Good afternoon. Welcome to Perpetual Equity Investment Company Limited's Annual General Meeting for 2023. My name is Nancy Fox, and it is a privilege to chair the board of your company and to chair today's meeting. I have been told that it's now 3:00 P.M., and a quorum is present. I declare this 2023 Annual General Meeting open. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land we are present on today, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, as the custodians of this land, recognizing their connection to land, waters, and community. We pay our respect to elders, sorry, to Australia's First Peoples and to their elders, past, present, and emerging. We would like to extend our respect to and welcome any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people who are joining us today. We also acknowledge the traditional owners of the many lands where our attendees are situated today, both here in Australia and overseas. For ease of reference, I will be referring to Perpetual Equity Investment Company Limited as PIC, or the company, for today's meeting. I'd like to start by welcoming our shareholders, proxy holders, and guests. It's great to see you in person, and I recognize many, many, shareholders I've met before in the room. We also have many online, and we're pleased this hybrid format continues to provide an opportunity for more shareholders to participate regardless of their geographic location. In the room, I am joined by our company secretary, Sylvie Dimarco; John Edstein, a non-executive director and chairman of the Nomination and Corporate Governance Committee; Amanda Gillespie, our executive director; and Michael Clarke, a non-executive director who joined the PIC board on September first, 2023. Online, there you go. We have Virginia Malley. She's the non-executive director and chairman of our Audit and Risk Committee. Welcome, Virginia. Thanks. Karen Trau, in charge of PIC's investor relations matters, will be the facilitator for the Q&A for the investment manager presentation, and Karen is present with us here in Sydney. I'd also like to welcome Karen Hopkins from KPMG, who is the company's auditor. Karen Hopkins is available to answer any questions that shareholders may have in relation to the financial year 2020 financial statements and the auditor's independence. Excuse me. Before we move on to the formal part of our AGM, on behalf of the board, I would like to share with you some of my observations on PIC's activities and performance this year. Following that, I will ask PIC portfolio manager, Vince Pezzullo, to deliver the investment manager presentation. Vince will be joined by senior equities analyst, Louise Sandberg. I note that the prepared AGM address and presentation has been released to the market. So let us now move to a discussion of PIC's performance in FY 2023. In August, we announced a strong result for the company, with net profit after tax of AUD 55 million and net investment portfolio performance of 16.2% for FY 2023, outperforming the benchmark by 1.8%. In line with the company's investment objective, the investment portfolio has returned 9.7% per annum over five years, outperforming the benchmark by 2.6%. This is a testament to the active management style and skill of portfolio manager Vince Pezzullo and the team at Perpetual Investment Management Limited. For our shareholders, this result, combined with the board's effective capital management, allowed the board to declare an FY 2023 dividend of AUD 0.073 per share, fully franked. This represents an increase of 19.7% to FY 2022 and is the highest dividend paid to shareholders since inception. It also translates to a dividend yield of 6.3% and grossed-up dividend yield of 9%, which we believe is attractive in the current environment. At the same time, we are conscious of macro factors, including higher interest rates and inflation weighing on markets. Accordingly, the board has sought to maintain a robust profit reserve of AUD 112.9 million and dividend coverage of 3.7 years to deliver a sustainable long-term income stream for shareholders. In total, the company has paid over AUD 150 million in dividends since it was first listed on the ASX more than eight years ago. We are proud of this track record and maintain our commitment to paying dividends to shareholders twice a year that are fully franked to the maximum or to the maximum extent possible. Excuse me. I would also like to provide an update on the board. We are committed to high standards of corporate governance and undertake rigorous processes over the year to provide oversight of the company's activity and performance. Recently, we took steps to strengthen the board. On September first, we were delighted to welcome Michael Clarke as an independent non-executive director of the company. Michael has extensive industry knowledge and expertise, having recently held roles in asset management, including most recently at Challenger Funds Management. His appointment builds on the skills, knowledge, and diversity of the board, and forms part of our succession planning. It also means that the board is now majority independent. Michael's appointment will be put forward for election later in this meeting. I also want to comment on the proposed increase to the non-executive director remuneration pool, which is called the NED, NED fee cap. We are seeking shareholder approval to increase the NED fee cap from AUD 250,000 to AUD 400,000. Michael's appointment in September, and a modest increase in the existing non-executive director fees, means that the total FY 2024 directors' fees, inclusive of superannuation, is expected to be AUD 247,000. This is just under the current fee cap. Amanda Gillespie, as executive director, does not receive any directors' fees. The maximum NED fee cap has not been increased or changed since the company was first established in 2014. This resolution will provide additional capacity as we enter a process to renew the board. Certain non-executive directors are approaching their maximum term on the board, and we may have an overlap between their retirement and the new non-executive directors appointed. It also enables the company to reflect additional services from non-executive directors that may arise in the future and maintain remuneration arrangements that are market competitive. The increase in the remuneration pool is being sought to accommodate this. The remuneration pool is a maximum annual limit, and does not indicate that fees will necessarily be increased up to that amount. As a board, we will continue to challenge the manager to ensure the portfolio is appropriately positioned for our shareholders. The manager reports to the board at least quarterly, providing detailed updates on the investment portfolio and investor relations activity. The non-executive directors of the board and the portfolio manager are all current shareholders in PIC. On behalf of the board, I would like to thank our shareholders for their support in PIC. I would also like to thank Vince and the team at Perpetual Investment Management Limited for their management of the portfolio to deliver these returns for our shareholders. As a board, we remain focused on the management of shareholder capital, including the dividend policy, and how the profit reserve is applied in the future. Together, we believe the company is well-positioned for growth and the delivery of a sustainable stream of fully franked dividends. Please stay informed by visiting the company's website, www.perpetualequity.com.au, for a range of resources and insights. I also encourage you to continue offering valuable feedback through Karen in Investor Relations or our registry, Link Market Services. Thank you. Before I hand over to Vince, I would like to advise that we will be taking questions after the investment management presentation. On screen now are instructions on how to submit questions online and over the phone. We have also had a number of pre-registered questions submitted. Any questions relating to the AGM resolutions will be addressed later in the meeting. If you are present in person, there will be an opportunity to ask questions following the update. For those of you attending online, if you're a PIC shareholder, you can ask a question or post a comment by clicking on the Ask a Question box on your screen. A box will pop up with two sections for completion. In the Regarding section, please select your relevant category. Click in the Question section, and type your question and click on Submit. Shareholders can also ask a question over the phone. You can submit a question at any time during the update, and it will be addressed at the end. I would now like to invite Vince to come to the stage. Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. I thought today we'd start with the structure of the team, because we've had a few additions in the last 12 months. Jakob Malisch, who's fifth on the right there, he joined the team about 4 or 5 months ago. He joined as a senior equities analyst covering the energy sector, building materials, and other industrial companies. And Louise, who you'll hear from today, covers for us the agricultural sector, consumer names, some travel, et cetera. So the team, we continue to add more resourcing to the team. Also, what you don't see there is we do have a steady flow of young people that we try to draw from the business, because we do try and draw resources from within the Perpetual Group that we will train. We prefer to bring people through the process. It's better for culture, and we tend to get better results. And as you can tell from the average tenure at Perpetual, at least 8 years. I've been here for 17 years. Most of the portfolio managers have been at least 12-16 years, up to 20 years. So we all come through the process. It tends to come out with better outcomes for all investors. Next slide. Okay, so I thought we'd talk about just give a market wrap as to what we think could occur in the next 12 months. But more importantly, I always have to think we should revise what our philosophy is and our process. So it's a very simple process. We always talk about every year. It's four quality factors that every company that we're allowed to invest in, doesn't mean we will invest in them, must pass before it's considered to be investable. So as you can see, their quality of business, this is where we test the business itself, the industry, try and understand the threats to that industry, the direction of returns overall, and to see if it's a quality industry that we can find value in. Secondly, and more importantly, for times like today and at the moment, with high cost of debt, we look for companies with conservative debt levels. So we do have an absolute screen of 50% net debt to equity or a minimum of 3 times EBIT interest cover. So basically, interest coverage. Any company that breaches these is not considered to be investable and will not go in the universe. Also, any company that's in the universe and is approaching these levels, we'll typically engage the company, see what plans they have to alleviate the debt issue, and if they have no sensible plans that we can see, we usually will kick them out of the universe, so it will become uninvestable. And if we own them, hopefully we haven't, we'll exit the position almost immediately. So we find that companies with too much debt tends to not, it increases the risk materially across the portfolios. Thirdly, sound management, a whites of the eyes test for us. This is where we try and understand if the management suited to the company is the remuneration structure in particular of... So