.7% in 2020 to 13.8% in 2025. On the right side is an even more interesting representation of how Eagers Automotive will be positioned into the future, and you can see in this graph how the company has become a material net winner as the NEV, the plug-in segment of the market, grows in materiality. The NEV segment share has grown to be 12% of the total market in Australia. Of this segment, Eagers Automotive delivers 34% or more than 1 in 3 of all plug-in cars in Australia for the first half of 2025. Now as I said, this is a notable slide to review and understand in terms of Eagers Automotive's unique position to continue outpaced growth in share, and it's also a key pointer to our strategic growth optionality in the future. Continued growth in our top line revenue combined with continued execution of our business optimization has delivered a record low in our costs as a percentage of sales, which finished for the first half at 12.1%, down from our previous all-time low of 13% in 2024. Gross profit percentages from our core franchise automotive business have remained broadly stable. As our retail joint venture and Easy Auto 123 business has grown to be a larger part of our overall business, it has impacted gross profit percentage, and I would note this point, it would be a bad misread to look at the reported gross level and see that as a significant drop in our core franchise automotive business. It is a change in mix, and it relates to the dynamics of those two business units I just referred to. Our Next 100 strategy has been primarily focused on growth and productivity. It's critical to understand that the expense base, which benefits from revenue growth, benefits from optimization initiatives, and benefits from disciplined management, is the key to support our competitive advantage and produce a net profit return on sales margin well ahead of the industry and peers. Turning now to examine this return on sales performance and slide 17, I think it's 17, demonstrates exactly this dynamic. The consolidated net margin was 3%, down from 3.3% at this time last year. Pleasingly, however, when adjusted to include annual incentives, our overall margin remains at 3.3%, which is in line with the second half of 2024 and supports that trough margins have passed during the 2024-2025 financial year period. Our core franchise automotive business, which is circa 76% of our total turnover, remains at a very strong 3.7% return on sales. We continue to highlight that there is more than $50 million per annum in profit upside via the integration of acquisitions and lifting the performance of those recent acquisitions to Eagers Automotive's core returns. Our Easy Auto 123 business improved to 4.3% return on sales, outperforming even our expectations and evidencing both the benefits of scaling on a largely fixed cost base and the continued margin and cost initiatives being executed successfully. Okay, moving on to our strategy. On slide 19 you will once again see our Next 100 strategy that drives transformational productivity improvements by optimizing our property footprint, our people and processes, our finance, insurance and ancillary income performance while continuing to deliver on our intention to be a leader in valuable innovation. We don't innovate for the sake of it, and all the while focusing on disciplined capital management and sustainable growth. It's a well-communicated strategy that we remain driven by every day. A straightforward way to think of this strategy is that we continue to optimize the existing core franchise business. We develop and grow unique businesses such as Easy Auto 123, all the while using disciplined capital management to reinvest in accretive growth. On this slide 20 you'll see the title strategy in action, and with the completion of our auto mall development in Osborne Park in Perth, we thought it would be useful to show how our Next 100 strategy comes to life in reality. Slide 20 provides a visual of this project where we exited seven external leases and consolidated onto one single owned property. Now, before I go on to the next slide, I just wanted to paint a picture for you. I'm totally off script here, but that site that you see on the screen used in 2015, so go back 10 years, was a single Holden site. It only sold Holdens, it sold used cars out the front, it had a Holden workshop at the back, and it had a parts department behind it. The site took up 21,000 square meters. Now imagine if in 2015 you were standing across the road and you made the comment that that site in 10 years' time will no longer have Holden. In fact, Holden won't even exist anymore. What it will have is Ford, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru, GMSV, BYD, and Denza. Seven franchises on one site. It won't have a service department. It'll have a service factory that accommodates seven brands. It'll have a PD facility behind it. All of the trade-ins from those seven brands will go to our single national fixed price used car brand Easy Auto 123. Our productivity from our people will be 90% better than industry benchmarks in 2015, and our profit will be two and a half times better than what we would make in our best years there as a Holden dealer. That's what has been executed on this site. The next slide now will show some numbers. As you can see on this table, we moved from seven external leases that occupied 45,000 square meters to one 21,000 square meter site that we bought in 2020. Our property costs reduced by $3.5 million per annum and the rent to gross metric, a key number in automotive retail, dropped from 11.2% down to 7.8%. As I said before, the productivity per person has increased by 90% above industry benchmarks. The total sales now delivered, because we've got seven brands there and we've managed that portfolio, will increase from 2,800 across seven sites to more than 4,500 per annum from a single site. In