Good morning, and thank you for joining us for today's investor briefing. Before we start, I'd like to introduce the team members from VGI Partners who will be part of this webinar. Firstly, we have Jon Howie, who joined us as CEO of VGI Partners in mid-April of this year. From our investment team, we have Thomas Davies and Marco Anselmi, who are both partners and senior analysts at VGI Partners. The purpose of today is to run through some key points from our recent full year 2021 results for both VGI Partners Global Investments, ASX ticker VG1, and VGI Partners Asian Investments, ASX ticker VG8. We'll provide an update on the two portfolios, and at the end of this presentation, we're going to open up to your questions, and we're going to do our best to answer as many questions as possible during the time allocated. If we do not get through your questions, our investor relations team will get back to you. Now, turning to slide two. The full year 2021 summary for VG1 and VG8 is as follows. VGI Partners Global Investments had a full year 2021 profit of AUD 153.9 million. The portfolio return, net of fees and pre-tax, was 25.6%, and this helped underpin a total shareholder return for the period of 36.3%, as the discount narrowed over the period. Now, in terms of dividend, the board has announced a 4% fully franked dividend yield target. A fully franked final dividend of AUD 0.055 has been announced by the board. The DRP election is due on the 31st or the 30th of August, my apologies, and the payment is due for this dividend on the 29th of September. In terms of VGI Partners Asian Investments, VGI Partners Asian Investments had a full year net profit after tax of AUD 58.8 million, a portfolio return net of fees and pre-tax of 15%, and this helped underpin a shareholder return for the period of 27.6% as the discount narrowed over the period. Again, in terms of dividends, the board of VG8 has announced a dividend yield target of 4% fully franked, and the board announced an inaugural final dividend of AUD 0.055 yesterday. 1st of September is when the DRP election is due, and the 29th of September is the payment date for that dividend. Handing over to Jon for slide three. Thanks, Rob. On slide three, what I'd like to do briefly is to go through and review some of the initiatives that we've been undertaking over the last six months or so to ensure that the shareholder experience in both VG1 and VG8 is as positive as possible. Just reiterating, as you will have seen on the previous slide, the total shareholder return for both VG1 and VG8 exceeded the portfolio return during the period, indicating that the share price over that period tracked closer to NTA, which we're very pleased about. To cover off on some of the specific initiatives and to again repeat the information that Rob provided on the previous slide, both VG1 and VG8, as has been previously announced, the boards of those companies have intended to target a dividend yield of 4%. As Rob mentioned, both of those entities have declared final dividends of AUD 0.055 fully franked. Our client investor reception to those dividend yields has been extremely strong. We are very positive that increased and improved yield on both VG1 and VG8 will continue to drive investor interest into both of the vehicles. In terms of our enhanced advisor relations and shareholder communication, again, we have announced a number of hires within the team. Both myself and senior members of the distribution team have been added to VGI over the last six months in order to accelerate our engagement with clients and their financial advisors. We've also increased our focus on working with investors who have interest in building larger stakes in both VG1 and VG8, noting particularly that the VGI Partners Master Fund is not currently open to new client monies. Therefore, clients looking to gain exposure to VGI strategies, the LICs are the primary option for those clients interested in generating exposure to these investment pools. In order to increase our client engagement, particularly on the portfolios, we have updated our monthly NTA statements. Those NTA statements now provide details of the top 10 long positions, representing about 71% of the net asset value for VG1 and about 67% of the net asset value for VG8. We've continued to improve and enhance the commentary we provide around those portfolios as well. We've been running a number of updates, particularly quarterly portfolio updates and webcasts, engaged with the senior investment team. The final point on this slide is around capital management. As many investors will be aware, a buyback was announced for VG1 in August 2020, and over the 12 months to August 2021, over 26 million shares or around 6.4% of the VG1 capital has been bought back. The VG1 board announced that that buyback has been extended for a further 12 months. Also just worth reiterating here, the board's intention to use that buyback more aggressively as the discount from time to time expands and to reduce their use of the buyback where we find a discount or the board sees a discount coming in to close to net tangible assets per share. With that very brief overview of the initiatives that we've been undertaking, I'll now hand back to Rob and the investment team to go through the portfolios. All right. Thanks, Jon. Moving on to slide five and just on our philosophy, I'll recap the key points. We're absolute return investors, and we're targeting a 10%-15% return through the cycle. We take a long-term view, and we believe that gives us a competitive advantage versus peers. We're focused on avoiding permanent loss of capital. We want to back our winners, and we do that through a concentrated portfolio. We've optimized the size of our fund to a relatively modest level on a global basis, and we believe that gives us a substantial edge to invest in medium to smaller-sized companies that are off the radar of our peers. The final point is, we're fully aligned with our investors for our investments in VG1 and VG8. Moving to slide six. This chart shows a summary of the long-term return of the VGI Partners Master Fund, which is the same as VG1, since its inception. You can see the compound return is 13.8%, which is well within our target of 10%-15% through the cycle. In terms of slide seven, gives everybody a snapshot of our process, in particular, how we go about long investments. What we are looking for are multi-year compounders. We start off by looking for secular growth. We're looking for a moat in a business and, typically, a moat that is going to stay stable or