Right. Good morning, fellow shareholders. It's just gone 10 o'clock here on the East Coast, so I think we should get going. Welcome to the Plato Income Maximiser Full-Year Results and Portfolio Update Webinar. My name is Chris Meyer. I'm with Pinnacle. I'm also a director of PL8. I'll be your host today. For those of you that don't know Pinnacle, we are a minority equity investor in the manager, Plato Investment Management. We also do the investor relations for PL8. Joining me today is Don Hamson. If you remember last time we did one of these in February, I think, Don was meeting shareholders up in the Gold Coast, but we're lucky enough to have Dr. Don back with us today, and so we look forward to his presentation. The format of today's presentation will be about 15 to 20 minutes of presentation and about 10 minutes of Q&A at the end. So if you do have questions, please feel free to type them into your Q&A box. The slides for today are available on screen. If you see there's a download link there, you can download them on screen. You can also go to the ASX under ticker PL8, and you'll find them there. We put them up on the exchange this morning. But obviously, if you are following with the visuals today, Don will be sharing his screen and will present the slides to you today. So that's really it in terms of housekeeping. Don, I think if you have your slides, maybe if you just quickly flick to the disclaimer slide, just so that the audience knows. We are not here to give personal financial advice. We don't know your personal situation, so please, this is general advice and information only. And I think, Don, there's an agenda slide, if you flick to that. Pretty much covered it, but, we'll run through the company, or you'll run through the company results, a market update and portfolio update, and then we'll go to Q&A. So with that, Don, let me hand over to you to take us away. Thanks very much. Thank you, Chris, and good morning, fellow shareholders. We'll start with the update, the formal update for financial year 2023, which finished on 30th of June. If we look at the financial results, I'll talk about PL8 rather than Plato Income Maximiser, because it's easier, but PL8 generated AUD 57.4 million worth of profits. That was a little less than last year, but we have seen sort of markets moving around quite a bit. The portfolio performance, it was 15.8%, which is very pleasing, although it was a touch behind benchmark. We actually had a strong calendar 2022, and then in the last six months of fiscal year 2023, so that's January to June, we actually saw a big bounce back in retracement in growth stocks, and particularly anything that's AI-associated. So many tech stocks, which often pay no dividends or very small dividends, rebounded strongly. I would say we've actually performed quite well, performing quite well this month in reporting season. For the last financial year, we paid a total of AUD 0.066 of dividends. That's 5.5 cents, 0.55 cents a share per month, fully franked, compared to ordinary dividends of AUD 0.06 paid in the previous financial year. So that was an uplift on the ordinary dividends. That equates to a gross yield, if you include the franking credits, of approximately 7.8% on PL8. The yield is a little lower than the underlying investments because PL8's actually trading a substantial premium to NTA, close to 20%. It's pleasing though, that in terms of performance since inception, we are even after fees and all costs, 0.1% above benchmark. So that's that is very, very pleasing, and we've certainly satisfied our other objective, which is paying out more income than the market, approximately 1.7% more income than the market, since inception, even though we didn't pay any dividends for the first sort of half a dozen months. We raised nearly AUD 86 million in a share purchase plan in December last year. That was very pleasing. We had more than 40% of shareholders participate, so it was very well supported, and I think that just highlights or you know why PL8 is trading at a premium, or the fact it's trading at a premium, highlights that there are still many more shareholders that would like to get more of PL8. They'd probably just like to get it cheaper than 20% above NTA. In terms of NTA performance for the year, there's a breakdown on this slide here. We started the year at AUD 0.00984. This is a pre-tax NTA. Net investment or portfolio performance, that's after fees, added AUD 0.12 a share. Other costs, so company expenses such as directors' fees and listing fees, took away AUD 0.1, and we paid out, as I mentioned, AUD 6.6 worth of dividends. There was a slight contribution from the fact that we did the SPP at a slight premium to the NTA, and that added AUD 0.3 to NTA, leaving an ending pre-tax NTA of AUD 1.04 at the 30th of June. So it's quite pleasing that we've seen a rebound in markets. I mentioned