the LTI, long-term incentive plans, the short-term incentives, do they match what the company could achieve? And do they correctly incentivize the CEO to work in our best interests? We have a full ESG screen we do for this. Every analyst is responsible for screening their companies for the management and all other ESG issues, which we can produce for all companies within our universe. And lastly, recurring earnings. So we don't invest in companies which don't make money. We prefer companies that are profitable. It can be cyclical. That's fine. Earnings can go up and down. So you think about the mining companies or building materials because you can make money out of those companies at the bottom of the cycle, but they must be profitable. So we don't buy concept stocks. We don't buy companies that are just listed that have never made a dollar in their life. They tend to not do well when the recession hits. Next slide, please. Okay, so where we're at the moment is we're probably approaching the end of the cycle that started with COVID, with a very significant pull forward of demand. Okay? Companies are trying to readjust. But what's happened, what's the difference pre- and post-COVID is inflation is materially higher and probably sustainably so. So a lot of business models, which are predicated on the prior 10-12 years from the GFC, we had a very low inflationary environment. We had negative real rates. So your inflation rate, sorry, your interest rates minus your inflation rate, it's negative real rates. That's quite expansionary, quite accommodative to the economy. Now, we have positive real rates, right, which can actually... It hurts asset markets when you have positive real rates. So you got to be very, very sensitive to valuations, what you pay for something, because if you pay too high a price or valuation and the company misses all the economics of the business changes, you get very significant outweighed adjustments in the value of the company. So right now, we have a high inflationary environment. We have still expansionary fiscal policy from most governments, right, which sort of adds a bit of fuel to the fire. Not as big as it was a few years ago, but still not allowing the economy to readjust. In Australia, in particular, we've seen a change in government, and therefore there's changes in legislation coming, and we'll touch on some of those which are important in a moment. The big one at the moment is you have significant increase in immigration, you know, 400,000 people a year. Now, when you go from zero, where we were in COVID, to 400,000 people, and you've actually been under building in that period as well to accommodate for that, and you've got normal housing formation, et cetera. There's only one thing that changes, and that is inflation. It's gonna go up. You have to make adjustments for it. So that's sort of like a subtle pressure on the economy at the moment. Now, the government's got their, I believe it's called Government Housing Fund, AUD 3 billion. I think it's AUD 1.6 trillion worth of mortgages out there. I don't think it's gonna touch the sides, really. So what you do need is actual real supply-side reform. That means land release, all that. That gets into the sticky situation of dealing with local governments, et cetera. So these problems are probably here to stay. And the only way you get rid of these problems is by having pretty material recession because things would readjust pretty quickly after that. Now, I don't think the RBA wants that, nor does the government. So at the moment, while they can afford to service the government, the government bonds, pay the interest on them, so for now, they'll keep things going. So we've sort of looked at one of the more rigid changes in legislation in the last three years, and that is the new IR law, IR laws, industrial relations laws, that passed early this year. And it, it's quite significant. It does change the flexibility of the workforce, and what it does, because of that, will add more fuel to the inflation fire. Right? One of them is actually the fact that most EBAs, enterprise bargaining agreements, right? Whatever they'd agreed to last, that is the low point of negotiations for the next agreement, so they can't go backwards. One other factor is the... I think it's Fair Work Commission or the ACCC will determine what a sector looks like. What does the building sector include? And include all the companies in that. Now, if a union goes and negotiates with one company, and they strike an accord with that company, that wage agreement goes across every company. You just have to hit one of them. So that, that's pretty aggressive and, you're seeing, given we are in a cost of living sort of crisis, we're expecting that if wages will grow well north of 3% or 4%, 5s or 6s. And that's pretty material, 'cause if you think about the services economy, which is a fair 75% of the of the economy, that's-- If that's growing at 5% or 6%, it's gonna be hard for inflation to roll down. You need the goods part of the economy to slow down a lot more, and we're not gonna see that. So we're gonna have persistent inflation for a while, and because of that, we're gonna have higher real rates for a lot longer. So what that means is, if you look at history, we're sort of equating this to more like the '70s, where there are quite a few similarities. All of a sudden, we're having a bit of an oil crisis. You got higher labor rates, more chances of strikes now because of the new legislation. You might get more industrial action, which again adds to the pressure of inflation. And with a higher energy price, as we try to transition, and we've talked about this in the past, the... One of our investments, two of our... Sorry, AGL and Origin have gone a bit more traditional as to why we think how the energy market may develop over time, and I'll talk about that later. But all the cost push elements in the economy are going higher. So what that typically means is you get very short economic cycles because inflation can never get out of its way. So the economy slows a bit, wages don't catch up. They don't start falling. The central banks try and think, "Okay, things are slowing down a bit. We're gonna cut rates again." That's just putting more fuel into the fire, and it bounces again. And what that typically means for asset markets is you typically get a steady de-rating, so the multiples you pay for the market actually starts to decline 'cause of persistently high inflation rate. At the moment, we talked about energy. OPEC, the Saudi Arabian, Saudi Arabia needs about a $90 barrel of oil to balance their budget right now, and it's funnily enough, we are heading towards that number, and they're not adding any more supply. So OPEC's, OPEC's been very, very strict with supply. Anytime they feel that the price of oil is heading towards $65-$70, they tend to take more supply out of the system to try and tighten it up again. So this is a global phenomena. We're sort of caught up in that. Now, one of the frightening aspects is, there's eight counties in West Texas, which are supplying most of the growth in the oil, the oil market globally, at the moment. So eight counties in West Texas, where the Permian Shale oil sector is, system is. So if... And they're actually starting to get exhausted. Their reserves are starting to get exhausted. So we are sort of setting up for a, it sounds quite dire, but a bit of an oil blow-off, potentially. Which again, it feels a bit like the '70s, and because of that, we're... For us, we're trying to position our portfolio to things which have a bit of pricing power, right? Definitely have significantly lower debt than the average. But these things are hard to manage around, and because of that, you're gonna have periods of quite high volatility, and the last three months is a perfect example. The markets rallied very strongly, now they're rolling off 8%, almost what they, they earned in the last three months. So that could be quite persistent. Right. Now, what typically happens in this cycle is there will be a couple of accidents, so some companies won't be able to cope. Now, the four quality filters should keep us out of those, 'cause it's usually companies with high indebtedness or extremely volatile earnings streams. And it does take this sort of environment to change the sins of the last, so from the GFC, basically, we had very easy money flowing about. So a lot of business models are gonna be tested, right? And fortunately, the four quality filters we have basically only prefers companies which generate profit, have a good balance sheet, have decent management, and have a decent industry, and should typically keep us out of trouble. On the U.S., we talked about energy inflation, but on the U.S., it's gonna be very hard to generate significant recession in the U.S., 'cause the amount of money they've thrown at their economy at the moment, even with 500 basis points of rate hikes, which is quite restrictive. You've got to remember, Australia is a variable interest rate market. All mortgages are pretty much on a variable, so when they increase rates, you get pretty short lags when it starts to affect consumption. This cycle has been a bit different. Because people saved so much money during COVID, they had way more buffer this time around, but we are now exhausting it. You can see it. We're starting to see some of the retailers talk about things starting to drop off very quickly in the last couple of weeks. In the U.S., though, mortgages are locked in for 30 years. So you lock your rate in, it doesn't actually change. And also, if it's, I think it's below a certain dollar value of the house, your own home is tax deductible, so it's set up for the homeowner. Increasing rates doesn't really work that quickly in the U.S. Inflation does tend to work reasonably quickly in the U.S., though, 'cause the economy moves around pretty quickly. And the Inflation Reduction Act, which we talked about before, typically, when a politician gives a name to a program of spending, it means the complete opposite. So the Inflation Reduction Act has done the reverse. What it's done is, it's effectively a war for global capital because Europe's been spending money on renewables. China dominates supply chain of lithium and rare earths, et cetera. They've been doing that for the last 20 years, building that capacity out, and the United States has found itself quite short in these industries. They're not actually self-sufficient at all. So the Inflation Reduction Act was basically throwing money at the problem. So it started out at about $350 billion. It's now probably close to $1 trillion at the moment, and it's probably going to grow even more. So a lot of money is now flowing, 'cause whenever there's a tax incentive, you'll find a company trying to find it. All right? So global capital is now charging towards the United States, and that is, again, quite inflationary because they have the lowest cost of capital, right, for them. The U.S. can do way more with their capital than we can, because our cost of capital is a little bit higher. So again, this sort of global war for capital when there's high inflation rates, makes the chances of an accident significantly higher. So we're sort of preparing ourselves by building a bit of defense in the portfolio, so that when it happens, and we're starting to see it today. Today is probably the first time I've seen a lot of favored stocks getting seriously marked down. So we've got a list of companies at the moment we're keeping an eye on. Some of them. Most of them are global, actually, and a few domestic. We're quite