hopefully grow wider and deeper. We're also looking for high-quality management, who can help grow and evolve the business over time. A key part of our investment process involves a series of checklists and most importantly, red teaming, which is trying to disprove the idea and constantly disprove the idea. In terms of portfolio construction, we have a concentrated portfolio. We tend to concentrate the vast majority of our capital in our top 5-10 ideas, which you can see from both VG1 and VG8. We also selectively short single stocks in order to generate excess return, but also to hedge the portfolio. We also hold cash, sometimes varying levels, in order to provide optionality in terms of new ideas and market volatility. We also tend to limit the use of leverage in our portfolio, and traditionally, our gross exposures have been very light. Moving to slide eight. Which gives you a sense of how we go about both our long and short stock selection. Long stock selection involves overlay filters that are both quantitative and qualitative. Ultimately, what we're getting from these screens and filters is a short list of companies that we tend to focus on both the global side and then the Asian side. The short side tends to focus more on three buckets: frauds, fads, and failures. What we tend to use is specifically substantial proprietary screening methods, which involve red flags, various criteria. There are hundreds of them, but key examples would be accounting restatements, senior staff departures, et cetera. That then translates into a specific basket of single stocks. Now I'm going to move on to the global fund, VG1. Slide 10 gives you a snapshot of the portfolio update. As at July 31, the net exposure was at 89%. The portfolio remains fully hedged to the Australian dollar. The number of short positions, long positions is listed there, the top 10 long investments represent 71% of the portfolio. The long portfolio by exchange listing is listed in that diagram, you can see that there's a skew to the U.S. by listing. Now moving to slide 11. The top 10 investments are listed as follows. Our largest investment remains Amazon, followed by Mastercard. Pinterest has dropped down due to share price performance over the month of July, particularly post its result, we will talk about Pinterest in an upcoming slide. In terms of any major movements in the portfolio, we've added Qualtrics as a meaningful investment, which we've talked about in previous monthly updates, we also have a new position, which we are not disclosing at the moment, but will do so in due course. Now, I'm going to hand over to Tom to take everybody through our investment with Pinterest. Thanks, Rob. By way of background, we initially purchased Pinterest in the low 20s. We added at around $30 this time last year, and the position has since grown primarily through performance. As you can see from the chart, there's been some volatility since January, mainly as short-term investors and speculators bet on quarterly results and trends, but we continue to be long-term holders of the stock. The most recent decline was driven by the results of the end of July, which was impacted by a partial unwind of the usage spike we saw through COVID, which wasn't expected, but the size was larger than we forecast and than the market forecast. The detail behind this is that core users who use the app, not the web browser, generate the vast majority of revenue for the platform, and these users actually continue to grow. It's the casual user that stopped using the platform as they've emerged from lockdown. This gives us confidence that there's not a larger problem here, just some temporary volatility as lockdowns end in the northern hemisphere. Monetization in the quarter was actually well ahead of our expectations and market expectations. ARPU increased 90%, and they continue to attract more advertisers to the platform. We believe the market is pretty myopically focused on short-term usage, which we think misses the forest for the trees. We've taken advantage of this volatility over the past six months to selectively add to our position. Moving to slide 13, we think it's important at this stage to take a step back and reiterate why we own Pinterest and why it's one of our largest positions. The Pinterest platform is highly differentiated and is unique. It is an online research and discovery platform that has both elements of search and also the network effects of social media. Users on the platform are there for a purpose, and they're highly engaged. Other industry players have realized the attractiveness of the platform and have tried to launch competitors. Google have launched Keen and Tangi, Amazon have launched Spark and Collections, and Facebook have launched Hobbi. None of these have got any traction, and so we believe Pinterest has a wide and deep moat, which has been tested and is proven. The other point to note here is that users have very high purchase intent. You can see this in the chart on the top right of this slide. 55% of Pinterest users use the platform to find or shop products. This is far ahead of other platforms and means you have a primed user that isn't just there to kill time, as can be the case with other social media platforms. They're also undecided. They come to Pinterest usually at the early stage of a purchase decision. This gives the advertisers a chance to reach the users before they've made up their mind on the final product or brand that they want to buy. The high intent and undecided user makes Pinterest a very attractive place for advertisers to advertise. Sorry, for brands to advertise. Pinterest is also a safe space on the internet with no violent, offensive, or controversial content. This is increasingly important for advertisers who don't want to see their ads next to abusive content, and it also significantly minimizes the regulatory risks associated with social media at the moment. They've been continuing to innovate, and they're getting more traction with their in-app and shopping features and have also launched a creator platform to increase the amount of engaging and differentiated content. This is why we like the business and platform. Let's move to slide 14, and we can discuss what this means financially. The revenue growth is driven by increasing monetization, which means attracting more advertisers and getting them to allocate larger portions of their budget to Pinterest. The first key driver to do this was building out an ad tech stack, which they've been doing for the past three years, and now automated bidding