combination, this strategic delivery and execution will deliver return on sales that will lift from 2.8%- 5% as all brands come on stream. It's a compelling outcome. What's been hard to articulate in the past is how our so-called property strategy enables all the other parts of our Next 100 strategy. By consolidating onto a single property, we've allowed consolidation of roles and headcount reduction. We've allowed the ability to grow our partner representation with OEMs with better flexibility. As brands evolve over time, it's facilitated the ability to roll out tech initiatives across a single site, which drives better customer experience, better employee experience, and better productivity outcomes. All the while, crucially linking hand in glove with our Easy Auto 123 inventory sourcing solution and in Australia, a market that is hyper competitive where you have 77 brands today and more coming, competing for 1.2 million. These sorts of innovations, these sorts of executions are critical to long term sustainability. The next slide provides further evidence of these initiatives at a group level. While I'll not go through this slide in detail, it is provided to reiterate this is a multi-year transformation that continues to make our underlying business stronger as we scale and as we successfully execute. The next slide, I want to return to this plug-in (NEV) transition and it's a key part of Eagers Automotive's growth plan to use our strategic leverage that comes with our globally unique scale. This scale that we have is incredibly powerful during a once in a generation transition in powertrains, accompanied by or in many cases driven by the influx of new market entrants. Any of vehicles, and just to be clear, that's any vehicle that can be plugged in, includes both full BEVs, battery electric vehicles, and plug-in electric vehicles, are now 12% of the total market in Australia, up from 1% as recently as 2021. The contribution of total sales is growing fast, particularly plug-in electric vehicles, and it's likely to be a major part of the total market into 2030 and beyond. Now Eagers operate with circa 14% of the total new car market in Australia, and we often refer to it as our globally unique scale. I think I need to stress the context behind that phrase. The largest automotive retailer in the U.S. has under 2% of the new car market in the U.S. The largest automotive retailer in the U.K. has less than 4% of the new car market, as Eagers has 14%. It is why we constantly refer to globally unique scale. This scale has allowed us to be the winner in the transition to NEV vehicles, with Eagers representing a staggering 34% of all plug-in vehicles. When you take out Tesla sales, which are direct to consumer, we are 42% of all plug-in cars sold by franchise dealers in Australia, which is quite incredible. I stress again, it's a powerful example of the strategic leverage available to our business. Speaking of strategic leverage, Easy Auto 123 remains the biggest strategic growth opportunity for Eagers Automotive as a pure play used car business that sits inside Eagers' overall business. It is uniquely positioned even when compared to U.S. pure play used car retailers CarMax and Carvana. The unique advantage is the incredibly powerful inventory sourcing advantage that Eagers has built into the Easy Auto 123 business via our globally unique new car operations. No one else in the world does this, and very few could even if they wanted to. Our sourcing is linked to the best source of profitable used inventory, that is new car trade-ins. As we scale our new car franchise business, we scale our Easy Auto 123 advantage. I'm pleased to report this business unit continues to gain momentum with a record profit for the half, up 45% on 2024's previous record. The business is benefiting from strategic scaling, gross profit improvements, and ancillary sales, and a fractionalized cost base. The metrics on this slide you see are exceptional. Key lead indicators such as days to sale and gross profit per unit are well ahead of industry metrics, and this is delivering a net profit per unit of $1,526 per unit. That's net profit. That's a new record and above global best practice by 56.8%. With the outlook for the remainder of 2025 extremely positive, this next slide highlights the medium to long term opportunity in this business and the title of the slide really says it all. The opportunity is massive. Execution is key. To this end, we've highlighted what we call a five by five plan, which demonstrates the five compelling thematics that drive this strategy linked to the five key execution opportunities. The investment thesis is really easy. The used car market is huge in every mature market in the world, three times new in Australia, and that is a consistent metric around the world. The competition and the market is extremely fragmented even at the global level. The circa $40 billion market cap Carvana only has 1% of the U.S. used car market share. This business lends itself and benefits from proprietary technology, which Eagers Automotive has. This business is driven by unique big data sets, which Eagers Automotive has, and this business is a capital light scalable growth model with no reason it cannot be replicated in other markets as long as access to profitable sourcing is achieved. The execution plan is easy, or at least on paper it is, and that is to scale our unique sourcing advantage, roll out optimization across the entire business, expand the footprint, evolve the business model, and build Australia's most loved brand. Another way to put it, we are going to leverage our unique advantage, we are going to accelerate our first mover advantage, and we're going to build a deep moat around this business. We plan to outline each of these key steps at our planned investor day sometime early November. The date's still to be set, but before we move on from Easy Auto 