underrepresented in global at the moment because we just couldn't find the value, and we'll go through the allocation later. But that's where the PIC's sort of focusing at the moment, 'cause there'll be some high-quality businesses in the United States, but some in the U.K., which is probably one of the cheapest global equity markets at the moment, where we'll wait, and when we get a chance, we'll put quite a bit of money to work in those markets. Next slide, please. Okay, so the consequences of all this. Australia will feel like a recession, but because of our... It's very hard to have large recessions when you've got that much immigration growth. Very difficult, because you're adding quite a few people to the system who have to consume and have to be provided for and housed, et cetera, and you are just spending just to keep them in the economy. So it'll feel like a recession because it'll be like a per capita recession. All right? It'll... Everyone's ability to spend more will be lowered because there are just natural barriers to the economy right now. The U.S., there could be a chance of a recession because the Fed, Federal Reserve, because they've got particularly sticky inflation and because short rates... Sorry, sorry. Because mortgages are not, are locked in for 30 years at a fixed rate, it's harder to break the economy, so they have to be a lot more aggressive with their rates. Right? And obviously, as I said, 500 basis points of rate increase is pretty significant within 12 months. And bond markets right now, the risk for the Federal Reserve now and most central banks is that long interest rates out in the 10-year part of the curve start to gravitate higher, 'cause that's basically the market saying inflation longer term is going to be way higher. Now, that's significant because if that starts to de-anchor from its last 15, 20 years, where everyone thought the central banks had control of inflation, and it starts to rise, it does have quite a material impact on asset markets. 'Cause basically, the only way to get rid of long-term inflation is to really hurt the economy here today, and no central bank wants to do that. So we, we think there's going to be gentle pressure, whether through traditional means in monetary policy or more unconventional means in monetary policy, by shrinking the balance sheet, the Federal Reserve or the central bank balance sheets, taking liquidity out of the system, so it's less money rolling around the economy. With higher real rates, it typically will favor having a bit more balance in the portfolio rather than having what's worked the last 7, 10 years, 12 years, which is a very significant exposure to tech, tech companies or long-duration companies such as the Transurban, those sort of very long, long-dated businesses, which typically run with a lot of debt. Traditionally 'cause they could secure their cash flows, 'cause it's a toll road, they could secure it. They can borrow a lot of money forward and pay you a dividend today because of it. That model doesn't work with high real rates and higher interest rates. You want companies to generate cash flow today, 'cause they can pay you dividends out of cash today. They don't have to borrow forward, 'cause the cost of that, that cost of debt is so high, it makes it very difficult to do that. So, but what we've seen is actually the long-duration companies I just talked about have all underperformed significantly, 20%-30%. So funnily enough, even though I just said that, we are looking at long-duration stocks because there are some opportunities starting to rise in those stocks where the market's overly penalizing them, and the yields are reasonable, the, the dividend yields are reasonable, that you're still getting paid to sit in those stocks. 'Cause there will be a point where, I don't know when that is, where, rates will start to go the other way. 'Cause the work that the central banks have done will start to bite, and it'll start to hurt the economy, and that's when you won't be able to pick that day. That's why it's better to preposition for that time and start buying some of these longer duration names and just start nibbling at them, quite soon, I think. So we're starting to do that with the portfolio, with some of the REITs. One of the stocks that Louise is gonna talk about, is one of those. So we're in a position now where, you can see there, I mentioned earlier, energy transition, balance returning. So for the last three or four years, you've seen significant reliance or focus on renewable energy. That's fine. Unfortunately, there are some structural issues with renewable energy. It sort of works in a very low interest rate world 'cause the cost of debt is very, very low, extremely low. And what you do is, initially, the first renewable, wind farms, et cetera, that get up are usually quite decent because they're built in the right area with very high wind pressure. They probably stand on their own two feet. They're not far from where the customers live, us, and they probably stack up. But as you grow the network, every one of those renewables is becoming extremely marginal, and now you're doing it with very twice the cost of debt and way more competition. So they're all struggling. So that's why you're not seeing many approvals for new wind farms, 'cause the capital, the people that take the risk are just not willing to take the risk anymore, 'cause the numbers have changed that so much. So that's why we bought AGL 6-9 months ago, and Origin, because the traditional owners of the vertically integrated utilities actually do way better in this world. Firstly, they have all the customers. Origin's obviously under takeover at the moment. It's got 4.7 million customers. AGL is significantly large as well. And when you've got the customers, you own the load. You know how much your customers demand in energy every day. So if you own the load, you can start building your own renewables, and you take the benefit of building that out. And also, AGL and Origin own these power stations around the country, which are built on the edge of town. And the biggest problem for renewables at the moment is they are built so far out from where the customers live, they have to build transmission out to that, and it's heinously expensive. Imagine you're trying to build power lines now in Australia, not a hundred years ago, right? It's triple, quadruple the cost of what you think it would be. So the economics are sort of starting to fail. So that's why AGL and Origin will be the type of companies that will end up building out these renewable assets, but they'll actually be able to make money out of it, whereas others at the moment are not making any money. We talked about global as well, so we're looking at Flutter. We still maintain a significantly large position in Flutter. We did sell down, sell some down, a couple of months ago. FDJ, the French lottery asset, and we do have Goodman, which is the company that Louise will talk about very soon. I think that's it. Next slide. We're done? Okay, so historically, with the last few years, we've brought up. You've heard from Alex Patton, Clark Wilkins, who's our resource analyst, and Rosemary Tan, who's our healthcare analyst. So we'd like to bring up the team so you can see the depth of the people that work on the fund. Louise Sandberg joined us last year. As I mentioned to you earlier, she's worked domestically on the sell side, and she's worked offshore in other fund managers, in global top-tier fund managers. As I've mentioned earlier, she's covering the, the agricultural sector, consumer stocks, and some of the travel names, et cetera, and the REITs. Now, she's gonna get up and talk to you about two of our biggest positions in the fund, Goodman Group and A2 Milk. Louise? Thank you, Vince. As Vince said, I'll present a short summary on A2 and Goodman Group. Starting with Goodman Group. Goodman Group is a developer, owner, and manager of logistics real estate around the world, so really centrally located to key growth cities globally. It's the largest listed property fund manager in Australia, with AUD 76 billion of external assets under management. So early last year, concerns arose that interest rates are putting pressure on property companies, valuations, balance sheets, and also, hence, distributions. We saw this as an attractive opportunity to build a position in Goodman and believed that the market was underestimating the strengths inherent to Goodman's model, given both the strengths, macroeconomic strengths of the logistics warehousing space, particularly if you compare it to office or retail, and also Goodman's development driven growth model, strong balance sheet, and excellent management team. So if you step back and look at industrial assets, essentially, the asset class is benefiting from a number of supportive long-term trends, including the growth of e-commerce, the emergence of near and onshoring, so post-COVID, and also continued urbanization globally. In e-commerce, specifically, our desire for next-day or same-day delivery pushes warehouses into the cities. So it's no longer okay for the warehouse to be two, three hours outside of the city, because essentially, for a logistics company, your deliver... Your cost of delivering a product is much bigger than your rent. So you can pay more rent to be closer to your end customers. So as this happens, simultaneously, warehouse automation has resulted in a lot of older warehouses being not fit for purpose. You need higher ceilings, you need bigger bays for the trucks, and so on. So these factors all coincided to push industrial occupancy to record highs. Sydney, for instance, vacancy is less than 1%. And also supporting this fueled rental growth, which was explosive globally, and thus supporting asset valuations. So we view Goodman’s portfolio as especially leveraged to these trends because management has consciously sort of pruned and recycled its portfolio to placing its assets near big cities. Today, Goodman's property portfolio is 99% occupied, and saw like-for-like net property income growth of 4.7% in 2023. Find me an office manager that's done that. Property income will continue to grow, given contracted rent step-ups, and also the fact that the existing portfolio is, as existing leases roll off, the reset to market rents is very steep. 