I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Robert Luciano, Executive Chairman and Portfolio Manager of VGI Partners Limited. Please go ahead. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for today's investor briefing. Joining me in the room is Marco Anselmi, Shannon McConaghy, and from our New York office, Chris Walford. The main purpose of today is to provide an update on the portfolios for VGI Partners Global Investments, VG1, and VGI Partners Asian Investments, VG8. At the end of the presentation, we'll open up to your questions and do our best to answer as many as possible in the time provided. However, before we do that, let me provide a brief recap of some of the recent shareholder developments for VG1 and VG8. Now, turning to Slide 2. As most of you would know, VGI announced a few weeks ago that it has signed a binding merger agreement with Regal Funds Management. In terms of a timetable update, I'm pleased to say that earlier this week, we released our explanatory memorandum for the transaction. This means the VGI shareholder vote will be taking place at VGI's AGM on the twenty-seventh of May. If approved, we will be on target to complete the deal some stage in June. Now, I intend to vote my various entity shares in favor of the deal as I believe the transaction will provide a number of benefits to VG1 and VG8 shareholders. In particular, the structure should be highly beneficial to VGI's portfolio management activities. Firstly, this includes the fact that I'll be able to spend much more time focused on the portfolios and research as my business management duties will be passed over to Brendan O'Connor, who is CEO of the combined group and his team. Secondly, it gives our investment team access to Regal's expertise in a number of areas and specialist sectors such as healthcare and resources, as well as their team in Asia and their office in Singapore. Furthermore, Regal has been very successful in managing its listed investment company, RF1. Now, this is partly attributed to their strong distribution and marketing team, as well as the application of RF1's buyback. We're keen to draw on their experience in these areas. In addition, the boards of both VG1 and VG8 have announced on-market buyback initiatives, with the VG1 buyback recommencing and a VG8 buyback commencing for the first time. Now, we absolutely recognize that buybacks themselves do not close gaps to NTA. However, they are certainly valuable when combined with other initiatives. Buybacks provide the dual benefit of providing increased on-market liquidity, as well as being accretive to shareholders. We're anticipating both buybacks will commence in early May now that the explanatory memorandum for the merger has been released. Finally, the boards also recognize that consistent dividend income is an important outcome for our investors. Both VG1 and VG8 maintain a target 4% fully franked dividend yield, with VG1 recently paying a AUD 0.045 fully franked dividend per share and VG8 paying AUD 0.05 fully franked per share. We're also very pleased with the level of participation in the dividend reinvestment plan for both listed investment companies, and we thank investors for their continued support. To summarize, we are very hopeful that the benefits of the Regal merger, combined with the buyback initiatives just outlined, will be beneficial for VG1 and VG8 shareholders. Now turning to Slide 4. Now, just to reiterate our investment philosophy, we are absolute return investors. Since inception in 2008, our target return has always been 10%-15% through the cycle. We take a long-term investment horizon, and we believe this provides us with a substantial competitive advantage in a world that's extremely short-term focused. We avoid permanent loss of capital through doing deep research on investments. However, we hold highly concentrated portfolios in order to maximize our return, but this can lead to volatility in return. We limit our size of funds under management, and this allows us to execute on opportunities that managers with larger capital bases cannot execute on. Finally, we have very strong alignment between the investment team and our investors through our collective team's substantial investments in our listed investment companies and unlisted funds. Turning to Slide 5, and just briefly, VG1 is our global concentrated share portfolio, and VG8 is our concentrated Asia-focused portfolio. Now, moving on to a portfolio rundown for VG1. Turning to Slide 7. Now, this gives a snapshot of the portfolio returns over these respective time periods. Now, we're obviously disappointed by the short-term return profile. You know, our targeted return through the cycle is 10%-15%. We have delivered double-digit returns since inception on our unlisted fund, but that has not taken place so far in the listed investment company. We're obviously disappointed by that. Having said that, the portfolio we have today, the way that we're positioned, we feel extremely confident that the portfolio can generate substantial returns over the medium to longer term. We're very bullish on the portfolio of longs that we have. We think we own some extremely high-quality businesses that are mispriced, a number of which have held up extremely well in this sell-off. In fact, some are close to their highs, such as CME. In terms of the exposure here, you can see we've got substantial short exposure, and therefore a quite low net equity exposure compared to what we would traditionally have. On average, since 2008, we've had about a net equity exposure in the 70% range. Being in the 50% range is extremely low for us. It's obviously, you know, due to the environment we're in, the opportunities we see on the short side. Yet at the same token, yes, it's a volatile market, share prices as a whole are coming back, this is a kind of environment as a long-term investor you need to be excited by and you need to take advantage of. Yes, you might buy a share in a great business today. It might continue to fall over the next number of weeks or even months. The reality is we'll continue to slowly add to positions where we see extreme value. Like I said, long-term investors should be excited by weakness and pullbacks in share prices because it gives them the opportunity to buy more of extremely good businesses at discounted values. Now if we move to the next slide, please. Slide 8 just gives a snapshot of the portfolio longs by listing and by sector. The key is really, I think the next Slide number 9, which gives you a