123, I did want to provide an update on our Cars for Good initiative, which was announced at our recent AGM and is a foundational piece to building Australia's most loved brand. Cars. 4Good was born out of an internal aspiration at Eagers Automotive to be a company of good people doing good things. The simple but powerful ambition that aligns our people and provides the North Star for both culture and performance for all our stakeholders. Cars4Good is our Easy Auto 123 community-centric initiative to deliver on this. Each month our Easy Auto 123 teams nominate a person or family or cause in need of mobility in their community that they operate. Easy Auto 123 will then donate one car per month to these communities we operate in. It's our way of delivering mobility solutions to our entire community, including those who need it most but may be able to afford at least. This initiative will be the foundation for the culture and personality of this brand. A brand that genuinely gives back and has your back. We are very passionate about this initiative and also about the future of this business that is the true hidden gem within the wider Eagers Automotive Group. Finally, before we go to our second half outlook, we wanted to touch on key growth opportunities highlighted previously. We are active in all four categories on the slide in front of you, with progress ranging from early stage to well progressed. One particularly important enabler to our future execution in these areas is the recently announced strategic alliance with Mitsubishi Corporation. It's important to note that while we are a proud Mitsubishi Motors partner across Australia, this alliance is with Mitsubishi Corporation, which is a totally independent company. Mitsubishi Corporation is a Fortune 100 company operating in 90 countries with turnover of more than $130 billion per annum, larger than any Australian company by about 50%. The alliance will focus on opportunities across all parts of the Eagers Automotive business and global mobility ecosystem. However, it will not focus on new car franchise retail business. We are very honored to partner with such a global powerhouse and look forward to communicating more as this alliance progresses. Turning to the outlook, just before we provide our outlook for the second half, I wanted to touch on this next slide which is an especially important one. On occasions, companies and investors tend to get so focused on short-term results or key growth plans that they fail to really understand what matters inside a company. That is, how does the company behave, client behave behind closed doors when they're not publicly reporting to the market. Eagers Automotive is proudly a culture-driven business. It's a foundation to everything we do. From great culture, we can build a more sustainable, resilient company. We can optimize our existing business to constantly improve and outperform, and if we do these things, we earn the right to grow in an accretive and sustainable way. Without great culture, we cannot achieve any of these objectives. At times, our focus may shift between sustainability, optimization, and growth, but it never ever wavers from protecting and enhancing our culture. I highlight this today because it matters to Eagers Automotive and it should matter to investors, but it rarely gets the scrutiny it warrants. Finally, our outlook for the full year 2025. Specifically, on this slide for today, you'll see our expectations for industry dynamics, for revenue, margins, and business units for the year ahead. With regard to the industry, generally speaking, we've seen conditions trough in the first half of 2025 with improvement post the election and further momentum after the recent RBA cuts. Within a strong industry, we expect to continue to grow share. Our revenue has already grown by $1 billion in the first half, and this will continue. We expect our core should be consistent at current return on sales margin levels, with improvements coming through in our acquisitions, in our greenfield businesses, and in Easy Auto 123. Most importantly for long-term investors, we'll continue to make progress on sustainable, material, and accretive optimization of our business, and we are actively reviewing meaningful growth opportunities. In summary, we continue to be equally obsessed with building a better business at the same time as making it bigger. Before we open for questions, I'd like to recognize the tremendous efforts of the entire Eagers Automotive team. It truly is a privilege to work alongside you all, be part of this team, and be able to report your great results and hard work. On behalf of Eagers Automotive, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for your interest today and now open for questions. Thank you. 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 Phil Chippendale from Ord Minnett. Please go ahead. Good morning team. Thanks for your time. Congratulations on really strong result. Just on slide 16, just had a couple of questions there. Firstly, just on the gross margins, you know you've articulated sort of that mix shift in particular from the retail Joint Venture and Easy Auto 123. Just given how well those businesses are performing, is it fair that we should continue to see that gross margin moderate perhaps a little bit further going forward? Is that a fair summary do you think? Phil, nice to hear from you. I think it's more an issue around those businesses. Easy Auto 123 has got a totally different model because it's mainly, it's entirely a front end business so it only sells used vehicles. Used vehicles, broadly speaking, operate at about a 10% gross profit margin compared to our overall business running at about 17 or 18%. Now remember the gross profit margin of 17- 18% is made up of new vehicle margins, used vehicle margins, very high margin finance 75- 80%, service 65- 70%, and parts at sort of