the performance before. Yeah, we're 0.8% behind when compared to an index that includes franking, that's the S&P/ASX 200 Tax-Exempt Index. All of that has come in the last six months of the year because we did outperform in calendar 2022 in both halves. We are ahead of benchmark since inception on an after-fee basis and we've generated, as I mentioned already, a higher yield than the market. So last year, 12 months' yield for the S&P 200 was a 4.5% cash yield and 1.6% franking credit yield. So you add that together, and the gross yield of the market last year was 6.1%. The gross yield of PL8 was 7.8% when you gross up for franking. So we had a higher income, distributed income than the market. And from a longer-term perspective, so this goes back right to the very start of the underlying investments of PL8, because PL8 does, in fact, invest into Plato Australian Shares Income Fund. That income fund was started in September 2011, so we're coming, approaching a 12-year track record on that, and this is the longer term total or cumulative performance of that underlying investments after fees is in blue, and the gray line would be the similar investment if you were invested into that tax-exempt or franking credit, which includes franking credits index over that same time period. Remembering, there are no fees in the index, but fees are taken out of the underlying fund. So, and, you know, here is the pattern of monthly dividends. Remember, one of the objectives of PL8 is to pay monthly fully franked dividends. And, s orry, someone's just gesticulating at me through the window. I should have a curtain on this screen, but this room. But here is the pattern of monthly dividends since we started paying dividends in October 2017. You can see that over the last 12 months, we've kept the dividend constant at AUD 0.055 or AUD 0.0055 a share after lifting it twice in the previous financial year. Directors feel that this is the appropriate level of dividends given the current outlook. But we certainly met our objective. It doesn't include the special dividends that we have paid. We've paid a couple of special dividends along the way, but we're just looking at the ordinary dividend pattern here. Last, this is PL8's share price compared to the underlying pre-tax NTA. You can see that for most of the period that PL8 has been in, you know, since inception, it has traded at a premium. There was a period of time, you know, five or so years ago, when there was some question marks over the franking credits refunds, where we traded at a small discount to NTA. But subsequent to that, we've traded at a premium. And even in the period of market dislocation in the pandemic in 2020, it seems a long time ago now, but we traded at around, basically the share price of PL8 traded down with the NTA. It didn't really trade at a discount for any particular length of time. But, subsequent to the bounce, we've often been around that 15% to 20% premium to NTA, which suggests that there's still significant ongoing demand for, a, a company like PL8 that pays, monthly regular income. I think pleasingly as well, when we listed, we had, a touch over AUD 300 million of assets. We've done some subsequent raises, SPPs, and placements, and, the asset base is now more than doubled, since we listed. And if you actually look at the market cap, because we're trading at a 20% premium, is a, well over AUD 750 million now. So, I think that's very pleasing because in the LIC land, big is better and, you know, the LICs that are larger have a tendency, not always the case, but a tendency to trade stronger given liquidity and other factors. That really comes to the end of my presentation. I f we go back to one of the foundations of why PL8's around, is that it was really designed largely in the underlying fund for retirees who want regular income, and it's no more regular than getting paid a monthly fully franked dividend. The other thing is that retirees, certainly if you're under that AUD 1.9 million pension phase cap or transition balance, then your earnings are tax-free, and you get a refund, a full refund of franking credits. And that is something I think that retirees certainly love those franking credits and those refunds. And that was one of the reasons drivers of the Plato Australian Shares Income Fund and indeed, PL8, was a vehicle for retirees who want regular income, although other investors who want regular income, I think also like that, particularly charities and foundations. And the reason is the tax rates are different. We've shown this chart before. If you are in that pension or tax-exempt phase, you don't pay tax, but you do get a refund of franking. So in this chart, we're looking at the after-tax value of AUD 1 of pre-tax income. So an investor who, you know, if you're either a pension fund or super fund in pension phase, or you are a charity or