snapshot on where the vast majority of the portfolio is invested. There's obviously a tail outside of this, where we have other companies, businesses that we think are high quality, and but we've kept at smaller weights for a variety of reasons, or perhaps we're adding. This is where the vast majority of capital is, and you can see that it is skewed to the top 10, but particularly the top 5. Now the next Slide 10, gives you a snapshot on some of the changes that we've made or the key changes we've made over the last number of months and even recently. As you can see from there, in terms of increased position sizes, we've added to our CME position. We've got very high conviction in CME and growing conviction in CME that the business is now extremely well-positioned for secular growth in its various products, particularly in its interest rate derivatives. We've also added in the substantial weakness we've seen to our Pinterest holding and also to Qualtrics. The final position we've also added to in substantial weakness, and particularly weakness around the French election, but also just general weakness in European equities, has been FDJ. Now, one position we have exited that was in our top 10 is Jucolt, and that's been completely exited. The share price has strengthened, and we deemed it prudent to reallocate that capital to better opportunities. Now, one of those opportunities that we used that Jucolt capital for was building a position in Twitter, which we did over the course of earlier this year, including in March, as the stock continued to sell off with the general tech sell-off and in particular, sell-off in social media or social media-related stocks, which has seen Snapchat, Pinterest, obviously Facebook, when it had its large downgrade earlier in the year. Everything got caught up in the sell-off, and it was indiscriminate. We've seen a complete de-rating of the sector. That saw Twitter get sold off quite sharply. It hit a low of around $32 in March, and in hindsight, it would've been obviously a lot lower if Elon Musk wasn't building up a very substantial 9% stake in the company. He has obviously made a takeover offer which has been accepted for the company, which is 70% above the low price in March. As I said, that low price was probably held up by Elon Musk's very substantial buying in the month of March, when markets were extremely weak. That 70% difference from where we were buying Twitter stock to Elon Musk's takeover bid gives you a sense of the disparity between price and value in some of these technology or digital business situations. Elon Musk is clearly one of the smartest people and most successful business people in the world. He is not paying $54.20 because he believes that is a price that he will not make money on. In fact, $54.20 is well below the valuation we have on Twitter. We think Elon Musk is gonna make a very substantial amount of money on his Twitter investment. Twitter is at the very early stages of focusing on monetization, profitability, has just installed a new CEO who'll be fully focused on the business. Previously, Jack Dorsey, the founder, had a part-time CEO role at Twitter with his key focus on Square. The reality of the situation is Twitter, I think is an... Exemplifies the environment we're in in terms of disparity between price and value in this market, the opportunities you can find, the catalyst here being, though, a takeover offer. It should just reiterate to our investors or prospective investors, and I think investors in general, that this is a market environment where there are substantial opportunities, but those rewards may not be realized unless there is some type of immediate catalyst and in the case of a takeover offer. Otherwise, investors need to be patient and take advantage of what has been indiscriminate selling in extremely high quality companies. I think Twitter, like I said, just reiterates that point. Next slide, please. This is a snapshot just of the portfolio's exposure to pricing power and ad valorem pricing models. Investors who have listened to a number of our calls over the last couple of years would know that traditionally we have very much favored high quality business models, high quality industry structure, and as a consequence, those businesses tend to have pricing power. But we've also had a positive view of ad valorem pricing model business models. Why? Just because they're excellent and previously had free inflation protection that really wasn't a concern previously, but it's obviously accelerated over the last 6 to 12 months. I think this gives you a very good snapshot on the top 10 investments that we have in the portfolio, and the fact that they have either pricing power, and ad valorem pricing, or in some cases, actually both, in the case of Amazon, and obviously in the case of, say, an FDJ, and a Mastercard. In terms of these features, we obviously look for prospective investments that have these features, and we have a number of other investment positions that meet these criteria. I should say in terms of CME and exchanges, we'll talk on the next slide, but we also have built a position in Deutsche Börse, about a 3% weight, we've built up over the last couple of months. Deutsche Börse, very similar to CME, has pricing power, but also in a key part of its business, which is one of the largest central securities depositories in the planet, it has an ad valorem pricing model. Deutsche Börse has both pricing power in many of its underlying businesses and also has an ad valorem pricing model component to its business. Now we'll just move to the next slide, please, which is Slide 12. Now, these are more specific examples, and this is where I'd like to hand over to Marco Anselmi and to Chris Walford. Marco will give you a rundown on Richemont, and hopefully we'll get some questions on Richemont, and I can give that to Marco to answer, plus a number of other companies that he focuses on for us. Chris, Amazon, and Chris also, hopefully we'll get some questions 'cause he looks at a number of the larger investments that we have in the global portfolio. Marco. Great. Thanks, Rob. Here, we just really wanted to give a couple of examples of two of our portfolio companies that really are flexing their pricing. As Rob mentioned, you know, we are always looking for to own businesses that have pricing power. In fact, a lot of the businesses that we own have consistently over time raised prices. However, in the current environment, we're seeing that, you know, these businesses really