makes up 75% of revenue. This is mostly complete, but there are still improvements to be made, and they're still steadily closing the gap to their competitors. The second aspect is building out a sales force to educate potential advertisers. This is still in the early stages. It started with large enterprises in the U.S. and are steadily moving down market to mid-market firms and SMBs. These initiatives have driven the revenue growth over the past five years, and revenue has increased five times since 2016. We think they're still in the very early stages of this, with less than 0.5% penetration of the addressable advertising market. They've got huge headroom for growth, and we believe this will allow them to compound for many years. A large part of the revenue upside will come from international expansion. They've developed a roadmap to building a presence in new markets and are now accelerating the international rollout using this roadmap. They're steadily building in the EU, where we estimate they're around three years behind where they are in the U.S. They've opened an office in Mexico and Brazil very recently, just in 2Q, and they're on the verge of monetizing those new markets. This rollout requires no incremental investment in technology or the platform. It's just monetizing what already exists, so it is highly accretive to earnings. In terms of valuation, we think it's very important to note that Pinterest has reached an inflection point in its business. After years of operating at breakeven, they can no longer invest as fast as revenue is growing, and therefore, free cash flow is expanding rapidly. This is a true inflection point in the business and something we think the market has overlooked. Pinterest is free cash flow and earnings back. The valuation is not based on a revenue multiple as many investors may assume. You can see that in the bottom right chart on this slide. Finally, we also see areas of upside optionality from changing the revenue model. This can happen either in the shopping part of the business, where we think there's a potential to charge a fee as a percentage of all transactions, or this could also take part in the creator part of the business where we think there's an opportunity to add a paywall. We don't factor these into our estimates, but they do provide areas of potential future upside. Look, I think that's probably enough on Pinterest. Rob, I'm going to hand back to you to continue going through the deck. Okay, Tom. That's excellent. Thank you. Now moving to page 16, which is the VG8 portfolio update, and this is as at the 31st of July. You can see our long and short exposures there. Gives us a net of 91%. We remain fully hedged to the Australian dollar. Our long and short exposures are there, in terms of number of investments. A slightly longer skew in the Asian fund due to portfolio limit restrictions. You can see our top 10 long investments come 67% NAV. In terms of the portfolio exposures here, we've broken it down by revenue. We just think that that is a better way to give you a feel of the underlying portfolio. You can see there's a substantial skew there to Japan and we've had an increasing exposure to China over the last few months as we've seen some single stock opportunities arise. I'll talk about that in the next slide. All right. Moving to slide 17 for the VG8 portfolio as at the 31st of July. You can see from there the largest holding is Richemont. We've spoken to you about Richemont before. It is the world's leading player in super luxury jewelry. It owns the Cartier and Van Cleef super luxury jewelry brands. Recently had an excellent set of results since a very good share price performance, and it has grown into a much bigger weight as a consequence. Olympus, number two weight. We've talked about that. Olympus is the world's leader in gastrointestinal endoscopes. It had a recent set of results that was very impressive. Actually upgraded its medium-term guidance. We're very excited about the long-term growth prospects of that business. In terms of other recent positions, something where we've built a position and lately it's come under pressure. Alibaba is a business that we sold out of last year due to regulatory concerns. In April and May, we started to re-initiate a position and built a position in Alibaba based on our fundamental analysis. At the prices that we built the position in the low AUD 200 range, we believed that the situation was extremely attractively priced. The Ant Financial business was being valued at zero. Its cloud business was being valued at zero. In effect, you have to assume a pretty dismal longer term situation for the Alibaba business. The recent developments in July are obviously having an impact on all China securities, particularly China tech. We believe it has created a set of capitulation in these securities, and the valuation on Alibaba, we believe, is extremely attractive at these levels. We are watching the situation very closely, but we are at this stage very happy with our Alibaba investment. Another position that has seen some volatility has been Crown. Crown's an investment that we made last year in the low to mid AUD 8 range. We did sell a chunk of the holding after some of the corporate activity in the AUD 12 range, then we sold some more and switched into growing our position in Star, which we have held since the COVID sell-off. In terms of Crown, we see substantial fundamental value, but we also see meaningful strategic value. Yakult's another large position that we have had now. We've spoken about it previously, Marco will talk about it soon. In Yakult, we see a very high-quality global brand, global distribution, and a niche in the probiotic market. Most importantly, what we see in Yakult is scope for corporate reform which Marco will touch on, and also scope for corporate activity which we're seeing growing in the Japanese market. On that note, I'll hand over to Marco for slide 18, who will take you through Yakult. Thanks, Marco. Thanks, Rob. Great. Yakult is actually a position in both our Asian and global portfolios. Altogether, we own around 1% of the company. We like Yakult firstly because it is a globally recognized brand. I'm sure many on this call will recognize the brand. It is a leader in the category of probiotic beverages, which is a category that has seen and we expect will continue to see secular growth due to demand for health and wellness products. Yakult is primarily an international business with over 60% of earnings outside of Japan as a result of steady international expansion