foundation or someone that doesn't pay income tax, your tax rate is zero. When you receive the franking credit refund, you're getting more than AUD 0.40 back for every AUD 1 of fully franked dividend that you receive. So it's the most tax-efficient form of income. It's actually still very good for super accumulation, although you do pay some tax on the franking credit, and indeed should, and this is an estimate from Plato, but should the government's proposal to tax super balances over AUD 3 million at 30% effectively. A fully franked dividend has a AUD 0.30 or 30% tax credit, so it'll still be worth AUD 1, and it will still be the most tax efficient form of income for superannuation funds. So that's just a bit of a feel, and we have written a paper on the potential impact of that, those potential tax changes or mooted tax changes, and they're on our website, if people wish to look at that. But that's one of the changes that's happened this year. In terms of the market itself and turning to that, clearly interest rates have been rising now for over 12 months. We've seen interest rates now move up to sort of 4% and bond yields as well, which means that if you're investing AUD 1 million, whether it's in term deposits or you're putting it into government bonds, you're getting approximately AUD 40,000 on AUD 1 million, compared to virtually nothing 18 months ago. So that's sort of I think for retirees and other people living off income, that sounds very good. It's better than what it was. However, inflation is still pretty strong, although we did see the monthly inflation numbers come below 5% for the first time yesterday. I still prefer to use the quarterly inflation numbers. They're much more accurate. We have a long-term history of those, and the June quarter inflation was still at 6%, but it does. It does. It is going down. It peaked at 7.8% in December 2022. But the problem is, if you're earning 4% on your term deposit, but prices and inflation, the cost of living is going up 6%, you're actually going backwards 2%. Or if you put AUD 1 million in the bank, really you're earning a negative real rate of return of minus two, of 2% negative, or you're going back about AUD 20 thousand. So yes, interest rates are rising, but they so far are not rising as fast as inflation. Hopefully, inflation will tick down further, but at the moment, you're actually locking in a negative real rate of return. Turning to, this is an update, really, the market outlook now, and this is very up-to-date. If we look at the results season, it hasn't quite finished. It's the last day of reporting today. We are on the last day of August. Dividends declared, which is our focus, so far, have been over AUD 29 billion. Now, that is a big number, but it's actually 21% less than last year, although we still have the rats and mice reporting today. You know, and that headline number of 21% decline is largely driven by two stocks. Two very big stocks in the market, BHP and Rio, cut their dividends significantly because iron ore prices and coal prices for BHP have gone down compared to last year. That's the main drivers for the, for the reductions of the market and the reasons why BHP and Rio have cut their dividends. There were cost increases as well, but really it was the commodity prices, and we expected those cuts for BHP and Rio and some of the other miners. But apart from that, actually, if you look at the graph on the right-hand side there, the average dividend increase, so was actually 24%. So whilst at a dollar, level, the, the dividends are down, if you look at company by company, most companies actually increased their dividends. Indeed, more than 57% of companies increased dividends, 13% had flat dividends compared to the same time last year, and only 29% of companies have so far cut their dividends. But as I said, a couple of those 29% of companies are very large companies, so they pull the dollar value down. Probably, I mean, the problem with an average, which weights each company the same, is a small company might increase, or even a medium-sized company like IAG, might increase its dividend by 80%. BHP cuts it by sort of 50%. The net, you know, that means that the number's positive. But the reality is, you know, BHP is a lot bigger than IAG. If we can sort of try and adjust that by looking at the median, and median was still up because with more than 57% of companies increasing dividends, the median rise was still 4%, which is pretty close, but a little bit less than the inflation rate, which is now down to 6%. So overall, you know, we actually thought it was not a bad reporting season, given there was so much negativity factored into the market going into the results. And some of the stronger areas were like the insurers, IAG, QBE, and Suncorp, and Medibank Private. They all increased their dividends, and we actually prefer, you know, a