are flexing and increasing the pace of price increases. We think Richemont is a great example of a company with significant pricing power. You know, in fact, the more expensive their luxury products are, the more consumers are attracted to the product. We're seeing, you know, across most of the tier one luxury companies, whether that be LVMH with its Louis Vuitton brand or, you know, Prada or even Kering with Gucci, they're all increasing prices, which more than offset the inflationary cost pressures and therefore preserve and protect their margins. What we're seeing with Richemont, just over the last few months, they've made announcements on how they will be increasing prices of Cartier jewelry, on Van Cleef jewelry, and also on the broader watch portfolio, so on brand watch brands like Panerai, Piaget, and IWC. We think, like in the past These price increases won't have a detrimental impact on demand, which we think is key. You know, we think it was actually very interesting that last week the Cartier CEO gave an interview in which he was talking about how they may even increase prices for a second time this year, not just on jewelry, but also on watches. They now even have a two-year waiting list for some of their watch brands like Cartier, which is unthinkable relative to, you know, 12-18 months ago, to have waiting lists for some of these brands. That just speaks to how they've, you know, very successfully managed inventory, but also, you know, managed the perception of price through price. I think that's a good example of one of the companies in the portfolio that's really flexing their pricing and is gonna continue to, in order to protect their margins. With that, I might hand it over to Chris to speak on Amazon. Thanks, Marco. On the right-hand side of the slide are several tangible examples of Amazon flexing its pricing power in the last six months. In February, Amazon increased its Amazon Prime membership fees for the first time since 2018. Just this month, Fulfillment by Amazon introduced its first ever fuel surcharge. Late last year, Whole Foods implemented a grocery delivery fee. The chart at the bottom right shows the historical annual price of Amazon's Amazon Prime subscription. We estimate that the February price increase will result in approximately $3 billion of incremental profit or over 10% increase to last year's total profit. I will now hand this call back over to Rob to discuss the exchanges in further detail on the next slide. All right. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Marco. Look, this is just a quick snapshot on, you know, two key positions. CME, obviously a long-term investment holding we've had and we've added to, and I've explained that we've recently built a weighting in Deutsche Börse, circa a 3%-ish weight. These two businesses, just as a refresher, CME is the world's leading derivatives exchange. It is the only place in the world that you can trade the entire U.S. yield curve. It trades the vast majority of equity index derivatives, commodity derivatives, metal derivatives, and energy derivatives. It's also the only venue for Bitcoin futures, which has obviously had substantial growth. Deutsche Börse is the leading European exchange. It has a cash equity business, but a key part of the business that we like very much and has a lot of latent earning power is its Eurex business, which is the dominant derivatives platform in Europe. It also owns Clearstream, which I mentioned previously is one of the world's largest central securities depositories, which is effectively a banker to the banks in the world. Now, the reason for having this investment position, which now, you know, totals just under 4%-15% of total long capital, is a substantial exposure it gives us to the derivatives complex, but in particular to interest rates and interest rate complex. As you can see, since the GFC, and a period of very substantial quantitative easing by global central banks, interest rate derivatives have seen growth, but relatively patchy growth, certainly compared to the period prior to the global financial crisis. This has been due to, like I said, quantitative easing, and the fact that yield curves have been substantially repressed until now. What we have in this environment is clearly quantitative easing ceasing. Quantitative tightening now looks to be on the table. We have interest rate increases coming through from central banks as they look to attempt to moderate the impacts of inflation. This is an extraordinarily positive environment for derivatives exchanges, of which the two key leading ones in the planet are the CME and, like I said, Deutsche Börse. We are extremely bullish on these two companies. We think they have very substantial earnings upside, untapped earnings power, and, like I said, we are extremely excited by the investment outlook for these companies and the earnings power of these two companies. Next slide. Look, just a quick update on our short portfolio, which has obviously grown substantially over the last number of months. You know, shorts at the back half of 2021 had given us a bit of a drag. That's obviously turned around pretty substantially in the new year. Year- to- date, it's been a substantial contributor. You know, as we've mentioned in previous correspondence and on calls, we've scaled back our single stock shorting last year, and in particular basket shorting. Some people ask what's basket shorting? You know, we'll talk about a U.S. housing thematic that we've got soon. Chris will take you through that. That basket has, you know, it's five stocks that we've selected, and we've just put it together into a combined basket, so to speak. So instead of talking about five stocks, we're talking about the general reason why we've shorted those five stocks. It also gives us a little bit of spread, and I guess some diversification. It's something that we've looked to undertake and with quite high efficacy and effect for the portfolio. We've said in previous correspondence and our letter to you in January that we think that shorting is gonna become an increasingly important part of the strategy going forward. That's obviously been amplified by the uncertainty in the macroeconomic backdrop. Obviously, conflicts around the world add to that, and central banks tightening rates, uncertainty over inflation, all these things feed through into our ability to short is a substantial competitive advantage, and it's something that, like we've said before, will become an increasingly important part