over the last couple of decades. We actually think the company is still at the early stages of monetizing this international opportunity, and I'll touch on this on the next slide. What we also like about Yakult is its unique distribution system. On top of being sold in retail stores like supermarkets and convenience stores, as well as online, Yakult has a network of essentially delivery employees, which the company calls Yakult Ladies, which essentially go door-knocking selling Yakult Ladies, and which provides a pretty sticky and recurring distribution channel, which is quite unique. Those are some of the key attributes that we like about Yakult and about the business. Here, the key is the moat of the business here is really the brand equity that it has built over decades, really. What is the opportunity for Yakult? Maybe if we just move on to the next slide 19. We essentially believe Yakult has been run like a sleepy Japanese business, and the company has been significantly under-earning. Firstly, we see a big opportunity to increase penetration internationally. Certain developing markets like Indonesia and Vietnam, they're growing quite rapidly. There are a number of developed markets that still have significantly lower penetration than Asian markets. We think that is the result of management not embracing things like digital marketing and also being too slow to expand distribution. For instance, Yakult has only just recently achieved full distribution across the U.S. despite entering that market back in 2007. They've been very slow moving. More importantly, we see a big opportunity to introduce premiumization in international markets. In the domestic Japanese market over the last few years, Yakult has introduced new higher priced products. You can see this on the chart here to the right. These new higher priced products have driven a significant margin uplift in the domestic business. It's a playbook we've seen across a number of other consumer product businesses. What we think Yakult should be doing is accelerating the premiumization in markets such as China, where there is a fairly high propensity to consume more premium products. Over the last six months, VGI has been actively engaging with Yakult management behind the scenes to flag and accelerate some of these changes. In particular, we have been proposing to the company to implement a more robust digital marketing strategy. Secondly, to accelerate premiumization internationally. Thirdly, to engage in more shareholder-friendly capital allocation, both in terms of CapEx as well as shareholder returns. Whether that be dividends or buybacks. Since our engagement, management has been quite responsive and we have positive engagement with the new CEO, who only recently came on board. I think we're seeing some early green shoots, which is encouraging. Early green shoots that management is taking some of our feedback on board, judging from, for instance, Yakult's marketing activities on Instagram. We still think we're still at quite early stages and we see pretty significant upside for Yakult, particularly if they do implement some of our proposals that will allow the company to both accelerate revenue growth, but also drive meaningful margin uplift, neither of which we think are really appreciated by the market. I guess we think Yakult can really leverage its brand equity internationally over the coming years and be a great example of the positive structural changes that are happening to corporates in Japan that Rob alluded to earlier on the call. I might now hand over to Jon for some comments on shareholder engagement. Thanks, Marco. Just to really quickly finish up the comments before we move on to questions. We'll move straight over to slide 21. I guess the first thing we wanted to say is, obviously, we are working very hard to continue to evolve and improve the work that we do on shareholder engagement. For all shareholders and investors who are keen to stay up to date with what's happening at VGI, and particularly in the portfolios, then we would ask you to elect to receive electronic communications. That will ensure that you stay up to date with the quarterly portfolio briefings that we're doing, that you are receiving the monthly NTA statements and the commentary contained within those NTA statements. Also, importantly, our investor letters, which are published twice a year. If you haven't had a chance to review the most recent investor letter, I would encourage you to go to our website, where you will find that able to be downloaded. COVID permitting, we will have an annual roadshow in October. Whether that's in person or virtual remains to be seen. I'm sure many of us on the call would hope, as I do, that we can do that face-to-face, but at this stage it's likely that that will be a virtual roadshow. Then we have the AGM coming up in November. For any individual who would like to talk to us or to provide feedback or to receive additional communications, please feel free to reach out to Ingrid in our investor relations team. You'll see the details on slide 21. For financial advisors, first of all, I wanted to bring your attention to the research, the independent research, which is available on VG1 and VG8, both from Zenith and IIR. Please feel free to contact Matt Newham, who leads distribution for financial advisors. Again, Matt's details are available on the slide. Now that we've completed the formal remarks of the presentation, it's time to move on to questions. I'd like to hand it back to Tom Davies, who will be moderating the questions for the session. As a reminder, if you'd like to submit a question, please type it into the Ask a question box on the website. Tom, over to you. Thanks, Jon. We've got a lot of questions coming through on the webcast. We're unlikely to have time to cover all of these today, but we'll do our best. If we don't cover your question, our investor relations team will aim to follow up with you if we have your details, or please feel free to contact our investor relations team directly. The first question, we've got a couple on this topic. Share buybacks and marketing are not working, so how do you intend to remove the share price discount to NTA? Jon, I think that's probably one for you. Thanks, Tom. Look, it's a good question, but I think there's a few things to highlight before we go into more detail on some of the initiatives that we are working on to bring the share price as close to NTA as possible. The first one is, I think, to reiterate some of the numbers that Rob went through in his comments very