north of 20%. It's the blend of all those margin dynamics that give you 17- 18. Easy Auto 123 will never produce a margin profile that matches the rest of the business. In terms of the retail joint venture, it's early stage and it is heavily overweight on new vehicle margin. Again, let's say 10% as a sort of a pool of gross margin there. It's got very early stage back end, so limited service, limited parts. It's also because it's largely a plug-in (NEV) segment brand or is a plug-in (NEV) segment brand, it's got a high percentage of novated sales which means its finance under indexes compared to the rest of the business. It's going to be, it's more a timing issue. As that business matures over time, it could be another two years before it fully comes through. Our overall franchised automotive business now, which includes the retail joint venture, is still, while that growth is down, importantly our net margin is still strong. Yeah. Turning to the cost side of things again on slide 16, that chart showing the cost base margin continuing to decrease. Well done on achieving 12% slot. Impressive performance ahead of my expectations. We're never satisfied. Let's talk in general terms, you know, what should that look like going forward? Is there significant gains to go here? I mean, again, really impressive results. Let's try and get a sense of what direction we're going here. Yeah, there's actually a slide I'm trying to with the upside in our Next 100 which shows that there is in the midterm, and let's work on midterm three to five years, Bill, there is 2% upside in net margin. Now that 2% upside is a combination of gross profit improvement out of finance of about 0.5%, of greater productivity in headcount of about 1%, property of about 0.3%, and there's probably another 0.2% in interest. The reality is if you look at the way that our net profit should go to a mid to long term 5% return on sales, the majority is through cost out. Higher productivity with people, high productivity out of property, interest rate benefits is a more normalized interest rate, and then the gross profit lever, particularly in Australia, is around finance, insurance, and ancillary income. I haven't necessarily said what 12.1 should be, 11.5 or 11.4. I've focused on what really matters from our perspective and that is the net, what we can bank. It's a combination of gross and cost out. There is no doubt that a big part of that drive down in cost as a percentage is scaling our business. I think the thing about Eagers Automotive that we've demonstrated is that in the last three years we have delivered $1.3 billion in growth, $1.3 billion in growth, and this year will be north of $1.8 billion, probably in growth. We have demonstrated over and over that this business has the ability to materially grow and that is the thing that assists or helps. It's not the only thing, but it certainly assists that cost base. Okay, thanks. I'll jump back in with you. Thanks all. Thank you. Your next question comes from Peter Marks from Barrenj oey, please go ahead. Morning, Keith. Morning, Sophie. My question's just on the margin outlook for the underlying core business. I notice you still got that as a neutral. Just wanted to check my thinking there. Should we have that improving into the second half on the first half? Just thinking we should be past trough margins now and I think it's 0.3% impact from annual incentives and I guess. A couple of interest rate cuts. Yeah, got my thinking right there in terms of the second half margins. Hi, Peter, thanks for the question. There's certainly the opportunity for it to be better. We don't expect it to fall down. We've basically said we've gone through. We did see trough margins in the first quarter. Margins on vehicles improved in the second quarter. Our used car margins have been up all year. I think that's more around our business model than the market. Your thinking's not necessarily wrong. I would say there's an argument to say that, you know, we could have said that's tailwinds there. Eagers Automotive like to be reasonable and relatively conservative. We think we're operating at a pretty strong margin profile, particularly relative to the industry, and we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. Your thinking's not necessarily. It was hard to argue with your thinking, but I think this is a conservative place to be. Maintaining our current strong core return on sales level will be a great result for us. If there's upside, that's great as well. That's great. On the M&A, I guess the acquisitions that are in the business overall, the margins on those businesses bounce pretty strongly in the first half versus the second half. Are you still confident you can get? Those businesses back up to, I guess, where the underlying core margins are and how long you are you thinking that might take? It'd be good just. To get a general update on how you're thinking about M&A. You still got more in the pipeline. In Australia and an update on your international thinking with the new Mitsubishi Corporation partnership. Peter, our first question you asked. Is the acquisitions 100% confident? It's just the timing. At the moment, our core margins are across circa $8 billion worth of turnover. We've proven that we can get the business to those returns. It's just a matter of integrating and it takes a little bit of time. We've got a large scale acquisition which was in Victoria, which has been challenging and that's geographic, certainly hasn't helped down there. Victorian market has been challenged, as everyone has noted. One of the more recent ones up here in Brisbane is starting to see some really positive momentum as well. Very confident that they will reach the core level because we've done it across such a large sample size. It's just how quickly we can do it in terms of acquisitions and the pipeline for acquisitions. It's really strong. It's