slightly overweight the insurers. CommBank had a fairly good result and increased its dividends by 14%. So you know, we actually think, given the expectations, it wasn't a bad reporting season, and if we dig down into a couple of these results, first, the bad news is, BHP, well, depending on whether you adjust for currency, 'cause it declares its dividends in U.S. dollars, was down over 50%, but that was really driven by commodity prices. You know, and so there was an expectation these things are very volatile. We still think, though, the outlook is not bad, and whilst there are a lot of concerns about China, India is growing strongly, and if you look out over the next 10 years, India, you know, will have a higher population than China and will be significantly increasing its demand for steel and iron ore. CommBank, as I mentioned, increased its dividend by 14%. Is an interesting result. Their profit was actually only up 6%, w hen I say only up 6%, it's now, their cash impact was more than AUD 10 billion, which is a very large number. They increased their, sorry, this should be final dividend, not interim. Their final dividend from AUD 2.10 last year to AUD 2.40, that's 14% increase compared to the increase in profits of 6%. And so one of the things that we expected from companies like CommBank was they were likely to increase their dividend payout ratios. The reason I say this is, November last year in the budget that Jim Chalmers brought down, he basically stopped off-market buybacks from happening. The Commonwealth Bank and Ampol and a few other companies have, indeed, BHP is one of them, have a history of, paying out or, or doing undertaking off-market buybacks to, to pay out excess franking credits to their shareholders. If off-market buybacks are no longer allowed, although it hasn't been passed by Parliament yet, but it's, it's been, been announced, we expect it to go through, then the only way that companies like Commonwealth Bank can, pay franking credits out to investors is to pay more dividends, whether they be ordinary dividends, and CommBank did increase its ordinary dividends, and it has increased them by more than its increase in profit. So it's actually paying out a higher proportion of its earnings as dividends, and I think it's doing that because that is the only way it can release those franking credits to shareholders. That was, we expected this when they announced those changes. We also expected that some companies would pay special dividends, and earlier this year, we saw Ampol pay one of those. So, that was actually a pretty good result. There's a lot of doom and gloom around. Their net interest margin was fairly stable. Their bad debts are still very low. Most people in Australia still have jobs. If you've got a job, you pay your mortgage. You know, so we're still relatively bullish that we're not gonna go into a recession, and if you don't have a recession and you don't lose your jobs, you'll pay your mortgages, so bad debts will remain low. The final number I think is quite important. CommBank funds 75% of its funding from its term deposits and general deposits, so it is largely self-funding, doesn't have a lot of call on the market to finance its lending. JB Hi-Fi was certainly moved it as one of potentially the poorer results. Yes, the numbers were down and its dividends were down compared to last year. But the results were actually better than expected. The market thought they'd be worse. Their margins have fallen. If you look, their sales are up 4% over the year, but that was less than inflation, so their actual volume of sales is sort of slowing. Their EPS was up only 0.1%, so, you know, their margins are contracting. But if you look at it from a longer term perspective, and I know it's sort of four years, but JB Hi-Fi, its profit this year compared to its pre-COVID profit is up 120%. So it's done really, really well over the last three or four years. Yes, we are having a slowing in sales, but they're not slowing as much, in fact, as much as the market thought. And yes, it did cut its dividend, but it's still trading on a yield of nearly 10%, 9.6% gross yield, and only a 65% payout ratio. So we still like that stock, particularly for, to grab those dividends, because that's a pretty chunky yield. And lastly, I've probably said enough, but just from an outlook point of view, part of our process is to estimate likelihood of dividend traps and certainly avoid stocks where there are massive cuts in dividends, or they might cut the dividends completely and pay nothing. So we have a bottom-up model that forecasts the likelihood that individual companies will cut their dividends. We can then aggregate. This comes out as a percentage, and if you think about the likelihood of cutting your dividends or the probability that a company will cut its dividends, a high probability is bad and a low