early on in the presentation. Particularly what you've seen over the course of the 12 months to 30 June is, for VG1, for example, the NTA performance was 25.6% positive return, but the share price performance was 36.3% positive return, therefore indicating that there was a significant compression in the discount to NTA. RG8 had a similar experience, where the NTA performance was 15% over the course of that 12-month period, but the share price performance was 27.6% positive return over the same period. Again, I think it's important to highlight and to reiterate that the share price performance has been significantly better over the 12 months to 30 June than the NTA performance, which obviously is a positive reflection of the direction of travel of the discount in both of those securities. It's not to say that we are satisfied where the discounts are, but we are at least encouraged that the discounts are heading in the right direction. What more are we doing? Well, again, to reiterate some of the plans that are already in place, and again, to say that this is still relatively early days, I think we've acknowledged in the past that VGI has some work to do to continue to build out its ability to engage effectively with shareholders, and we are very committed to doing that. Again, you have seen and you will expect to see improved portfolio commentary and content that we provide to investors and shareholders. Hopefully, all of you have seen the changes and the improvements that we've made in the monthly NTA statements and the materials that we have begun publishing to help investors understand what's going on in the portfolios and where they might use VG1 and RG8 in their investment strategies. We're improving our internal systems to help us manage client relationships better, and we've upgraded our client relationship management software recently to make sure that we have the ability to track and engage with investors and clients as well as possible. We've significantly increased our direct client engagement. I personally have spoken to dozens and dozens of investors in the four months since I've been on board, I've very much enjoyed those conversations, and it's been a very valuable source of feedback. We've used that feedback in our planning and the initiatives that we'll continue to roll out over the course of the next six months and into next year. I would say ultimately, I think to answer that question again, in short, is that we actually do believe that the initiatives that we've undertaken, including share buybacks, including the boards approving increased dividend yield targets, and the client engagement that we've been engaging in has been working. Again, we do acknowledge that there is more to do, but we are encouraged by the direction of travel, and we remain committed to the course. Thanks, Jon. The next question we've got here is, you have been adding more technology stocks in the past year, like Pinterest and Qualtrics. Is that a good idea given where valuations are in the tech sector? Okay. All right. Thanks, Tom. I'll take it, and then I might hand back to you, to have a chat on Pinterest and Qualtrics and perhaps even Marco as well. If we go back to slide seven, I think is maybe the best way to do it and have a look at portfolio construction. Let's get back to first principles in terms of what we're looking for. We're looking for multi-year compounders, and we're looking for the best businesses we can find that give us global growth and secular growth. We had very awkward conversations with people, seven, eight years ago when we bought Amazon. It was loss-making. It was profitless prosperity. It was this business that was never going to make money. If you cast your mind back to more than 30 years ago or so, there was a business that was losing money constantly because it was building out a network of infrastructure, of planes, of trucks, and it was never going to make money, and it was profitless prosperity. That company was called FedEx. The difference is, as you move from a tangible analog world into a digital world, these businesses are doing the same thing as what FedEx was doing. Amazon was the new FedEx. It was replicating its model, but it was growing in plain sight. Instead of having CapEx, it was having OpEx. What we need to do as investors is evolve our investment process because we can't keep owning Coca-Cola like we did 13 years ago or keep hanging on to Colgate-Palmolive. They're these businesses that are wonderful businesses, but they lack the ability to take capital and reinvest it and get high incremental returns. That is what these businesses can do. That is what Amazon can do. That is what the Pinterests of the world can do or the Qualtrics of the world can do. They are reinvesting in the OpEx statement to grow and expand their moat in industries that have secular growth. In terms of Pinterest, in social media and in a niche in social media that as Tom highlighted, the biggest tech companies in the planet have tried to penetrate and have failed. Facebook has failed. Google has failed. They've failed in visual search. The only group that dominates in the planet is Pinterest. As Tom highlighted, the valuations, if you look at the free cash flow yields, are attractive. In the case of even Pinterest, if you look at Pinterest now, assuming that it paid out all its free cash flow as a dividend, let's say it was 100% payout ratio as a dividend. Today, this year for 2021, you'd get nearly 2.5% dividend yield. Next year, it's a 3.5% dividend yield. That's for a business growing its revenues at 50% and earnings at 70%. That's an extraordinary situation. Instead of paying out, they're reinvesting the business. They're growing their global network, setting up sales and distribution teams across the planet, including Australia. They didn't used to have anyone in Australia or in South America or elsewhere. This is a business that has a very long runway of growth. Fortunately, a lot of investors have ignored its capabilities and potential and taking a very short-term look at it. The edge that we have as long-term investors is we can take a three to five-year view or longer. We've now owned Amazon for just under a decade. We've owned it for a very long time. It has gone up more than tenfold for us. It's been volatile. It's been down 15%-20% in periods, just like what Pinterest is. We'll have some volatility in our results, but over time, it's going to deliver us an extraordinary long-term compound return in our view. That is based on our analysis. Qualtrics is an example of a business