really strong here. Locally, there is plenty of great opportunity that we're working through here. We continue to progress our review of overseas markets. The one thing I would reiterate and make sure that every investor felt confident about is that if and when we do go offshore, it will be done after a lot of due diligence and we'll be feeling very confident about anything we do offshore. We'll take our time. There's absolutely no shortage of opportunities, to be quite frank at the moment. It's a case of picking the best opportunities. That is really incumbent on us because again, I use that phrase, strategic optionality, Eagers size in the market and how we position ourselves means that people are knocking our doors. The inbound options now are really unprecedented and that's great. We should feel very honored that people knock on our door and want to do business with us. Equally, we've got to be very careful with shareholder money and we've got to make sure that as a team and as a board, this company invests in the right acquisitions for the long term, not just any. They've got to enable the total business. Simply buying a business for earnings is not exciting to us. Buying a business where we can add value and they can add value to us, where we can learn from them and we can perhaps teach finding the right partners, whether it's locally or overseas, that's critical. They're the things that Eagers obsess over and I guess over time that's what we'll be most focused on. That's great. Thanks, Keith. Thanks, Peter. Thank you. Your next question comes from Scott Murdoch from Morgans Financial. Please go ahead. Morning Keith and Sophie. Just firstly, I guess a little bit more on Easy Auto 123. Obviously see a lot of upside on that. Just, I guess, two-part question. Just interested in what scope you see left in Australia. You said before it's not really a rollout strategy, and just on your comments around in offshore markets or in other markets, access to profitable sourcing is key. Can you give us an idea of how you execute on that? Given in Australia you've got that 14%. Market share to sort of work with. In offshore markets or other markets, you've effectively got zero. Scott, all will be revealed when we have the time to talk through it at the investor day because both of those are really big questions. It's not necessarily simply a rollout strategy in its current model evolution, but we've sort of dropped some breadcrumbs as to how the business, how we're thinking about evolving this business model going forward. There is still tremendous upside in Eagers Automotive, you know, as we scale. There was a comment I made and it's a really important comment. As we grow our new car business, we grow the opportunity in Easy Auto 123. This year we'll do the best part of 200,000 new cars in Australia. That means that somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million people have come to Eagers Automotive in an old used car to talk about selling it to us. Our penetration rate on those trade-ins on the total opportunity on the 800,000 or 1 million is really low. We are building tech and we're rolling out tech and our penetration is ramped up considerably in the first half of 2025. That's been a big part of the story in terms of growing both the existing operations we have but also pointing to us expanding the footprint. We're likely to open another five or six doors in the next 12 months. They will be linked to where we can get profitable sourcing. There was an interesting comment by one of our guys who runs that business who said something to us when we were talking about expanded footprint. He said we need to have stores where we've got access to inventory. Let's go where the inventory is rather than looking at a map and saying this is where the people are. When it comes to used cars, people chase the car, not the brand or anything else. It's all about inventory. Scott, where I'm leading to there is that the way Easy Auto 123 will scale in Australia we'll talk to at the investor day. It's reasonably complex, hard to do in a two minute answer. In terms of overseas, you're exactly right, we start with zero. When I just answered the question that Peter asked me, when you're looking at overseas, how you progressed, are you on overseas, what I refer to is that when we look to go overseas we're going to look to see how we could partner with people that maybe are going to add to our strategy and who may be able to benefit from our strategy. That's something that we'll consider when we look in different markets around the world. Both of your comments and your questions are totally valid but hard to answer quickly in this call or in this forum. Okay, thank you. Just another question on the scene of the Chinese OEMs entering Australia. I guess it would be pretty obvious that they're looking at how you've executed on BYD and would probably be interested in talking to Eagers Automotive. I guess two part question, I mean I guess how do you look to, you know, take on other partnerships with some of these emerging OEMs, and do you see them as competition to BYD or more competition to the legacy OEMs? First off, Eagers Automotive proudly represents, I think it's 52 brands and we've done that for 100 years. If someone asked us what your expertise is, our expertise is to be a valued partner to these global automotive OEMs and we do it in a way where we've always had to juggle those partnerships. Our skill, I think Scott, is that we are always totally devoted to producing the best possible outcome for every OEM we represent. In fact, internally we talk about our task as being a preferred partner when there's an option to be made or a decision to be made. OEMs prefer to do business with Eagers. That's our overall philosophy. Managing whether it's another Chinese brand coming to Australia compared to another Korean brand or an American brand or a