66% in North America, 37% in Australia and New Zealand, 17% in Europe and the U.K., and around 1% in Asia. In addition, Goodman has a development-led model, so property fund managers can either buy their growth, you know, buying buildings with fund investors' money, or they can develop it. Goodman has historically very much tilted to developing this growth, and rising rents have more than offset rising construction costs, so they've maintained very healthy development margins. More recently, also, management's highlighted the opportunities related to the fact that a lot of these logistics buildings can be repurposed as data centers, and returns, development returns and data centers are even more attractive than traditional logistics. Prologis, the biggest logistics owner in the world, said this week that they're multiples of the returns that you get from building a warehouse. From a sustainability perspective, we have had in-depth conversations with Goodman's sustainability team, and we're very impressed with their commitment to sustainability and also the thoughtfulness that they put into tenants' future demands. Because a lot of the Goodman's tenants are the biggest, some of the biggest companies in the world, including Amazon, who are under a lot of pressure to reduce their emissions. Gearing is conservative at only 8%, which is one of the lowest of the listed property companies. And this low gearing also affords the company patience to buy sites and bide their time for when negotiate with councils, find you know, contract electricity to turn their sites into data centers, where competing, sort of highly geared bidders need returns tomorrow to pay their interest costs. From a quality of management perspective, Goodman is founder-led, and the business has a very deep bench of talent and very low employee turnover on the senior ranks. The following slide shows sort of the growth of assets under management over time and also their global split of assets under management. I'd also, you know, really emphasize that I think the results this year showed the strength of Goodman's model. They grew operating earnings per share by 16%, where the property as a group, as a whole, saw earnings flat to down. If we move on to A2 Milk. A2 Milk markets and sells premium branded dairy nutritional products across Australia, New Zealand, China, and the U.S. The A2 milk protein is marketed as easier to digest than other types of milk, and that's really struck a chord with Chinese consumers. Over time, infant formula sales by A2 to Chinese consumers has grown to make up a significant share of sales and the majority of profits. A2's Chinese infant formula is available in close to 26,000 mother and baby stores in China, and the Australian-made, what they call English Label product, is available online through A2's flagship stores on key internet platforms, including Alibaba and TikTok. Now, I think we all remember the formula outages of years past. So historically, Chinese entrepreneurs, called Daigou, purchased A2 infant formula in Australia and resold the product to their extended networks of friends and family in China. This channel was disrupted through COVID, and coming out of COVID, A2's management team has increased its investment in their on-the-ground presence in China, and also in their own online platform, so pivoting customers to buying directly from the company. We see the growth of the Chinese label and the pivot to A2-controlled sales through their own websites as the creation of a much higher quality business model, where A2 has control over its inventories, its marketing, and also its price in China. This has been demonstrated throughout this year as A2 gained market share in China while maintaining solid pricing and avoiding inventory buildups in a very challenging overall market environment, where a lot of the competitors cut price and also saw inventories increase. The weak Chinese birth rate and sort of lack of recovery in the birth rate to date, coming out of COVID, remains a headwind for growth, but A2 has gained a successful foothold in China with a very limited range of products. They have one Chinese formula brand and one English label. So we believe that sort of leveraging the investment in the brand and the great brand recognition to potentially more products is a huge opportunity for the company. And if you compare to other domestic and international companies, they all have multiple products to sort of leverage that marketing spend. A2 has over AUD 800 million in net cash at the end of fiscal year 2023, and an operating cash conversion of 114%, meaning that every year they're building that cash pile further. So they have plenty of time to invest in growth and to potentially, you know, invest in another brand or another canning line, whether it's in New Zealand or China. We're also very satisfied that A2's management under David Bortolussi has shown consistent execution throughout this sort of challenging period in China. If you turn to the next page, you'll see a breakdown of A2's sales by segment and also sort of infant formula sales. And I think the key point here is, if you look at the first Australia, New Zealand, English label, EL, that's the sales through the Daigou channel and how that's declined in favor of the much better controlled sales channels. So, thank you for that. I'll hand back to Vince. Thanks, Laura. Excellent summaries. Couldn't get two more different companies, I think. So next slide, please. Right. Performance. The last few months, the portfolio struggled. We've been going a little bit more defensive in the last three months, positioning the portfolio, and the market's been very strong. So, in that environment, we're gonna probably lag the market. But days like today, where the market's down 1.5%-2%, we're getting that relative performance back. So I think the portfolio is sort of ready for any sort of bumps we get in the next 3-6 months. As I said, a bit like when COVID occurred, if there are opportunities available in the market, domestically and offshore, we've got the liquidity and we can. We will actively manage our existing positions, particularly ones that have performed quite well. We'll sell those positions. Hopefully, we'll be in profit. So we're generating more franking credits and gains, and moving to these new names. So we've got a team of 15 investing professionals and virtually investing in, looking at global and domestic stocks. When we see, when we start to struggle a bit with performance, I know that there's opportunities coming typically, 'cause we are quite patient about things. We tend to just wait. While the noise that you see in the market today is pervasive, and it's quite confusing, and people get drawn into doing things they shouldn't typically do. So, there's enough rigor within our process that sort of gives us, produces long-term numbers. And again, we are very focused on paying the dividend and maintaining the dividend and growing the franking as well, so that it is always a fully franked dividend. So what hasn't worked in the last three months is, Jervois, which is a cobalt company. We exited it earlier. That sort of lagged the performance. And, Healius, which we still have in the portfolio, we've had to go a bit more active on managing, engaging with the company. It's one of the things that hasn't recovered from COVID. Most sectors have recovered quite strongly volumes, but the healthcare sector is still lagging in Australia. Volumes are still below. We're talking about pathology testing and diagnostic imaging, et cetera. It's still quite far below 2019 numbers. So either people are just not going to, to see the doctor as much, which could be the case, and there's less testing because of that. But we've also now started to see a shortage of doctors, GPs. And funnily enough, we did have quite a significant flow of GPs coming from offshore. They usually came to Australia, immigrate under an immigration program, and we shut down the borders. So we're struggling. So it's gonna take a bit of time for that to recover. So we're sort of actively engaging the board of Healius to make sure that they don't go and do anything silly regarding making an acquisition or just preserve the balance sheet, wait for things to recover, get back to normal, and then these, that will probably perform quite well, and we'll get our investment back. As I said to you earlier, you can see cash is quite low at the moment, at 3.7%. Global securities at 11.6. That's probably the lowest we've ever been. But as I said, we've now identified one or two new names offshore, one in the U.K. and one in North America. We've started an initial position in the U.K., and this particular company will probably be disclosed in the next report that we do. It's involved in the building sector over there. The U.K. is going through probably one of the worst housing cycles in probably 30 years. 'Cause the problem they've got is they went through Brexit, which then they had COVID, and they got record levels of inflation, which they can't do anything about, 'cause they've got no, basically, no workforce moving into the country, so labor rate's extremely high. And so the housing market is now, I saw a stat last week, in the U.K., the amount of houses being built is so low, you can't actually... The existing population, they've got nowhere to live, or there's not enough housing formation going on. That's critical. So we've got an election coming up in the U.K. I'm assuming there's gonna be quite a few policies angled towards the housing sector in the U.K. So we're sort of positioning for that a bit, not for the election, but the company we're buying is extremely high quality. We will disclose that in the next report. And there's one or two names in the U.S. which are starting to look quite interesting. And in the domestic front, we've still got some of our Insurance Australia Group, IAG, you know, the NRMA brand, still one of our biggest positions. That's doing quite well. Again, the insurers do very well in inflationary times. And I hate to bring up the weather, but I will. As we go into El Niño, that means drier. Drier is usually good for insurers, 'cause we're not smashing into each other during the rain, typically. And you also get less events. Flooding is the worst thing ever, 'cause it usually hits built-up areas. Whereas with warmer weather, you get way less frequency. And what they've done, the insurers have over, I believe, provisioned now for the bad times. Like, they're just using the last couple of years of extreme catastrophes, and they're setting policy pricing rates. We all know that. Today, I got, I think I got my car went up 25%. I'm not that much bad of a driver in 12 months, but that's what it did. So they're pricing for the worst, and we think that's gonna be a more benign environment. So insurers will, I think, will be paying out significant amounts of capital in the next 2-3 years. So we're gonna get a lot of dividends back from the insurance part of our portfolio. Next slide. We're done. Okay, I'll now hand over to Nancy to go through Q&A. I should have shared with Vince that my homeowner's insurance went up 56%, so, I had to- Sorry, but thank you. I think you're onto something there. Okay. Thank you, Vince and Louise. We'll now answer any question received from shareholders or interested parties on the event, investor manager presentation. A reminder that any questions related to the AGM resolutions will be addressed later in the meeting. First, I'll deal with the pre-registered questions. The first question is actually from me, Vince, you'll get the next one, is from Dan Majowski, and the question is: "Will the company issue rights to shareholders anytime soon? The company needs to scale up and grow to at least AUD 1 billion to be sufficiently competitive and to improve liquidity." I also got a question from Ian Miller, which is very similar: "Does the board have any plans for raising further capital? Clearly, the recent options issue wasn't successful, largely due to market movements. What are the board's thoughts on optimum capital size for PIC?" I'm going to address Dan and Ian's questions together. You're spot on. We believe the same thing. The board discusses opportunities for growth quite a bit, and we look at the different mechanisms available in the market that would provide value to shareholders. You might recall we successfully raised capital in the past via AUD 101 million dollar entitlement and general offer in 2018. In 2021, we did the AUD 30 million dollar share purchase plan, and as you acknowledged, the majority of the share options expired, lapsed due to market volatility. So we agree, the larger the LIC, the more volatility in the marketplace. So we are looking at it, but we believe we need certain conditions to actually make it work. So we need a pricing structure that is appropriate for all market conditions, and the volatility