of driving returns and protecting returns. We're still long biased. We'll always be net long, but we're able to reduce that net long exposure through shorts, which we anticipate will deliver returns and have delivered returns for us through the cycle. Now, two examples we're gonna talk about now is U.S. housing, which I think Chris is gonna take you through, and just expensive loss-making tech short that we've had on, which Marco will take you through. This is Slide 15. Chris, I'll hand it over to you. Great. Thanks, Rob. The U.S. housing market has been remarkably strong over the last two years, with home prices rising to record levels driven by low interest rates. As a result, until recently, home builders were seeing unprecedented demand, turbocharge profits, and also trading at peak valuations. Now, with mortgage rates rising rapidly from 3% to over 5%, affordability is declining. As you can see from the chart on the bottom right, affordability leads housing activity. We are already starting to observe softer demand for housing. As a result, we have been and remain short a basket of home builders and related construction suppliers, and continue to investigate ways to express this theme globally for VGI. I'll now turn it back to Marco to discuss our expensive loss-making technology short thematic. Thanks, Chris. Moving on to Slide 16 now, where I'll touch on our short basket targeting expensive loss-making tech. This was a basket that, you know, we initiated last year, so late 2021, targeting, you know, these a number of egregiously priced, heavily loss-making tech businesses, on the view that, you know, that a lot of these, you know, businesses were getting caught up in a speculative rally and the valuations were diverging from the fundamentals. We hand-picked around 40 of these securities that, you know, fit the criteria. You know, so far, the short basket has worked very well for us. It's been the largest contributor to the short portfolio with, on average, the security is declining between 40% and 50%. To give you some perspective, when we initiated the short, the average security in the basket was trading at a revenue multiple of over 20x, which traditionally has been a revenue multiple reserved only for the highest quality of businesses. We have been tactically covering the short basket. We covered it after the sharp sell-off in February. Following the rally in March, we took advantage and reinitiated the short basket. Like I said, it's been a strong contributor and a very large, a very good performer for the short portfolio. By the same token, you know, the sell-off in these digital tech businesses has been indiscriminate, and so good businesses and bad businesses, particularly in the tech space, have been equally sold down. We have taken advantage of some of the opportunities in that space to, you know, reinitiate prior holdings or build up existing positions, one of which was Twitter, which Rob mentioned earlier. I don't know, Rob, if you wanna make any additional comments on that. Yeah, look, I will in that, you know, just to reiterate Marco's comment, you know, the sell-off has been indiscriminate. A number of you know, outside of mega cap tech, a number of extremely high quality digital businesses have continued to sell off due to a general derate. In some cases, a number of these businesses are now trading on metrics that you previously would only be allocated to standard or high-quality industrial businesses with modest growth profiles. A number of these digital platforms are extremely high quality businesses with abnormally high growth profiles, and they're continuing, and the efficacy has been well established. So we see opportunities there, a number of which we own. We've also seen companies that are high quality, you know, that have delivered high quality results, but perhaps have not exceeded expectations or have slightly missed, and the sell-off in those securities has been substantial. Now that has taken place in some of the holdings that we have, but also in other holdings. We've taken advantage of this market weakness to either add, as we've discussed in some of the positions, or purchase new positions, in which we have done in about four-five digital businesses that we have been watching now for some time. We were scratching our head at the valuations, but now they've come into a range where we're finding them highly attractive. One business is in the medical technology space, and a number are in the enterprise software space, and one is in the consumer facing software space. We'll talk more about those in due course. I think, you know, just to finish off on the global fund, you know, it also leads into the Asian fund. This is an environment where the indiscriminate sell-off is creating very substantial opportunities for stock pickers, for long-term investors, and for those who have done their work, have been patiently waiting and can take advantage of this sell-off and the prices that are on offer. Maybe the prices will continue to weaken, but the reality is as the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter has shown, you know, you wanna buy high quality businesses when you think they're attractively priced. You cannot pick the bottom. You cannot pick the catalyst that will make it precisely turn and that precise point in time. This is the environment where very substantial returns can be generated by patiently allocating capital in high quality assets that are selling at distressed prices. That is certainly the case with digital assets. Now having said that, we'll move on to the Asian fund, VG8, and Shannon McConaghy, who is a senior analyst with us, will help me with that presentation. Now turning to Slide 18. This gives you a return snapshot for the portfolio over the respective dates. Obviously, it's been a very difficult investment environment in Asia. We're disappointed by these results. Having said that, the same stands for global. The portfolio we have, we think is extremely high quality. We think it's mispriced. We think there are very substantial return profiles in a number of the holdings we have, in that some of the prices have been sold to distressed levels with indiscriminate selling. Our portfolio exposures are listed there. We have less short in Asia because we just see, we actually see greater growth opportunities, less egregious valuations. Having said that, our, you know, our short portfolio has grown over the last number of months, and really over the last couple of weeks has also grown as