Japanese brand is something that is sort of part of our industry and it's part of the Eagers Automotive model. I think we've got a really good track record of showing that we can manage that. In terms of any brands coming to Australia, we will manage how our relationship is best delivered and manage any of the politics, etc. Ultimately, the more important part of that, Scott, is that you need to go with the highest quality partners. That's really, really again, a key skill for us in automotive retail. That is, who do we partner with that are going to be here for the long term, who are going to behave in terms of looking after customers in Australia? They're going to invest properly. Our job is to deliver for them. We need to make sure that our partnerships are the best they can be. Long and short, there are more Chinese brands looking to Australia all the time. To be fair, the really large material ones have already not shown their cards, but they're already active in Australia talking to the marketplace. As we said, we believe we'll be a significant partner to all the highest quality OEMs, no matter where they make their cars. Okay, thank you. I'll allow others to ask a question. Thank you. Thanks, Scott. Thank you. Your next question comes from John Campbell from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Thanks, guys. Congratulations on the cards for good initiative, Keith. That sounds terrific. Just further to that discussion, you know, you're a big part obviously of the BYD distribution and sales in Australia. Is it? I know this is sort of your DNA that you have to juggle competing brands and etc. etc. I understand that. Does your very large share of BYD, does that make it especially difficult in terms of this whole plug-in (NEV) sort of evolution? I guess we're seeing. No, not really. I think the answer I gave to Scott's probably along that same sort of line. As I said before, we have to manage our relationships with all our OEMs. One of the things I'm going to point out is that if you look at our investor packs, we steer away from talking about any OEMs at all. We do not refer to OEMs by name. That is very deliberate, and it's because our job is to be a really valued partner to all of them. Talking about the specifics of our relationships with one partner, whether it's Toyota or BYD or Porsche or anyone else, is not something that we like to do. We don't think it's valuable and we don't think our OEMs appreciate it either. I think now, BYD, because your question is about BYD, we're now four years into the partnership with them. Three years. Four years. Three years into that. We've been fielding questions on how to manage it all the way through and we've said we're working through it. I think we're seen as a very valued partner to them and others, particularly new entrants into Australia, because we've got a lot of expertise down here, we've obviously got a lot of infrastructure, we're well connected, we know how to operate down here and hopefully we've got a great reputation as well. I think that adds value and if you're a valued partner, people tend to stick with you, particularly if you deliver results. It's hard for me to answer your question specifically, particularly publicly, but I think we're pretty comfortable in managing the intricacies of the relationships. Got it. Yep. In terms of your technology and sort of leveraging your scale, which is, you know, gives you the opportunity to develop technology that many others can't, can you just give us an indication on what the sort of initiatives that, you know, that's the focal point of the tech development at the moment is and maybe over the next year or two, where you see the, you know, the real bang for your buck. In terms of tech spend, the tech spend. We're probably 50% proprietary tech that we're developing ourselves and 50% tech that's being developed for the industry that we're leveraging and we're integrating. The most important thing around tech, and it's interesting because we're not a tech company and I'm never going to try and frame us otherwise. We are not a bunch of developers here. The reason we invest in proprietary technology is if we believe we can generate a unique competitive advantage or we cannot get a like-for-like piece of tech in the market that integrates into our DMS. One of the problems with tech is most dealerships have so many computer systems that it just slows productivity. They layer on layer upon layer. They haven't got APIs to talk to each other, they're not integrated, and it actually slows down progress, even though on the surface it's sold as a tech initiative to speed you up. We've got a really talented team that work with Edward Geschke, our COO, in the operations team to make sure that our tech is always driving higher productivity. Now in terms of your question, there is a heap of different things that we're using at the moment. There's our tech stack that we've rolled out over the last couple of years, whether it's our 10 minute sales app, whether it's our upsells in the workshop, whether it's using RPAs, Robotic Process Automatizations, to close down invoices, Easy Quote which is using data and analytics to value cars. They're all in place and they're still being rolled out. Everyone's talking about AI now and how to use that. We're certainly looking at that. It's early stages. We're using AI on things like writing descriptions on how vehicles are advertised online. We're using AI to be an automated lost lead system. At the moment we've got a pilot in place in Easy Auto 123 for that one. There's a whole heap of tech that is in train, in development, in pilot. There's a whole heap that's already been proven up and we're just rolling that out further. The key to it though, John, from our point of view is tech has got to make the customer experience better and the employee experience better and then produce a productivity