in PIC's NTA and share price, in the manager's view, is giving us some opportunities, but it's still moving around quite a bit. So we need to see that narrow and stay narrow for a longer period of time. And then, excuse me, the board will consider what our options might be. So I will move to the next question. Oh, Ian had an additional question, and he asked me, "Please advise cents per share of a 100% fully franked dividend reserves." So right now, in the franking credit balance, we have AUD 22 million after payment of your FY 2023 dividend, and that's sufficient to pay a fully franked dividend of AUD 0.136 per share. So that's for Ian. So we've got quite a reserve there. As I mentioned earlier, we also have the profit reserve with over AUD 112 million in it. The next question is from Colin Green, and I will ask Vince to respond to this. "Could you discuss..." And I also have one from, Dennis White. I think they're related. Oh, sorry. Colin Green's question is: "What does PIC do when markets are threatening a downturn? We do have quite a strong valuation discipline, and that means when 'cause we're actively managing the portfolio, when things get expensive and we see opportunities in other companies, or more importantly, we're not very comfortable with the market itself and the overall value in the market, we can put some money to cash, 'cause we can go up to 25% in cash. We don't try and use that too frequently. We do like to stay fully invested. But in the last couple of weeks, we've been moving the portfolio a little bit more defensively by taking in, buying new positions in more defensive companies. And at the moment, I still think that's probably prudent to stay that way until we see a bit more of a drawdown in the market, at least 10%-15%. But I as I mentioned earlier during the presentation, I think we are gonna get this whip-sawing market for a while, until you see either a significant break in inflation expectations, so that people start to think inflation is going down. That could drive the market higher. So we've got to be prepared for that, 'cause you will wanna be exposed to more of the broader market then.... But usually our style, being a quality and value manager, is low volatility anyway. We tend to have a lower beta than the actual market itself. Because of the four quality filters we use, typically screens out very high volatility stocks, 'cause their balance sheets are so bad, they have significant movements. So that in itself actually protects the portfolio, and then it's the skill of us to basically manage that volatility as well. Thank you, Vince. Next question I have is from Dennis White. Could you discuss the issue of premium and the discount to NTA? PIC seems to do quite well in this regard, but many LICs do not. Now, this is near and dear to my heart. I think I've been talking about this for the five years I've been here, but we're getting better, and, and we have narrowed the gap. We're very committed to that as a board. We discuss it all the time. I think as I've said to you before, you know, there are three factors that we think will make the difference: investment performance, sustainable dividends, and shareholder engagement. Right? Well, you saw the investment today on, on Vince's slides. We've had the highest dividends, you know, we've ever paid out before, and hopefully we're engaging enough with you, but please let us know if we can do more. So we're hoping that we've kinda broken the back of it. You know, we narrowed quite a bit in the last month, but there has been some volatility in the market. So this board is very focused on trying to keep that as narrow as possible. Now, I'm going to open for other questions, Sylvie. So other questions for shareholders and guests who are present. If you wish to ask a question, please raise your hand as we have several roving microphones around the room. A microphone attendant will be with you as soon as possible. Take your name so that you can introduce yourself prior to asking your question. For those online, a reminder of the instructions to submit a question are now on your screen. I will also invite Karen Trau to the front of the room now. Do we have any questions in the room? Who's got the microphone? Sorry. Thank you. Chairman, I would like to introduce Mr. Darius Petrok. Good afternoon. Darius Petrok here. Just have a question to Vince. I'm glad you mentioned the U.S. market with the interest rates, particularly that the housing market there, people who have lots of 30-year mortgages, which kind of, you know, giving that cushion to the interest rate shock. Mm-hmm. But it's, it's quite a large portion of the total market, right? The 30-year fixed mortgages. Yes, very large. Mm. Adjustable-rate mortgages, they call them ARMs. Right. They're smaller, a lot smaller. Yeah. Yeah. I wish we had this type of loans in Australia. Mm-hmm. I don't know why we don't have it, actually. My next question is about the particular company in the portfolio, the Bapcor- Mm-hmm Group. Yeah, how is that going, and are you going to be adding to the position in Bapcor or? So, yeah, they had a tough day, two days ago. The company advised that, at the AGM update, that, that Bapcor is a auto parts distributor on both the trade and on the retail side through Autob arn, that brand, Autob arn, et cetera. They also have wholesale, auto parts as well, which they, they do distribute, both in, motor vehicles and trucks, et cetera. So they advise that in September, the retail part of their, business softened a bit. So as, as I said to you earlier, we look at all these things. So it looks like that the slowdown's starting to occur in the domestic economy. People are pulling their, pulling their horns in a bit. So Bapcor sort of warned that that's, that's the case. The stock was, I feel, overly discounted. It fell, like, 15% for what was about a 5%-7%, sorry, 10% downgrade, if they do nothing. But they are removing - they are taking costs out of the business. That's what they've advised the market, and the market ignored it. And yes, we've been buying stock because it's, it was, it's now 15%-20% cheaper than it was a day, two days ago. So yeah, we're adding to it. It's a high-quality business. They're going through a transition. Bapcor was a business that was grown by acquisition, buying small corner store auto parts, distributing businesses and putting them all together. So at the moment, they're just sort of like, they're putting it this... It wasn't really integrated correctly, so then they're now going through that process of quite a bit of spend going on in the business. But there are two dominant trade auto parts companies in Australia. One's Repco, which we all know, owned by GPC, the Genuine Parts Corporation, and Bapcor. So they're the other large one. And the trade business is the part that attracts us the most because I don't know what a disc brake should cost, so when the mechanic tells me, I've got no information. So if that price goes up 5%-10%, sure. And mechanics don't care either, 'cause as we all know, when you go to the mechanic, 70% of it's labor, the cost. So they just need to get the thing off the hoist. It's a high-service model, trade auto parts, because they do deliveries four to five times a day, right? So the, 'cause the mechanic's got to get the car off the hoist to get paid. Amazon's had a crack at doing in the U.S., auto parts, trade auto parts, but they can't match. The companies like AutoZone or O'Reilly's in the U.S. are the two models we look at. They are incredibly high-service businesses, incredibly successful. AutoZone's one of the companies I'd suggest you look at. It's probably one of the best companies over the last 30-40 years.... So yes, I've added to it recently. Thank you, Vince. Next question, please. Chairman, I'd like to introduce Brian Allison. Just a question about A2 Milk. At the last presentation, as I saw here, you were very keen on it. And I was very surprised to see that you're still keen on it, considering the lack of performance- Yeah in the meantime. Yep. The fact that they're in dispute with Synlait Milk, which is their main milk supplier, and they've really done nothing but go backwards since the directors sold their shares some years ago without informing the ASX. And so I'm just wondering what the catalyst that you see that I'm not seeing? So I'll just talk about the directors. We weren't on the register when that occurred, 'cause pretty poor governance. We wouldn't particularly enjoy that. We're a recent owner, like last year. We started buying some last year as a start to... 'Cause it's fallen from AUD 18 down to AUD 4. So when it started going to the 7s and 6s, we started buying some, and we bought a lot more when there was a change in management. So when David Bortolussi joined the board, joined the business as CEO, we know David from where he's been in the past, at Pacific Brands. He's a very successful business person. We really like his style, highly detailed, knows the business. Anyway, I'll leave it up to Louise, 'cause she's got way more knowledge about this than I do. So, I think the key. It should be working. Yeah, it's working, yeah. So, there's a few key challenges that are sort of have been out of A2's control, which is that the Chinese birth rate through COVID with lockdowns and then the lack of economic stimulus that we saw sort of led to essentially a consumer recession in China and no weddings, so no babies. In that environment, so the overall infant formula market in China is down double digits, and A2 Milk is still growing sales, and they're guiding the market to slow single-digit sales growth this year and flat margins. So we think, you know, that really demonstrates the strength of the brand and the commitment of management and sort of being on the ground in China and fighting for sales. We follow very closely everything from the age of the inventory that's on the shelf in China, so we have people in China who check the cans. We follow the online sales market share. We follow Nielsen data on overall market share in China, and A2 is consistently growing market share. We also follow pricing data that shows that A2 is holding price, where competitors are discounting. And then, if we look at the execution of management since David Bortolussi took over, you know, shifting this, the model from selling through resellers, sort of who are buying in the supermarkets in Australia and then selling themselves, so you actually don't know how much inventory is in the system, right? You know, someone could have bought pallets of formula and keep it in, keeping it in their house and then dumping it into China. Now A2 has full control over that supply chain, and they've transitioned, for instance, they've transitioned or they're in process of transitioning to their new Chinese label, which is under the new license. Now, the issues with Synlait, while they're concerning, they're also another aspect of A2 in-housing and gaining control over their entire supply chain. Synlait underperformed in their delivery of. So they have sort of performance metrics that they have to meet in terms of how much formula they produce for A2 to sell, and they missed those targets consistently for several months, which sort of triggered an out clause in their exclusivity contract. That gives A2 the opportunity to move production in-house to their own facility in Mataura Valley. And by doing that, they can actually sort of control the entire production process and also sort of improve profitability in that factory. So, you know, it'll be a longer process with Synlait, but over time, we actually see it as a positive