we see selective opportunities. As a whole, the growth profile in Asia remains quite attractive. The valuations remain attractive, and therefore our net exposure is obviously higher. In terms of our long exposure, we would expect that to increase, particularly given some of the opportunities we are seeing at the moment. Now, if we just go to a quick snapshot on the long portfolio, proxied by revenue. This just gives you a better sense of the true underlying spread that our long portfolio holdings have. Then this is a snapshot on the long portfolio by sector. Now in terms of the top 10 holdings, which is on Page 20, they are listed as follows. The key holdings should be relatively consistent. There have been some changes and a couple of new additions, some sales, and we'll take you through that now on Slide 21. In terms of you know the key increases in position size, Japan Exchange has been one that we have been actively adding to as the stock has been coming under pressure and particularly even recently we've been active in the stock. Rakuten for the same thing that you know we see substantial disparity between price and valuation. The business has been sold off due to its mobile business, with the core very profit-generating e-commerce components and other components not being looked at and ignored by the market who views it as a telco business for now. We believe that will change. Another increase has been Panasonic, which is a business that we have been adding to over the last number of months. We believe is substantially mispriced, is undertaking a restructuring akin to what we've seen at Sony, what we've seen at Hitachi, and also what has been pushed upon Toshiba. We're seeing some very substantial changes taking place and hidden gems within the business that we do not believe are being valued correctly. We've had a substantial new addition in Daifuku. Daifuku is a global leader in warehouse automation. We'll talk about that soon, along with Panasonic. We have owned Daifuku previously. The stock went up considerably. We sold it. The price has come back and we have taken advantage of that weakness and in particular, what we think is an extremely attractive opportunity. In terms of exited positions, we have exited Crown. We did so really only recently as the share price converged with the final offer price from Blackstone. We've put that capital to work in some of the above, particularly in Daifuku. We've also reduced our Nintendo position size. Look, extremely high-quality business. We think it's got great growth prospects. We just feel like the price has got ahead of itself, and therefore, we've taken some profits. That doesn't mean we won't potentially add back to it, but that was the reason for the reduction. We've also added to some Mercari. It is, in our view, a dominant consumer marketplace in both Japan, but has a very exciting and growing business in the United States. It has been substantially sold off over the last number of months. We think that the price is a very substantial discount to value that we ascribe to the Japanese business, let alone to the U.S. business. We believe it has been caught up in indiscriminate tech sell-off in Japan. We believe it's an extremely mispriced high quality business. Now, just turning over to the next slide here. This is just a snapshot on Daifuku. Like I said, it's a new addition. This is a business that we've owned before, but have reinitiated a substantial position on. We're extremely excited by the opportunity with the business. I'll hand it over to Shannon, who has done a substantial amount of work on the business for us, and has had substantial dialogue with the company. Shannon, over to you. Thank you, Rob. As mentioned, Daifuku is a Japanese company. It's been around a long time, since the 1930s, and it's been a key reason for Japan leading other nations in warehousing automation. This is not just around kaizen or process improvement focus in Japan. It's also got to do with the lack of land and labor shortages. We're clearly seeing these issues now prevail in other parts of the world, and we're seeing rental for inner metro distribution centers spiral higher, and wages for warehouse workers spiral higher, which we'll discuss later. Warehouse automation solves for some of those problems, obviously by reducing the number of employees in a warehouse by up to 90% in some recent examples for Daifuku. It also greatly increases the amount of storage per square foot in a warehouse. In fact, it reduces wasted space by 85%, and you can stack the shelving twice as high. Now, one of Daifuku's key strengths is its breadth of products across all range of solutions, and there is no one particular solution for every customer. Daifuku can also provide consulting for customers that have no experience in warehousing automation to implement solutions. One recent expert in warehousing that we recently spoke with suggested that he was absolutely amazed by an example in Sydney where Japanese engineers that focus on specialized areas of the automation process engage with technicians on the ground here via augmented reality glasses to commission the system without flaws as it had already been tested and optimized in a virtual environment. Beyond just the warehousing automation solutions, we see management of Daifuku unlocking value in its other businesses. The CEO has a track record of improving margins, and the CFO, who we've been engaging with, has been very interested in our views as to how it can improve CF, return on invested capital. We've been in constant dialogue with the company and look forward to engaging further down the track and seeing it really take advantage of what we'll discuss later is a real spike higher in demand for its offerings internationally now that we're seeing labor and wage costs spiral. If we move on to the next slide. Panasonic is leveraged to a slightly different aspect of logistics automation. Last year, Panasonic bought Blue Yonder, which is a world leader in end-to-end supply chain management software. Panasonic itself was already a leader in many aspects of supply chain hardware and software, including artificial intelligence. One example the company recently gave us of how these synergies between software and hardware can be implemented is for AI forecasting of demand conditions, say, for barbecue-related perishables, meats and bread buns over the coming weekend with a deteriorating weather forecast. That can be fed in from the Panasonic analysis into the Blue Yonder software, which