that has very high prima facie metrics if you look at the historical numbers. We don't look at history. We look at the future and where the forecasts are going to. The business is at a tipping point. It is the global leader in experience management software. It has basically no competition. Its competitor just got bought by a private equity group. It is the dominant player globally in experience management software. Experience management software is where customer relationship management software was 15 years ago, which is in the wilderness and not well understood or taken up. We believe Qualtrics is a business that is at the very early stages of a multi-year growth profile. It's one of the businesses that we actually are in, one of the larger shareholders in, because it has a low free float. The largest shareholder is SAP. Qualtrics, we discovered because we're an SAP shareholder, we've been able to build a stake because we have modest funds under management, and that has allowed us to build a meaningful position in the portfolio, given our ability to have flexibility in our capital base. When we look at Qualtrics and the free cash flow generation, we think it's extremely impressive. Look, I don't want to spend too much time talking about our shift to technology because we don't believe it's technology per se. We believe it's where there's secular growth, there's extraordinary moats that are being built. Both these companies, both Pinterest and Qualtrics, they're not executive management teams. These are founder management teams. The founder management teams have delivered extraordinary returns to shareholders. Amazon is a classic example. Pinterest is a founder CEO. Qualtrics is a founder CEO. These people are not working for money. They're working because they love it. As Warren Buffett says, "They're fanatics." You want to back fanatics who are in secular growth industries and are building extraordinary moats. I hope that touches on it. Yes, there are a few other positions that are in technology or software. The reality is that's where the secular growth is, that's where the moats are being built. Not in all cases. In some cases, there is spectacular frothiness, and we've looked to avoid those areas. In some instances, there are businesses that are building, like FedEx, are building extraordinary businesses, but they're going to take years to appear. Netflix is a good example of a business that was hiding in plain sight and hiding its capacity to grow its streaming business. One that we learned a lesson from, which perhaps gave us greater conviction in what we thought was a better business model like Amazon. It was using OpEx instead of CapEx. I hope that helps round it out and give a little bit of perspective. We're not wildly running into technology. We're not wildly running into anything. We are sticking to our fundamentals, sticking to our process. However, the difference is now with some of these businesses, there will be some more volatility. We need to embrace that volatility in order to generate excess returns over time. Otherwise, what we'll end up with is a very mediocre outcome, by owning low-growth, capped upside companies that may make you still safe at night. It is a delusion because in a world of negative return, negative yields, which is what we have, real yields are negative. There is financial repression, and we could argue secular financial repression is taking place due to central government policy, central bank policy. You need to own high-quality growth, and you need to find the high-quality growth that is attractively priced and run by fanatics. That is our mission, that is our objective, and that is what Thomas Davies is helping me accomplish, and Marco Anselmi is helping accomplish. Our entire team in Sydney, New York and Tokyo is focused on doing this and helping me and our clients have these high-quality portfolios that are going to deliver excess returns over time. Tom, Marco, I don't know if you have any comments on that. No, look, I think that was a comprehensive answer, so perhaps we move on to the next question. Look, there's been a couple of questions on this topic, so I'll just pick one out here. You've initiated a buyback on VG1 and are holding VG8 on the VGI balance sheet. Why not initiate a buyback on VG8 as well? Jon, I think that's probably one for you. Yeah. Thanks, Tom. Yes, we have received a number of questions on the VG8 buyback over the last month or two. I think there are a few things to highlight here. The first thing is that, again, that we are encouraged that the discounts in both VG1 and VG8 are heading in the right direction. Ultimately, if we go back to first principles, what we are trying to do is to deliver high conviction returns over time, 10%-15% over the cycle. In order to assess the appropriateness of buybacks on any of the vehicles, if the investment outcome is able to deliver compound returns, ideally in excess of the discount, then it could be argued that the best use of capital for shareholders is to remain invested, and to attempt to deliver those compound returns over time. VG8 is a much younger portfolio than VG1. It is my understanding that the board's belief is that the investment portfolio should be given time to actually deliver those returns. Given that the discount has been heading in the right direction. That VG8 is about to pay its first dividend, and the dividend yield is an attractive one that we've received very strong feedback on. Also noting that we've received numerous inquiries from investors who are looking at portfolios like VG8 to gain exposure to Asia for all of the reasons that we've outlined on this call, and that our estimation is that we have a significant amount of interest from current and potential clients and investors and shareholders in the strategy. Ultimately, at this moment in time, the board's belief, as I understand it, is that the portfolio should be given the opportunity to deliver the returns that it's aiming to deliver, and that we believe that there are a number of investors who are very interested in adding the strategy to their portfolios over time. It would be inappropriate at this juncture to begin buying back shares in the portfolio, given it's only recently become fully invested. Should things change, my understanding is, well, I know that the board is reviewing or keeps a very close eye on the development of the portfolio and the development of the share price versus the NTA on a regular basis. Should things change in the future, then the board will reconsider at that time. At