where A2 improves their control of their supply chain. Yeah, so, this, this has all been in train, but it doesn't seem to be turning up in the market attitude towards the company, which is probably suffering from some past sins. I think you're right, and I think what we really need to see is the company making use of their cash piles in either... So they bought back shares earlier this year, in either continuing that or through a dividend, or what we would really like to see is the company sort of expanding their product range, so using that strong brand across more, more products. Yeah, I think that's another way that they've disappointed shareholders in that they suggested a few years ago that they might start paying dividends, but they never have. Mm. That's right. Thank you very much. Thanks, Louise. That was very interesting. Any other questions in the room? Yes, please. Hi. Chairman, I'd like to introduce Brian Perkis. Hi, Brian. I don't know if you remember, Vince, but- Yep ... last year at the meeting, I asked you about the investment in Westpac. Mm-hmm. raised the issue of whether that would be the best banking investment in the world. I think it was February or March, the monthly report, you then had a big stake in Commonwealth Bank. And then in the annual report there of the thirtieth of June, you've got investments in Westpac, Commonwealth, and National. Yeah. Yeah. You haven't got one international bank. Now, a few weeks ago, I read something written by one of your analysts, who from Perpetual, and the gist of it was that he didn't see Australian banks as being a good long-term investment proposition. I also read something that, well, not by him, by another commentator or analyst, saying that Australian banks, I think with the, their price was twice their book value. Mm-hmm. They're basically the most expensive banks in the world. So my question is, if that is the case, why have we got over AUD 50 million invested in the Australian banks as opposed to banks somewhere else in the world? Okay, that's a good question. I do remember your question, by the way. I've, we've progressively bought more of the Australian banks. Firstly, Australia probably has one of the best regulated banking systems in the world, probably the safest. It's a dangerous world with banks, but it is one of the safest. And when you look at it relative to offshore banks, they all trade cheap, they call it. You know, so CBA trades on 2+ times book value, 2.2 times the book value, at least that. Whereas Bank of America trades at a probably a 15%-20% discount to book value. Now, I've been a former bank analyst for my sins, and the one rule I know is, when there's a bank that's really cheap, you run the other direction. I'm not saying Bank of America is in trouble, but what it is, is I think that there's only it is an oligopolistic system. We've got four Australian banks that dominate, right? The payout ratios in Australia are a lot higher than offshore. You don't get as big a dividend because they're more heavily regulated, but also the ROE in those overseas banking markets are materially lower than in Australia, right? A lot of them are doing 8% ROEs, which is barely your cost of capital. So you're not actually generating enough capital to pay out a bit extra to the shareholders. So whereas there'll be a time, we've owned Bank of America in the past, and Lloyds, et cetera. We've owned those in the past. I'm a bit nervous about commercial property. You've seen already from March to June, the commercial property issue and, you know, Silicon Valley Bank and all things, those things happening, that had made no difference to Australian banks. Whereas over there, you would have lost 50%-60% of your investment. And even the money center banks like Bank of America or Wells Fargo and Citigroup, they derated as well through that period. So whereas the Australian banks didn't do much. So they're actually, I hate to say, defensive, 'cause if we have a recession, they're not defensive. But I think the dividend that we're getting out of them now is pretty robust. As I said, it's gonna be hard for Australia to have a significant recession because of the level of immigration growth we've got. So it keeps the economy going. As long as we don't have significant bad debt cycle, the banks can still keep paying what they've got right now, and they are incentivized to do it. They've got significant amounts of capital. They've probably got excess capital, so you'll start to see that coming back to us. There'll be a time to switch, it's just not right now. Now, another question: Do you still have Ramsay Health Care in the portfolio? Yes, we do. I actually, yeah. Are you aware that Mr. Aboud, I think, had an article on Livewire about shorting? Ramsay? You should have told me about that. And, that- I don't think so, but he owns them, so I don't know how that's right. Stock he was recommending should be shorted. How long ago was that? A few weeks. Okay, I'm gonna have a chat to him. Maybe a couple of weeks. I find that remarkable, 'cause we actually do own, as a group, we own quite a bit of Ramsay across all- So you've still got it? Because I know the price is low. Mm. I have read that it's sort of seen as a takeover target. Yep. You still think it's a good investment? I think not for the fact that it's a takeover target. I think they've got a chequered history in capital allocation overseas. And as I said to you earlier, before, remember I mentioned that the Australian healthcare system is taking a lot longer to recover. Hospitals is the same. There's less people going to have acute care. It's just taking a lot bit longer. And then on top of that, you've got a healthcare worker shortage. So they're paying, their wages are going up significantly trying to attract people, so they've got a bit of a margin squeeze now. I think that the value of those assets, don't forget, the property assets are effectively at cost, right? They own a lot of the sites the hospitals are on, the private hospitals, Ramsay does. They're in the process of selling a joint venture they have in Malaysia, Sunway Hospital Group, which if they get the price that's been rumored, they will de-leverage their balance sheet quite significantly. So whenever they de-lever, the market will probably be quite positively disposed to that. They've also got other overseas assets. Our presence, our preference is if they exit one or two of those assets, and like, go for a fortress balance sheet in that environment. And then if you've got a very clean balance sheet with... They're not even overgeared, but if you de-lever those assets, we are starting to see an improvement in volumes in hospitals, and they're positively disposed to that. So I quite like Ramsay around these levels, at the AUD 50 level. I think there's significant upside, and you never know if it's one of the rare hospital groups that own their own land. ... And a final question. I'm not sure if it should be addressed to you or the board. But so we're paying AUD 5 million a year in management fees. Again, like as I pointed out last year, none of your analysts have after them global equities, right? Now, your 2 major holdings, offshore holdings you've had for 5 years, I think it is- Mm-hmm. Flutter and the Toll Road. Since then, the manager has purchased Barrow Hanley, Trillium, and Pendal, all of which specialize in, obviously, international equities. So my question is: if we're paying AUD 5 million a year in management fees, why don't we have some dedicated people on that list? Or alternatively, do you-- are you in contact with these Barrow Hanley, Trillium, and Pendal- Mm-hmm. Regarding ideas of how you invest the money? Having dedicated analysts. Firstly, our process and philosophy is different to a lot of those offshore groups. Barrow Hanley is quite similar. They're a value manager from Texas. I've met quite a few of them. The Perpetual method is been going for a long time, 40-plus years. I'll back any of my analysts against the offshore analysts any day. And they, our analysts, remember, in the process of doing their work on Australian stocks, they're always looking at overseas peers as a part of their day job. And we give them free rein to basically, if they see something overseas, which is quite interesting, to go cover it, 'cause they will get paid for it if it works out, right? And I can tell you, most of the team are always doing that. So as I said, I'll back any of my team against any of those offshore guys, and I'm sure they're gonna say exactly the same about us, but- I'm not, I'm not criticizing your team. Yep. What I'm saying is, so if you have, say, if you've got a banking analyst on your team, and it's an Australian banking analyst- Mm-hmm. He's gonna be spending most of his time researching Australian banks. Not gonna be researching Japanese banks or French banks or banks in Ireland, is he? They do. They do look at them. 'Cause they, they look at the because if you think about banks, like, let's say banks, for example, it's quite a homogeneous product. So you, all you need to do is understand the regulation in those markets. But- They do, they look at it for comparisons. But we've sort of like, only... We can have 35% in- Mm-hmm ... international equities. We've only got, like, I think it was 11%. I think from last, I think the Australian dollar's dropped about maybe 10% or 5% in the last 12 months. Mm-hmm. You're now talking about investing overseas, but, I mean, are you assuming the dollar's gonna drop further or? I don't try and make currency assumptions. That's a mug's game, I feel. I'd rather think about the equity and what we're buying, the company and the quality of it, and the opportunity of that company. That will far outweigh, I think, the selection of that company in the portfolio than... I don't want to make a currency call. We will always hedge the currency. Typically, I don't like trying to take a directional call on the currency. It's not my skill or our skill. We're equity investors, and we analyze companies. So I take your point. I still think that plenty of Australians have been able to manage money internationally from here. You're talking about dedicated analysts, I agree. I'll go to the company and ask them for more resourcing. Now, the only reason I'm asking these questions is because I was an original investor. Yeah. And one of the reasons I invested was because there was the ability to- Go offshore, yeah. ... That part of the portfolio would be invested offshore. Yeah, and when COVID hit, we went to—we actually asked to increase the offshore exposure from 25 to 35, and we went to 33 pretty quickly. So there is... We tend to, as I said, we're patient, we wait for opportunities, so that there's so much margin of safety in investing offshore, 'cause you are taking a little bit more risk, 'cause you're not in—I'm not saying you're not in the loop, but it is a slightly different market. They can have different idiosyncrasies about it. So I prefer to see a little bit more buffer in the valuation arbitrage we have before we have a go. And, you know, I remember we put in, like, 6 or 7 stocks during 2020 into offshore, 'cause they all traded at 30%-40% discounts. So that's what I prefer to look for, rather than... And as I said, our team are always looking for new ideas. They're meant to bring companies. I've mentioned the investment universe. They're looking to bring more companies in all the time. Our investment universe is not static. It's quite dynamic. There's things going in and out quite frequently. Thanks. Thank you. Do we have any other questions in the room? Yes, sir. I think