can analyze the stock, reduce orders from suppliers, and adjust logistics and trucking orders. Beyond that, Panasonic is a leader in electronic tags within stores. What can actually occur is, to clear existing stock, the tags can start displaying two-for-one offers, for example. Panasonic, a leader in visual recognition, can analyze via its videos in store the facial responses of customers to those tags. It can then adjust tags to suit for different locations to clear that stock with the best possible economics. These kind of solutions lock in customers, and we can see Blue Yonder already has a 70% recurring revenue ratio. Another area of growth for Panasonic is in EV battery cells. Panasonic is a technological leader here and offers the highest density cells in the industry. This is very important in extending range for EVs and is highly sought after by its partners, including Tesla and Toyota. Another really critical aspect is that Panasonic is the only major EV battery supplier to have not had a major recall. This is extremely important for its customers in reducing the risk of its own recall costs and also, more importantly, reducing the risk of brand damage. Again, Panasonic is another example of a company in Japan that we see as unlocking value by raising margins in other businesses. When we analyze Panasonic, it's clear to us that the market is not pricing any growth into this stock. We can clearly see growth coming from supply chain management and EV batteries. Beyond that, management is attempting to raise margins and focus on other growth businesses. We can see Sony, Hitachi, and Toshiba, its peers, have recently been multi-baggers over the last five years in implementing their own reform solutions. Panasonic has taken real steps over the last year, including a transition to a holding company structure. That's led by the CEO, and our understanding from engaging with the company is that that will better facilitate actions such as spinning off poor performing assets or selling off assets that we think are undervalued to realize that value. That may include the EV battery business. Just skipping to the next slide, I thought I'd just provide a few charts here to give you an example of the scale of the inflection or tipping point that's occurring in logistics automation that benefits both Daifuku and Panasonic. On the left-hand side, we can see U.S. warehousing wages are up 10% year-on-year. In the middle, we can see U.S. warehouse rents are up 18% year-on-year. Both of these factors have been key drivers in Japan being more advanced in its own warehouse automation process, and we can see globally these processes or these factors are driving orders for Daifuku's products. On the right-hand side, we can see U.S. supplier delivery times have exploded higher. Our industry conversations indicate that budgets within companies for logistics improvement have risen dramatically, and that's exactly what we want to see for both Daifuku and Panasonic going forward. Now turning to Slide 25, I'll just go through an area we're finding increasingly appealing short opportunities in Asia, and that is Japanese restaurant chains. Japanese restaurant chains have been facing structural pressures for a number of decades now, as the population not only ages but declines. This adds a lot of pressure to their top line. In addition, restaurants face a disproportionate rise in wage costs as the government mandates minimum wage increases of 3%. Now, on the right-hand side, you can see consumer prices for eating out in Japan are rising around 1%, so they're already struggling to pass on the labor cost rise. One interesting catalyst of late is the explosion higher in corporate goods prices for food, so inputs for restaurants. That's rising at nearly 4%. That's been driven obviously by global price rises in food, as well as the devaluation of the yen, which increases the import costs. We see that margin squeeze coming through for structurally challenged businesses as presenting an appealing opportunity to create a basket of shorts that are particularly exposed to this. I'll now hand back to Rob to discuss other aspects of our Asia short strategy. Look, thanks, Shannon. In terms of other shorts we have on in the Asian fund, we have a short on the Australian consumer, which we believe has high efficacy, particularly in light of the most recent inflation data that we've seen this week and obviously a very substantial pending increase in the RBA cash rate, the extreme level of leverage that the Australian consumer has, and that is something that we've been focused on. We've got a number of other single stock shorts that have been successful. One, most recently, in the Australian technology space where there was egregious valuation, substantial insider selling, and that has proven to be a lucrative short. We have other single stock shorts and other basket shorts on which we're happy to talk about with investors in due course. You know, please feel free to contact Ingrid, and we're happy to take you through the outline. As always, we won't go into specifics. Just to wrap up the VG1 update, look, we're extremely excited by the opportunities we're seeing. The prices that we're able to add to positions in or either build positions in. The quality of the long portfolio we believe is the best it's ever been. We think that it's trading at a substantial discount to its fair value, and as a consequence, see substantial upside in the long portfolio. On the short side, we're seeing consistent opportunities. We're being active in terms of those opportunities, and we're on the lookout for ongoing signs of structural weakness and how we can execute on shorts in the region. Now, I'll wrap up there, and we'll hand it over to do some Q&A. I believe we've got a series of questions that have been sent through to Ingrid in advance and a number that are online. Marco, if you can take us through the questions, please. Thanks, Rob. We'll just move to Q&A now. As a reminder, if you'd like to submit a question, please type into the Ask a Question box on the website. We've gone a little bit over time, and we're unlikely to have time to cover all of the questions that are coming through today, but we'll do our best. If you still have a question after this session, please contact our investor relations team with your query. The first question here is, and I'll put a couple of these together, is on Pinterest and Qualtrics. You know, Pinterest and Qualtrics have been a drag on performance, but you still