this moment, my understanding is that the board has made a determination that the right thing to do for shareholders is to continue to allow the portfolio to attempt to deliver the returns that it is aiming for. Great. Thanks, Jon. We've had two questions on this topic. I'll just pick one out here. How are you valuing Crown now that it is speculated it may lose its license in Victoria? It appears it is trading in line with replacement costs of the assets without higher and better use. I might take that initially and then hand it to Marco. We built our position in the low to mid AUD 8 range last year based on the negative sentiment. I should highlight only the Asian portfolio owns Crown. We bought it based on fundamental value. We deemed the probability of license losses, whether it be New South Wales or elsewhere, as a relatively low probability event. There's a variety of reasons behind that. We can't know what the future holds perfectly. On a probability basis, we thought it was highly attractive. We think it's highly attractive still at this point, coupled with the overlay of strategic appeal. At the time we bought it last year, you may note that we thought that there was strategic appeal in Crown. Lo and behold, multiple parties appeared and two foreign private equity groups appeared, then Star appeared. Obviously, we own Star, we own Crown, that's quite a logical and quite an elegant solution if that were to take place. The reality is a stand-alone Crown going forward on the balance of probability, it continues with very substantive regulatory overlays as it should and as it deserves. What you have is extremely high quality six-star assets and without the high roller business for both Star and for Crown, these Australian gaming assets are actually higher quality than they've ever been before. The reality is the high roller businesses are very low quality. They attract low-quality patronage, which has resulted in all these negative externalities, which the regulators are now looking at. That's been associated with high roller business, not with the domestic business. That's the quick snapshot, but Marco, I'll hand over to you if you would like to add any additional comments on Crown. Yeah, sure. Maybe I'll actually just give a bit of background. The Australian casinos are businesses that we feel we know well. We have followed them for a long time. For instance, we were large shareholders of Echo Entertainment Group back, the former The Star Entertainment Group, I think back in 2014, 2015. We worked closely with them, board and management at the time to introduce some changes. They are businesses that we have followed and feel we understand quite well, and we haven't just taken a high-level view on the back of the regulatory scrutiny. In fact, just the fact that this, obviously given off a lot of performance, but the fact that we're still up on our position, as Rob said, we bought it in the low to mid AUD 8 range. The fact that we're still up on the position, I think is a testament to how well we bought it and then more broadly, our investment process. I think from here, as Rob said, we feel the risk-reward looks quite appealing. As you mentioned in your question, it's trading close to its replacement cost. If they do revoke the license, well, then they'll be able to monetize the property and all the assets around the casino, and if they don't revoke the license, then it's on the upside. When you frame it with that perspective, I think you can see why we view it as quite an attractive and compelling risk-reward. Yeah, that's our high-level view on Crown. Great. Okay. Moving on. Again, a couple questions on this. Can you comment on the recent AUD weakness and whether you're contemplating a return to holding cash in US dollars? Look, it's a good question. It's something that we've been constantly reassessing. On one hand, the U.S. economy appears to be recovering faster and possibly more likely, you will see federal funds rate go up in the U.S. before you'll see it go up in Australia, and that's obviously positive for the USD versus the AUD. The reality is the weakness lately in the AUD and commodity currencies is due to recent commodity weakness, but also particularly in Australia and New Zealand, this issue with COVID, which, who knows how it plays out, which is obviously what it feeds through into is more central bank intervention, more financial repression, and that obviously is an issue for the AUD. That's short-term. The counterbalance to that is, do you think the US dollar is being debased to a level and are we getting to a point of debasement in the US dollar given the fiscal situation in America and other factors which probably this isn't the forum to talk about, whether that translates into an ongoing and very sustained debasement of the US dollar. That's the counterbalance argument. At the moment, we are remaining fully hedged. We're thinking about it closely, and it is something that we obviously keep an eye on. That's, I guess, the short-term versus the long-term. There is a growing probability, and I would say previously it was a much lower probability, but it's a growing probability, that the US dollar could be moving towards a quite substantial and ongoing debasement effect, far more so than before due to the ordinary forces of inflation. That is something that as Australians and Australian investors, we need to be very cognizant of, and it is something hence that we need to think about when we look to allocate our cash and hedge our portfolios. I hope that answers the question. Yep. Great. Look, we're approaching the hour here, so this is going to be the last question. Amazon rallied a lot through COVID. Its share price has fallen after the last result. What drove the fall, and do you still see upside from here? Okay. Look, I'll start it with the context of, for the first five, six years that we owned Amazon, on every quarterly result, the stock was either up 15% or down 15%. That's been Amazon. Recently it had a result. It's been the best performer out of the FANGs over the last five, six, seven years, and most recently it's been the laggard, really over the last 6+ months, six to nine months. The most recent sell-off was a slight miss in estimates. It's cycling some very high growth from the previous period. Yes, it was a huge beneficiary. There was a pull forward of, you could argue, five to seven years of behavior in terms of particularly the elderly demographic taking up e-commerce. Now you've seen what you could argue is a permanent shift and permanent change of behavior