Colin. Chairman, I would like to introduce Paul Collins. It's just a quick question. You're obviously pretty keen on Bapcor. Mm-hmm. I'm just wondering why you're going for Bapcor, over, say, ARB or GUD, those vehicle accessory type- Mm ... businesses. I quite like ARB, but it trades quite expensive for us. We've got a price on it. We're just waiting for it to get there one day. So, just got to be a bit patient, 'cause it, like, eventually, most companies have an accident, right? And something will go wrong with it, and the stock will, the market will just want to throw them out.... and then we'll be waiting. We'd prefer to be more patient about those sort of names. Paying up with a very high company with a very high multiple leaves you not a lot of wiggle room if something goes wrong, because they will derate very quickly. Look, you know, CSL, up until 18 months ago, was trading on 38x-40x. As of today, it's trading on 23x, and the earnings have grown, but the actual, the value of the equity's declined on multiple bases. So that's what can happen to you. You know, the stock's pretty much done nothing for 4 years. So we just like ARB, ARB, sorry. GUD, G-U-D, sorry. We've looked at this for ages. We've owned it in the past. I just prefer the auto parts distribution business a bit better. They're more manufacturers. As you said, they're accessory companies. You've got to be careful because their supply chain, they're into China or Vietnam, and they've got less control over their supply chain. Whereas with a distributor, you're just paying for the part, you can hold it in inventory, and you can put prices up. Because the market structure is Repco and Bapcor that dominate that part of the trade market, they're both pretty sensible. They push prices through pretty regularly, so they can always maintain their margins. So we prefer that part of the value chain. Thanks. Thanks, Vince. Do I have any other questions in the room? Okay, Karen, do we have any other questions online? There are no questions online, Chairman. Link, do I have any other questions by phone? There are no phone questions at this time. Okay, thank you very much. I'd like to thank Vince and Louise for their presentation. Thank you. Karen, as the facilitator. Thank you. I will now move to the formal business of the AGM. The virtual meeting online guide was lodged with the ASX and published on PIC's website. It outlines the steps to enable shareholders to participate in the meeting. In terms of business, we have the following items to consider: Financial and statutory reports for the financial year ended June 30, 2023, my re-election, the election of Michael Clarke as an independent non-executive director, an advisory vote on the adoption of the remuneration report for FY 2023, and an increase in the non-executive director rem pool. The item of business relating to the FY 2023 financial and statutory reports is not for voting, but for tabling and discussion. Further information about each of the items for consideration today is set out in the notice of meeting. I will take the notice of meeting as read. As described in the notice of meeting, proxy appointments were able to be lodged up to 48 hours before the meeting, where I, as chairman of the meeting, have been appointed as a shareholder's proxy or become their proxy by default. I will vote director proxies as directed in the proxy appointment, and I will vote any available undirected proxies in favor of each resolution. If you are a proxy holder, then you would have received an email setting out instructions for you on how to vote these proxies using the voting mechanism on the online platform. Now, bear with me, I have to tell you all the formalities for how to vote. If you're attending in person, I will now outline those procedures. We will be voting by a poll and not a show of hands. Simon Davidson of Link Market Services is the Returning Officer for the purpose of the poll. You will all have received a yellow voting card when you registered yesterday. They will be used to cast your vote. Once counted, the outcome will be announced to the ASX later this afternoon. If you are online, you may cast your vote at any time during the meeting now that the poll is open. You may also change your vote at any point until I declare the poll closed. The poll is now open. The poll will remain open until five minutes after the end of today's meeting. At the conclusion of the AGM, you will see a red bar appear along the top of the online platform with a countdown timer of how long you have remaining to cast your vote. You must be logged into the online platform to cast a live vote. You cannot cast a vote over the phone. Shareholders online will be able to cast their vote using the electronic voting card received. To register to vote, click on the Get a Voting Card button on the webpage. The adjacent slide shows the page you need to access on the online platform to exercise your vote. Your voting card will appear with all the resolutions to be voted on by shareholders of the meeting. You may need to use your scroll down bar on the right-hand side of the voting card to view all resolutions. You will need to enter your SRN or HIN and your postcode. If you are appointed as proxy, please enter the proxy number issued by Link Market Services. In the Proxy Details section, then click the Submit Details and Vote button. Subject to any applicable voting restrictions, the board recommends that shareholders vote in favor of each item. The voting restrictions for the resolutions are included in the notice of meeting. If you experience any difficulties in the online platform, or you are unsure how to vote or ask questions, there is a helpline number available, which is 1800 990 3633 within Australia and which is displayed at the top of the webpage. If you have not registered to vote, please do so now. The results of the voting will be known shortly after the AGM and advised to the ASX and posted on our website. I will introduce each resolution, and there will be an opportunity to ask a question in the room or post written comments or questions. For shareholders in the room, if you wish to ask a question when invited, please raise your hand. We'll have several roving microphones. A microphone attendant will be with you as soon as possible. We'll take your name so they can introduce you. Please ensure you show them your yellow or blue attendance card. I said bear with me. If you're online, for shareholders participating online, you do not need to wait until we get to that item of business to ask a question. In fact, we encourage you to start submitting your questions now. The adjacent slide shows the box on the platform that you need to click to post a comment or question. Once you hit the Ask a Question option, the Ask a Question box will pop up, and you can then submit your question. If your question concerns the FY 2023 financial and statutory reports, please begin your question with this. Shareholders are only able to ask a question after you have registered to vote. The Company Secretary will read comments and questions to the meeting. The questions will be read out verbatim. If you're on the phone, you can also participate by phone and ask a question by calling 1800 416 518. To do so, you will need a unique PIN obtained from Link. If you do not have a PIN yet, please call Link on 1800 990 363. The PIN will allow the Link moderator to verify you as a security holder, and you will be able to ask a question. To ask a question after the chairman has invited questions on the particular resolution, please press star one on your keyboard. At the appropriate time, a moderator will introduce you to the meeting. Your line will be unmuted, and you can start speaking. Following comments and questions, I will confirm the proxy votes received before the meeting. These will appear on the screen in the room and your computer screen beside the video feed. Each resolution before the meeting today is an ordinary resolution and will be passed by simple majority. We will first take questions from shareholders in the room, then shareholders using the online platform, and then take questions received over the phone. We will save asking each question until the relevant item of business. Okay, this is the presentation of the FY 23 financial and statutory reports. The first item of business is to receive and consider the financial report, the reports of the directors, and of the auditor for the financial year end June 30, 2023. The accounts were circulated as part of the annual report in August. They were also published on PIC's website on the day we announced our full year results. I now formally table the financial report, the directors' report, and the auditor's report for the financial year ending June 30, 2023. There is no voting on this item, but shareholders will have an opportunity to ask questions and make comments on this item using the online platform. As I have previously mentioned, Karen Hopkins from KPMG is also available to answer shareholder questions on the conduct of the audit, the auditor's report, the company's accounting policy, or the independence of the auditor. All questions to the auditors shall, in the first instance, be addressed to me as chairman, and if appropriate, I will ask Karen to address the question. Please note that we will focus specifically on the remuneration report later in the meeting, and we will be taking questions on that and other specific items of business when we come to them. I note that no written questions for the auditor were received in advance of the AGM. I will now invite shareholders in the room who would like to ask a question on this item of business to make their way to one of the three microphones, or the roving microphones, so please raise your hand. All those instructions, and you don't have a question. Sorry. We give everybody every opportunity. Thanks. Sylvie, do I have any written questions received during the meeting? No, Chairman, there are no questions. Do we have any participants on the phone wishing to ask questions? There are no phone questions at this time. Thank you. It appears that there are no further questions on this item of business. We now move to the four resolutions, which do require voting. For each resolution, we will show you the proxies received prior to the meeting. The final number of votes, including the votes cast in person and through the online platform voting from today, will be collated after the meeting and released to the ASX. I wish to confirm that I am holding open proxies in my capacity as chairman, and it's my intention to vote all available undirected proxies in favor of all resolutions. The first resolution of today's agenda is to consider my re-election as a director. I will therefore hand the meeting to the Chairman of our Nomination and Corporate Governance Committee, John Edstein, to chair this part of the meeting. Thank you, Nancy, and good afternoon, shareholders and guests. Nancy Fox is currently the Chairman of the PIC Board. Nancy was first appointed as a Non-Executive Director of PIC on July 1, 2017, and stood for election at the 2020 AGM. Nancy is currently a member of PIC's Nomination and Corporate Governance Committee and the Audit and Risk Committee. Nancy now stands for re-election. Details of Nancy's career are set out in the explanatory notes accompanying the notice of meeting. The board, with Nancy abstaining, strongly supports Nancy's re-election. I would like to invite Nancy to provide a few comments with respect to her background and current commitments outside PIC. Nancy? Thank you, John. I have been Chairman of PIC for