seem to have high conviction in the stocks. What is needed to help change investor sentiment? Rob, I'll hand that to you. Yeah. Okay. Well, look, I'll get into the two of those and then maybe if you wanna offer a view on Pinterest afterwards. Look, they're both stocks have come off considerably. Part of it is just general tech selloff. You know, anything that's been outside of the mega cap space has really come under pressure. That has been general multiple compression, sentiment changing very negatively. In the case of Pinterest, that's been accentuated by a substantial selloff in the social media space, which has very substantially impacted the Pinterest share price. Look, it's just recently reported, its, you know, an important set of results for the fact that it's shown, stabilization in users, which has been, rightly or wrongly, the key driver of share price and certainly sentiment. The users have stabilized at roughly 430 million monthly users. Impressively, and something that we've been very focused on, you know, the revenue per user continues to accelerate. You know, profitability continues to grow despite very substantial investment in the business. We believe that it remains an extremely well-placed digital business. It's not a social media company. It's a visual search company. It's a destination for people to search for ideas, for inspiration, and ultimately that gives advertisers users who have very high purchase intent. In turn, Pinterest are looking to engage with that audience and allow them to shop on the platform, which is an area that they're making substantial investments in. To put it in rough math, the company's currently at an enterprise value of $11 billion-$12 billion. That is a very modest market cap given the 430 million or so monthly average users, the revenue base, core earnings look like they could be making close to $1 billion over the next 12-24 months. That's an attractive, extremely attractive, valuation level given the growth. So I'd put Pinterest in the bucket of, you know, where Twitter was before Elon Musk got involved. I think it's extremely mispriced. I would've said that at a 30-- No, I did say that at a $30 or $35 share price. This is an environment where high-quality digital businesses have been substantially impacted. What will make that change? Look, perhaps some renewed corporate activity. Microsoft made an approach to the company about 12 months ago. Late last year, PayPal made an approach to the company. The controlling shareholder knocked them back. We'll see. Who knows what the catalyst could be? It's, you know, these things are hard to pick. We have high conviction in the situation. We think it's extremely mispriced. Look, I hate to dwell on it, but the Twitter example shows you that there can be a substantial disparity between where a share can trade at and where the ultimate value is. The bid price that Elon Musk has offered is not what we think Twitter's worth. It shows you the disparity that can take place. In terms of Qualtrics, they reported recently, revenue is growing over 50%. We continue to think that the revenue growth rate for that business is extremely high. It's in an extremely high growth new vertical of software, being, you know, experience management software, where they are the market leader. Their revenues are tracking well above $1 billion. Existing customers spend 128%, you know, retention rates. They spend 28% more this period on the product, on the software product than they did in the previous period. You know, they're very attractive metrics. We think it's an extremely mispriced asset. Again, it's a situation where the market price is substantially different to what we think fair value is. The catalyst, again, you know, fundamentals ultimately take their natural course, but it can take longer than anyone thinks. It's been disappointing, to say the least. You know, again, we're taking a long-term view. I hope that touches on it. It has been impactful to the Global Fund. The reality is we continue to have high conviction. We've added to these positions. We won't be adding any more because we feel like we've in both positions put at cost around 6%-7% of capital to work in both positions. We won't be putting any more to work and we'll wait for the share price to react to fundamentals over time. Next, we have a question on Amazon. Do you have any comments on the Amazon results that came out this morning? Okay. Thanks, Marco. I'll take that first and then I'll, Chris, hand it over to you for some follow on. Look, the results come out. It's a headline, a negative surprise and stocks sold off. You know, when we saw substantial growth, you know, lapping already very high rates of growth, that was a surprise to the upside. Amazon Web Services is very substantial value driver of the business. The advertising business continues to grow largely in line with what we were looking for. That's another huge value driver of the business. Where the surprise was is in e-commerce. Looks like they've got some more cost headwind and some more growing pains. This is something that they flagged already over the last number of results. They're building out their business not just in North America, but globally, expanding their footprint dramatically, their logistics capability dramatically. That sets the scene for a very powerful earnings pipeline over the medium to longer term. You know, we continue to have high conviction in the investment. Again, it's more than just an e-commerce business. It's the global leader in cloud computing. It's one of the global leaders in advertising, third biggest advertising business on the planet. Chris, do you have a comment? Yes. Thanks, Rob. Yeah, I'd just say that the consumer business at Amazon is still growing in the low 20% range on an annual basis over the last two years, which is higher than it was growing pre-pandemic. They've invested an extraordinary amount of money into their fulfillment network, et cetera, over the last two years, which will take some time to improve productivity and efficiencies. They've done this before, and they're very focused on it, and they should work their way out of this over the next two quarters. Okay, thanks. Marco? Thanks, Rob. We've had actually a lot of questions come through on the LIC discount, so I might hand over to you, Rob, to make some comments. Okay. Thanks, Marco. Look, you know, I've touched on the buybacks, and the buyback reinitiated for VG1 and the initiation of a buyback for VG8. You know, simply put, I guess