probability is good. If you look at this chart, this is a chart not of individual stocks, but of all the stocks aggregated up. So it's a market-level chart of the likelihood of dividend cuts. There were very big cuts in 2020, and our model very quickly picked up the fact that there would be big cuts in dividends in the pandemic year of 2020. In this slide, you can see that at market-wide level, hit an all-time peak of over 45% on our model in 2020. It very rapidly fell. But what's happened in the last 18 months, as we've seen interest rate rises come through, as inflationary expectations have come through, and we are seeing a slowdown in the economy, you've just seen that probability of dividend cuts ticking up from a below average level to a slightly higher than average level. But what I would say, it's only a slightly higher average than level. So yes, there's increased uncertainty, but it's not doom, it's not slit your wrists and, you know, go to cash and, and what have you. It's not a GFC-type number, which is 40%. It's not a pandemic number, which is over 45%. It's actually, on our numbers, ticked up just a bit above 25%. So things have deteriorated over the last 12 to 18 months, but they're still just a little bit worse than normal, which is, you know, not a bad outcome when you compare to. If you turn the television on, it's all doom and gloom, interest rates, and can't afford to pay your mortgage, can't afford to pay your rent, can't afford to put food on the table. The reality is, at the company level, Australia's doing reasonably well, and we're still seeing some pretty good dividends out of the market. And that's pretty much my summary. Interest rates are rising. They are, to some extent, challenging valuations. Safe assets are still generating negative real returns, but we still, dividends are still pretty strong at the market level, ex sort of resource stocks, where commodity prices, you know, can go down, but they can also bounce back up. Generally speaking, most balance sheets are strong, but we still think it is a bit more uncertain, that it's critical, you know, to have a manager that's looking to avoid the bumps and on the horizon. But I've probably said enough, so I might hand back to Chris, and see if there's any questions that shareholders might want to ask. Good. Thanks, Don, and well done for that. And I see you've got the tech all sorted there. You've unshared your screen, so thanks for that. Don, we do have a few questions coming in, so I'll get to those. But just a reminder for everyone on the line, if you do have something on your mind, please feel free to put it in the chat, and we'll get to it. So in chronological order of how the questions came in, Don, the first one from John is, and I'll take it if you don't wanna take it, is: "Is a share purchase plan being considered for this year? Yeah, happy for you to take, Chris. Yeah. Look, I mean, I think we're a listed company, PL8, so obviously once we know, if we know anything like that is likely to happen, we would inform the market. I think in general, what we would say as a board of PL8 is that we're aware that a lot of shareholders would like to get set in PL8, to invest more in PL8, but are to some extent put off by the premium it trades relative to its NTA. And would like to invest more at a price that's closer to NTA. So that's one consideration, obviously, and it's an important consideration, and I'm sure that's the genesis of the question. We're also mindful of the fact that, as Don said, growing a company, even though this is not an operating company, you know, growing a company and having larger market cap, larger liquidity, is also good for shareholders. But it's a balance between that and, you know, making sure that to some extent, PL8 remains a fairly unique investment vehicle. It's not a limitless capacity that Don has in his strategy. And, you know, we wanna make sure that we don't put the company at risk in terms of trading at a discount to its NTA. So it's sort of that supply and demand balance that the board is always considering. So it's a fairly long-winded way of saying it's always a consideration. Capital management is always a consideration of the board. Dividends, raising new capital, all those kind of considerations. And so, you should take comfort, with the fact that the board, pretty much at every board meeting, has a conversation about, things like, share purchase plans. Right, hopefully that answers your question. There's a second one here from Gaetano, which is: "What is your consideration in regards to a DRP?" Don, do you wanna handle that? Yeah, look, I'm happy to take that one because we did some work on this a number of years ago. Because, you know, PL8 is pretty unusual because it does pay a monthly dividend, and so in terms compared to a company that might pay semi-annual dividends, which is more the norm, the