outcome. It can't be the other way around. It can't be, oh, we do things with less people and we do it faster, but customers have a terrible experience and our staff hate doing it. That is so, so critical to know that the focus is customers, employees before the tech is ever embedded in our business. Yeah, great, thanks for that. Look, last quick one. You showcased what's happened at Osbourne Park, which is very impressive over that 10-year period, and the auto mall in Brisbane as well, I think. Just around the Sydney and Melbourne markets, is it a lot more challenging to do that sort of property given the nature of those two markets? The property, I don't know. I'm trying to think of a way to express it. The upside that you guys can generate in managing your real estate portfolio, is it more challenging to extract that benefit in the Sydney and Melbourne markets? Not necessarily, John. The best way to think of this is, first off, I do want to make the point this is a dynamic that is sort of unique to Australia. Australia is almost ground zero for a hyper competitive market. Maybe China is a more competitive market than Australia, but there's probably no other market in the world that has so many brands competing for a new car market the size of ours. What we deliver there in that Osborne Park example is very much responsive to the dynamics we see in play in Australia. That's the first point to make. The second point to make is Osborne Park we use as an example because we've done that almost as a clean sheet of paper, and if we had a clean sheet of paper approach across Australia, we'd do that everywhere. What actually happens is that there are a couple of large scale developments we've got on the go. One is in Victoria that is exactly like an Osborne Park type scenario, exactly the same. The reality is we do components of what's occurred in Osborne Park all day in every different way across sites all over Australia. Whether it might be just putting two brands together and getting out of one lease, whether it's closing down a used car operation to put the trades into Easy Auto 123 at another location, or putting four brands together and rolling out a tech stack across that one site, we do components of that Osborne Park example in sites every day in every way. Our operational team are all driving that. The reality is there are a couple. One of them, yeah, there's two at the moment that I'm aware of that are much more large scale in size. I can't really talk about them because we've got leases in places and we need to formulate exactly what OEMs we've got to talk to. There's a whole heap to go and to be done, but long and short of it is that will be done. That's an example of how we improve our business in every way across the whole business. Yeah, got it. Thanks for that. I'll pass it back to someone else. Thanks, John. Thank you. Your next question comes from Sophie and Mo rgan from Macquarie. Please go ahead. Hi guys, can you hear me? All right, we can hear you, Sophie. Congratulations on the great result. Just one for me, please. On the revenue outlook, I mean, fantastic result, effectively delivering your guidance for the whole year in the first half. If we're looking out for the full year now, obviously there's, I guess, upgrades to come through there. Could you talk through that new build that you're expecting? I suspect acquisitions that will probably, the annualization of acquisitions will probably be less, but you know, market dynamics have probably improved. How should we think about the full new build now? A really simple answer is we're $6.5 billion for the first half. Doubling, that's $13 billion. That's a safe number. That's going to the bottom line. How you make that up is we expect our independent used business, you know, that will double from where it is at the moment, which is around $350 million. It'll be $700 million or thereabouts. Some of our core and our retail joint venture are a little bit dependent on how new models and how quickly new models come to market. In some of our organic growth, I think we'll have about $2.2 billion out of acquisitions for the full year. What else have we got? Greenfields almost irrelevant, couple hundred million. I think that's a reasonable guide in a very simple way. That's great. Just quickly, one on BYD. I guess the expectations there clearly have been upgraded. How are you thinking about the BYD full year expectations? I know you had originally spoken to that 30,000 volumes, but clearly there's upside to that now. Yeah, I think, yeah, there's definitely upside. I think the volume delivered in the first half was about 23,000, 24,000, something like that. Again, I think the expectations that BYD have in the market are fairly strong. They're obviously an ambitious OEM brand and we're their large partner. It really depends on how that translates in the second half. I would guess that they might, well, don't really like talking about different volume ambitions for the year, but I think their run rate that they've got at the moment is likely to continue. I know that they'll expect it to continue and probably improve, and they've certainly got some new models that they are planning to bring to market in the second half of the year to support it. Actually, I think Edward was just saying it was 28,000 for the first half, was it? Yeah. I'm guessing that they're going to be certainly north of 40,000 and they may want more than that. Certainly strong. Thanks so much, and congratulations again on a really strong result. Thanks Sophie. Thank you. Your next question comes from Tim Piper from UBS. Please go ahead. Oh, good morning Keith and Sophie. Firstly, congrats on continued really strong execution. Just following on that BYD comment, what are you seeing in second half in terms of new models, and then where's sort of fleet and leasing mix in the BYD sort of sales number at the moment, and