the past six years, and respectfully ask you for your support. I have been a Non-Executive Director here in Australia for over fifteen years on an array of financial services and not-for-profit boards. My executive career was in financial services, capital markets, and insurance across the United States, Asia, and Australia. I continue to have the capacity, energy, and time to serve on your board. Currently, I am serving on two other boards and two not-for-profits. Thank you for your support today. Thank you, Nancy. There were no written questions regarding this resolution received in advance of the AGM. I will now invite shareholders in the room who would like to ask a question on this item of business to raise their hand. Doesn't appear there's any questions there. I'll now respond to the online questions. Sylvie, do we have any written questions received? No, there's no questions, John. Thanks, Sylvie. Do we have any participants on the phone wishing to ask questions? There are no phone questions at this time. Thank you. It appears that there are no further questions on this item of business. I note that the proxies received are displayed on the screen and also on the online platform. Not currently displayed on the screen. There they are. The proxies received for this resolution one are as follows: Well, if you missed it, for is 20,977,093. Against is 722,116, and abstain, 522,978. Thank you. Please cast your vote on the resolution then. Now, if you're in the room, please cast your vote now if you haven't already done so by selecting either for, against, or abstain for resolution one on your voting card or through the online platform. Thank you. Nancy, you may now resume chairing the meeting. Thank you, John. The second resolution on today's agenda is to consider the election of Michael Clarke as a director. Michael was appointed to the board on September 1, 2023, and being eligible, now stands for election. Michael is a member of PIC's Nomination and Corporate Governance Committee and the Audit and Risk Committee. Details of Michael's career are set out in the explanatory notes accompanying the notice of meeting. The board, with Michael abstaining, strongly supports Michael's election. I would now like to ask Michael Clarke to provide a few comments with respect to his background and current commitments outside of PIC. Thank you, Chair, for the introduction, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm delighted to stand before you today to seek election to the board of PIC, and standing before you as a fellow shareholder, and particularly to be elected as an independent non-executive director. By way of introduction, I've been fortunate to enjoy effectively two very different careers over the past 45 years that have been instrumental in shaping my views and beliefs about what are the essential elements of achieving success and sustaining success in both business and investment management. While I recently concluded a corporate career in funds management, I spent the first 10 years of my working life actually in the Royal Australian Navy as a weapons engineering officer. As such, my background and experience includes both finance and technology. Stating the obvious, life in the military is very different to our normal life, and but teaches many valuable lessons. Among the most important for me was that success and possibly survival depends not only on you, the individual, but just as importantly, on the team of people around you. A ship at sea is a close-knit, very small world and relies on every member of a crew knowing and carrying out their assigned duty while trusting their teammates to do the same. The key organizational ingredients required to achieve success are professional expertise in your job and commitment to shared beliefs and values. While this is a military perspective, what I've experienced in the business world is essentially very similar. It's the quality of the people around you that you trust and that you work with that are who are vital to delivering the required goals and sustaining strong performance in any organization. My second career in funds management is covered in my biography, as Nancy mentioned, which is attached, so I won't labor the details. Suffice to say, I was fortunate to start at Macquarie Bank back in 1988, and I was there until 1997. I concluded my fund management or, if you like, full-time working career at Challenger Limited, where I've been for the last 10 years, 2013 to this current year, 2023. During the intervening years, I spent time at Equiti Link, Goldman Sachs JBWere, AMP Capital, and Russell Investments. The focus on the first half of my fund management career was on managing money, primarily domestic bonds, equity, and foreign exchange. A highlight was leading the investment team at JB Were, that was awarded the Fund Manager of the Year in Australian Equities, both large and small capitalization in 2002. In the second half of my fund management career, I concentrated on launching and building fund management businesses, both domestically and overseas. I was fortunate to have specialist experience in establishing and managing listed investment companies like PIC, both in Australia but also in the United States and Canada. A highlight while at AMP Capital was developing and launching the China Growth Fund, a listed investment company like PIC, which provided Australian investors with unique access to the domestic Chinese investment equity market. While at first glance, again, this world looks very different to military life. Fascinating thing is that these same ingredients are necessary for achieving and sustaining success. You want people committed to shared values and beliefs, who respect and trust each other's ability, working collaboratively to achieve outstanding results. To this end, I'm very excited, you know, for the opportunity to work with Nancy and my fellow directors, Amanda, Virginia, and John, and the entire Perpetual team. Perpetual has been a leading investor in the domestic and global equity markets for decades now, earning an enviable track record of delivering strong investment returns for their clients. In summary, I believe that I bring a diverse background, including expertise in both funds management and technology, which will provide additional diversity of thought to the board of PIC. My intention is to pursue only one or two other similar Non-Executive Director roles, to ensure that I have the appropriate time to focus on this, on this opportunity or this role. I'm privileged and proud to be offered an opportunity to serve on this board and to serve the company and you as shareholders. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. There are no written questions regarding the resolution received in advance. I will now invite shareholders in the room who would like to ask a question on this item of business to raise their hand. I was waiting for somebody to ask Michael what ship he was on or something, huh? Fascinating. So I'll now respond to any online questions, if we have any. There aren't any, Nancy. No? And Link, do we have any participants on the phone wishing to ask a question? There are no phone questions at this time. Thank you. It appears there are no further questions on this item of business. I note that the proxies received are as displayed on the screen. To vote on the resolution, please cast your vote now, if you haven't already done so, by selecting either for, against, or abstain for resolution 2 on your voting card or through the online platform. I hope I've given you all enough time. Moving on to resolution 3. The next item of business is the advisory resolution to adopt the remuneration report. The remuneration report forms part of the directors' report and is included in the company's annual report for the financial year ended June 30, 2023. As you'll note, the remuneration report contains the remuneration paid to the directors, who are the only key management personnel of PIC. The company has no paid employees, and accordingly, the 2023 remuneration report is simple and brief. There were no written questions regarding this resolution received in advance of the AGM. I now invite shareholders in the room who'd like to ask a question to raise their hands. Doesn't look like there are any. Sylvie, do we have any written questions received during the meeting? There are no written questions online, Chairman. Thank you. Link, do we have any participants on the phone wishing to ask questions? There are no phone questions at this time. Okay, thank you. It appears there are no further questions on this item of business. I note that the proxies received are as displayed on the screen. To vote on the resolution, please cast your vote now, if you haven't already done so, by selecting either for, against or abstain for resolution three on your voting card or through the online platform. The next item of business is the increase in the non-executive director remuneration pool. Your board believes that the proposed fee increase is a prudent step to provide additional capacity to enable orderly succession of non-executive director retirements and appointments, including transitional periods where there may be an overlap between directors' terms. While an increase in the non-executive director remuneration pool is being sought, it does not necessarily imply that the full amount will be utilized. The non-executive director remuneration pool represents a maximum annual limit and does not necessarily indicate the total fees payable to non-executive directors will increase to that threshold each year going forward. This is the first time that the rem cap is being raised since the company was established in 2014. There were no written questions regarding the resolution received in advance of the AGM.... I will now invite shareholders in the room who'd like to ask a question, to raise their hands. Sylvie, do we have any questions online? No, Chairman, there's no questions. Link, do I have any questions on the phone? There are no phone questions at this time. Thank you. It appears there are no further questions on this item of business, and note that the proxies received are as displayed on the screen. I will now take questions received on any other business brought before the meeting. For fairness to all present, I ask that you limit your questions to two questions or comments at a time. Sylvie, please let me know if we have received any further questions. No, there's no questions, Chairman. I think I skipped the people in the room. I'm so sorry. Does anybody in the room have any further questions? No? Thank you. I now ask Link to advise if there are any, any further questions from shareholders on the phone. There are no phone questions at this time. Thank you. I now ask you to ensure that you complete your voting for each resolution. Link's staff will now come around and collect your voting cards to be placed in the ballot boxes. For the shareholders online, if you are uncertain about any of the voting procedures, please use the helpline number available through the platform. Voting on all polls will close five minutes after I close this meeting. The results of the poll will be announced via the ASX later this afternoon and will be made available on the AGM section of PIC's website. There being no other business, I declare this meeting closed, and thank you for your ongoing support and your attendance today. I invite those present with us in person to join us, the directors and members from management, for some refreshments, which will be served just outside the entrance to this room. Thank you very much.