monthly dividend is quite small. And when you look at it, doing a DRP has some costs, and there are costs in terms of administration, and there are also costs in terms of the ASX; every time you issue new shares, it wants to charge you for that. So when we looked at the costs of implementing a DRP, it just didn't stack up from shareholders or from the company's perspective to do that. So, you know, I think maybe that's something that the directors will take into account when, you know, if and when we decide to do an SPP, that you can't have a DRP, so maybe that's another way of doing it. But it just isn't cost efficient to really do a DRP when you have monthly dividends. That's right. I think it's fair to say, Don, that most shareholders, at least we haven't done a specific survey on this, but certainly the feedback we get is that shareholders quite like the cash and mostly want the cash. So I guess we've always also felt that a DRP wouldn't have a high participation rate, given the desire for cash. Yeah, because the target audience is really retirees who want that regular income. Yeah. Don, maybe this is another one for you. I'm happy to add to it if you would like. But Nathan asks, at the end of June, he's obviously been through our financials. You've got AUD 93 million of profit reserve, which is 26 months worth of dividend cover, and you've also got about nine months worth of franking cover. How many months' coverage do you consider appropriate to whether a global financial problem will sustain the current dividend? Yeah. So I think, first, the appropriate one to look at is probably the franking account, because we want to fully frank the dividend, so it's nine months rather than the 26 months. Look, I don't think there's any hard and fast. We don't have, like, a fixed number in the mind of directors as how much we need, but we monitor this every, yeah, every time we announce dividends, et cetera, that is a key factor that we look at. But look, we are clear that, you know, that we are in a slightly deteriorating environment. You know, I would think at the moment, the probability is vastly in the side that we're not- we're going to avoid a recession, but who knows what may happen? So, you know, directors wanna, wanna, certainly wanna, I think, err on the side of being conservative and, and would prefer not to have to cut dividends. I'm not-- you know, I don't know whether you can add any more, Chris, to that, but... Yeah, I think, maybe one slight correction, Nathan, in that, I'm just looking at the accounts now. We did disclose that we had an equivalent of AUD 0.063 of dividends we could pay that would be fully franked, based on the current franking balance. And given we're paying out, you know, AUD 0.0055 a month, that's about AUD 0.065 a year, it's actually more like 12 months worth of dividend cover with the current franking balance. And Don, from memory, that's more or less what we've had almost through the life of the company. So it's sort of held itself at that level, more or less, since I can remember. So you think about franking coming in and franking going out through dividends we're paying, it's more or less staying at that kind of consistent 12-month cover kind of level. Yeah, well, it’s certainly been consistent since you’ve come on board as a director, Chris, but obviously in the initial days, we started with none and built up that balance. And then, you know, when companies paid out a lot of special dividends and buybacks, we built that up to that sort of nine to 12 months type mark. And, you know, I think directors are pretty comfortable having that bit of kitty there, but because we would like to retain the dividends and yeah, things are a little more uncertain, but not too uncertain. You know, I think feedback we have from investors is they like to have a stable dividend, and they don't really want to have it cut again, but we have a history, you know, we did it once, but we'd prefer not to have to cut dividends in the future. Yeah, and certainly, as you said, Don, there's nothing you're seeing that would suggest that's a risk at the moment. No. Okay, I think that's all we have from shareholders in terms of questions, unless anyone's got any last-minute questions. We did say we would try and get you out of here in half an hour. So, we're pretty much on that half hour. So if there are no more questions, Don, I'll just thank you for your time and obviously Plato, for doing such a good job in managing the portfolio. And shareholders, thank you for your time and attention on today's call and for your continued support. There will be a replay of this in your inboxes, probably by the end of the day. And as I said, if you do want the slides from today, probably your best bet is either to wait for that replay or just go onto the ASX and you'll find the slides there. Thank you. Thank you very much.