where do you think sort of fleet goes to within that mix, and how does it impact sort of margin profit outlooks for the BYD from here. Thanks, Tim. Thanks for the question. I don't really want to the first part of your question, I was just thinking about the fleet. What was the first part of your question again? Sorry, Tim. It was around models. The first half you got strong. Benefit from some new models coming in. Second half, are there some large new model releases which could drive further upside? From that first half? Right, correct. Possibly. Every new model is not 100% incremental to the volume and that's for any brand, forget the one we're talking about at the moment. There tends to be a little bit of cannibalization and as model lines get a little bit older, they sometimes tend to come off. We can never talk about a build being all incremental. Certainly any brand, I don't like to talk specifics, but any brand that has a strong pipeline of new model generates a lot of inquiry and tends to see volumes follow. The dynamics are in place for the second half to be strong. In terms of the fleet mix at the moment, it's about 30% leasing, which was as high as 50% before March, before the FBT exemption came off. Plug-in hybrids fleet is about 15%. The BYD model particularly, and maybe this is more indicative of the plug-in (NEV) segment rather than the brand as such, is about 45% between leasing and fleet. The reality is certainly it's a rapidly growing brand in terms of volume. It does have an impact on our gross profit profile as we said, because it is a different profile business. Got it. Just second one on the cost base. That's obviously been a continued highlight. That 12.1% down from 13%. Again, what kind of mix impact is there from BYD within that? Assumedly BYD cost margin on revenue is lower than what the core like for like. I mean if we're kind of thinking about what you did in the core business x BYD 13%. What would that sort of come down. As a percentage, people can't answer that. I'll try and answer it. I'll try and have that answer for you when we talk later. To be honest, we do look at it really at a total basis because BYD is just another brand within the core franchise automotive piece. The key driver of the cost leverage is the productivity piece and the employee numbers. You look, employee costs, which is 50% of the cost base, it's only up on a like for like basis, 6% or $24 million over a significant cost base. The reason, Tim, we don't is that ultimately it's not a business that stands apart or stands alone. The whole of Eagers Automotive is a multi franchise business. That brand as well as others sit on the same side. We have shared staff, we have consolidated back ends. We don't actually have that as a standalone business that we could say here's the ultimate impact. We'd have to go and do a whole heap of analysis, which wouldn't be that beneficial to us. We'll try and give you some better clarity when we talk later. No, that's fine. I understand. Thanks for taking the questions. Thanks, Jim. Thanks Jim. Thank you. Your next question comes from Christian Waked from Jarden. Please go ahead. Thank you for taking my question. Congratulations on a very strong result. My first question is just on price growth. Understand that price growth for new vehicles was flat and down for used vehicles. Was this due to increased competition, especially in used vehicles, and how do we think about that going forward, especially as interest rates possibly come through as a tailwind? Christian, are you talking about our price growth or industry price growth? Yours. Okay, just a mix. I don't think there's anything to read into that at all. I don't think that price growth is price growth in new cars at the moment. It's always going to be flat because it's a hyper-competitive environment. There's 1.2 million new cars being delivered into Australia and 77 brands fighting over them. It's very hard for any brand to ramp up their prices in that sort of environment. I think you're seeing the dynamic that prices are being held largely static there. In terms of used cars, our price, the prices of our used cars relate to the cars we trade. Ultimately, all that means is that the vehicles that we're trading at the moment are coming in at a slightly different mix overall. It's not responding to market conditions or anything like that because used cars are about the price you pay for the car, when you trade it, how efficiently and effectively you can recondition it, and then how much you can sell it. Each car has its own market price based on what type of car it is, and we can't choose what used cars we have. It depends what people bring to us. Understood. A question on the annual incentives. Can you provide a bit more color on that and how we should be thinking about that going forward? Yeah, annual incentives, we've always said is around about an $18- $19 million benefit in December. Thank you for taking my questions. No problem. Thank you. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Thornton for closing remarks. Thank you very much for that, and thanks for everyone's attention today. I really appreciate the interest in our company. I think we've produced a solid set of numbers and another consistent result. Hopefully that's showing that the business is getting stronger as we scale. That is important to us. I do reiterate that businesses can get big, but they can get slow, they can become laden with cost, and they can produce lower returns. We are obsessed about making our business better before we get bigger, but I think that scale is showing that we're building a stronger underlying business. The second half of the year should be a reasonably solid industry, and we expect to win share in that industry. Overall, thank you for your interest, and we'll get back to work now. Thank you. Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.