there's a number of key drivers of you know, managing a LIC successfully and narrowing a discount or eliminating a discount. Now, obviously, there has to be strong performance, and that is something that we're very focused on in both the Global Fund and the Asian Fund. That's something that you know, me and the team have to deliver in due course. Yeah, in terms of other key factors and other key drivers outside of obviously the buyback that I mentioned, but you know, there has to be very strong shareholder engagement and regular communication. You know, other capital initiatives outside of buybacks, you know, being dividends, fully franked dividends. Obviously both VG1 and VG8 boards have indicated that both companies will be paying at least a 4% fully franked dividend going forward. Ultimately to bring it all together is you know strong alignment of interest between the manager and the underlying investors in those listed investment companies. In the case of VG1 and VG8, that is certainly the case with the investment team, in particular, having significant holdings in both VG1 and VG8. We do eat our own cooking. Hopefully that touches on the discount that those factors going forward will work in unison. You know, in particular underpinned by the abilities that Regal brings to the table in terms of its investor relations capabilities, marketing capabilities, but also you know, its general additional capabilities that can assist us with managing the Asian fund given their Asian expertise. In general, the additional skill sets that the Regal team will bring to both the management of VG1 and VG8. I hope that answers the question, and thanks. Thanks, Rob. We now have a question here on Asian tech. After the sell-off in various Asian technology sectors, where do you see the opportunities? Is Alibaba the only one you own? What else do you like? Okay. Just starting off with Asia tech. I might talk about this and then I'll hand over to you, Shannon. Look, yeah, there's been a substantial sell-off, but that started, you know, mid last year with China technology sell-off, which was driven really by regulatory changes which have continued, and that's dramatically punished all of the China technology companies regardless of quality or efficacy of business model. You know, we've continued to hold our position in Alibaba. It's been disappointing. So far the stock has traded very poorly. It's trading at a deep discount to what we think valuation is. Earnings are going through a hit at the moment due to government impacts, and I think the company, you know, self-regulating itself to a certain extent. But we see the sustainable earnings profile of the business as extremely attractive. Therefore we do own it. We haven't added to the position. We've kept our position from a number of months ago. We also do own Tencent. We've slightly added to that position at depressed prices. It's a very similar situation. We do think that Tencent and Alibaba are two of the best placed Chinese technology companies, but also have global growth aspects and profiles, particularly Tencent. In terms of where else do we see opportunity? Well, in the Japan technology space and particularly enterprise software, we've been building a number of positions in enterprise software, in companies that are leaders in the digital native leaders in accounting software, or in other types of enterprise solutions where we see, you know, extreme disparity between the stock price and the underlying value of the company, and distressed valuations. An example that I think I touched on before is, you know, Mercari, which is, you know, got an extremely high-quality consumer marketplace business in Japan, seeing substantial growth. Yes, there'll be fluctuations in that growth, but the growth is there. It also has a very high-quality U.S. business, and that is a holding of ours. It has been severely impacted over the last few months. Whether that's investor capitulation, whatever it is, you know, we've taken advantage of the weakness. You know, it's disappointing when you own businesses that you see long-term investment merit in them. They're trading at a fraction of what you think they're worth. Shannon, I don't know, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I'll just add on, Alibaba. What's really interesting is, when you engage with the company, to get perspective on their self-regulation. Obviously, a lot of what they did last year and into this year is improve margins for its own merchants on its platform by reducing the fees that they charge them. Optically, that also reduces headline earnings and results, which Alibaba's quite keen to do in this heightened regulatory pressure environment. We can clearly see that Alibaba still has the capacity in its underlying core business to dial back up those earnings drivers, and we can clearly see that there is, you know, potential for significant earnings growth above and beyond what we see as the market forecasting and applying very discounted valuations against. Another aspect that I think is interesting is, you know, Alibaba is... It's quite renowned for having aspects to its business that people don't really ascribe a valuation or price to. One that I point out to is the logistics business that they're building, Cainiao, which is, you know, very, very rapidly growing in, not just in China, but globally and part of Alibaba's global expansion plan. Now, we hear talk that Alibaba might look to IPO that business and recognize the value there, which would also reduce some of the near-term costs that have been capitalized in the valuation. We think this would be a real way for the company to, essentially transfer some benefit to shareholders and unlock value over coming quarters and years. Okay. Thanks, Shannon. Look, thank you everybody for joining the call today. You know, we've done our best to try and keep it short and sharp, but as usual, we've gone over. If you do have any more questions, and we know you do, please contact our investor relations team, particularly Ingrid, and she can help answer those questions. Obviously, the team is available to speak to our investors, if there's a very specific question or something in particular. You know, look, thank you very much for joining us. We're bullish on our global portfolio holdings. We're bullish on our Asian fund long portfolio holdings, and we continue to see opportunity on the short side. We appreciate your support, and thank you for joining us. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.