towards not only e-commerce but the accelerated adoption of cloud. Because you've got to remember, Amazon is three businesses. It's an e-commerce business. It's increasingly becoming a logistics business competing with FedEx and UPS. It's the world leader in cloud by a country mile. It's actually now one of the world's biggest advertising businesses as well, depending on who you include in China. It's arguably number three or number four in terms of the world's biggest advertising business, number three or four, obviously Facebook being the largest, Facebook and Google being one and two. It's a multi-pronged business. It's not just social media. It's not just a search/advertising business. This is a multi-pronged business, and you could argue that a split of it would result in a much higher valuation. If we get back to the basics, well, you've currently got a business. Remember, this is a business a number of years ago that people said, "Well, why are you owning this loss-making, profitless prosperity Amazon?" Amazon is a business today that this year is going to make basically AUD 28 billion in profit. It's going to generate AUD 45 billion in free cash flow. To get back to that dividend yield concept, if it paid out all its free cash flow to shareholders, which is free cash flow to equity in a dividend, so 100% payout ratio like an Australian company because it doesn't want to reinvest in its own business. It's on a 2.6% dividend yield, but that's this year, going to 3.7% next year. Everyone looks at next year. 3.7% dividend yield for Amazon. This is a business that is growing revenue at 20% and growing its earnings at 30%. Wait for it. This is a business that takes all of its free cash flow and reinvests it back into the business. It doesn't diworsify like most other companies in the planet. Most other large tech companies, they can't expand into their own businesses because there's nothing to expand into. They do special projects, or they try other things or bets. Amazon expands into its own business. Look at it started with e-commerce. It's now got cloud, it's got advertising, it's building one of the biggest gaming businesses. It takes that money and reinvests it in its business and continues to expand its returns on capital. If you look at some basic metrics, the return on capital for this year on our numbers is just on 40% for Amazon. Next year it's expanding, and the year after we think it will continually expand. Instead of distributing cash to shareholders, it reinvests it and gets an even higher return. Which is what investors should do. You should keep your capital and reinvest it and get a higher incremental return, not pay it out. That is the secret of Amazon, and that's been the secret of, even traditionally of FedEx and UPS. They didn't pay out dividends. They reinvested in business. They built out their networks. It's exactly what Pinterest is doing now. It's the kind of business that we want to own for a very long period of time. It's obviously not as large a weight as it would be if we didn't sell a share. We bought our shares originally, not for VG1, for our original funds, in the AUD 250, AUD 270 mark. If we didn't sell any shares, it would be a huge weight. We prudently manage our weights and the current weight in our master fund portfolio, 14% weight at market, is about 1% at cost. Which gives you an idea of if you can look through volatility and look through the short-term noise and hold on to these wonderful assets, you end up with an extremely high-quality outcome. In terms of COVID, the noise, the fact that it fell 6% or 7% and that impacted our July numbers or something will happen and it might affect our other month numbers. We're long-term investors. Everyone who invests with us should understand we are long-term investors. We take a multi-year time horizon. We are stock pickers. We are not market timers. We are not traders. If you want to invest with a three to five-year time horizon and you want to invest with people who are investing alongside you and substantial amounts of their own money and net worth, well, if you like what we do, please invest with us. If you're looking at daily returns or weekly returns or monthly NTA and whether it's at a discount or a premium. In the first two years, we're at a premium. Were people complaining when we're at a premium to NTA? If you'd like to invest with a long-term time horizon with investors who are aligned with you, please invest with us. If you're worried about short-term noise and short-term issues in great businesses, I'd point it backwards and I'd flip it to another model and I would say, it's the same as Warren Buffett would say, is you put a price ticker in front of a great property. Think of all the great suburbs and great properties in Australia. If you had a price ticker in front of it moved up and down in the week or the month, would you worry? Most people wouldn't worry. In fact, nobody would worry. They just hold through it. I think that's what we need to do with great businesses, and that's what our investors hopefully can back us on. I hope that in a roundabout way answers it. I think Amazon, look, it's a good question. We've got a lot of questions on it. Jeff Bezos has stepped down. He's no longer there. He's appointed his key lieutenant Andy Jassy which is now arguably their most valuable business and most strategic asset. It is a business that we think is extremely unique. It's something that we've held on now think it's atypical of the kind of business that we want to own in the future. We don't view it as a technology business. We view it as an e-commerce business, a cloud computing business, an advertising business, and a gaming business, which then has optionality to expand into other verticals as it takes huge amounts of free cash flow and intelligently allocates it. I hope that gives you sort of an expanded response to that question. Yeah, I'm sorry, we've got to end it here. We've gone a little bit over. I've had a few messages that we're well over an hour. Very happy to take your questions via Ingrid or Matt. We're very thankful for you for joining us today. As I said, please contact Matt or Ingrid if you've got any other questions. We do have a roadshow coming up for our advisor networks and our broker groups in the months ahead. As always, do contact us. We are available. I've personally spoken to a number of our investors, as has Tom, as has Marco, and Jon Howie's constantly available. Thank you very much. Have a good day and we very much appreciate your support of VGI Partners. Thank you.