Hi, everybody. Welcome to Altron's pre-close call for the half year 2027. Today with me, I have our CFO, Carel Snyman. Unfortunately, Werner is ill and couldn't join us today, but he will be at the RMB Morgan Stanley conference in September, so you will have access to chat to him then. You would have seen the voluntary trading update published this morning on SENS. Carel will quickly take you through some of the key takeaways, and then we can open. The whole, yeah. Oh. Hi, guys. Good afternoon. I hope everybody can hear us. Thanks very much for taking time to come and listen to us. As Phil said, the voluntary operational update is out. Maybe just as a starting point, many of you attended the Capital Markets Day in June this year, where we laid out our plans for the next three years and the strategy for Altron. What we've done in the first five months until the end of July, or six months ending today, is execute on that plan. From our side, nothing has changed from a strategic perspective. We still are working towards the leading platform and data ecosystem. This is what we want Altron to become. Overall, I'm quite happy with the first five months of trading. As in business, there's always ups and downs, which I'll go through in a little bit more detail. But overall, I think, the business is much stronger and much more resilient than what it's been in the time that I've been here over the last three and a half years. That's evidenced through higher growth in revenue, EBITDA, operating profits, margin expansion. That's all driven by this deliberate move to become the multi-platform business that we want to be. That platform portfolio remains the growth engine of the group. You would have seen the metrics that we provided in terms of growth. But the business, the platform segment is 45% of our revenue and 95% of our profits, and we don't see any reason why that would go backwards going forward. Our aim is to improve that even further. With that also then comes healthier margins and healthier cash conversion. Overall, a more robust business from an annuity revenue, profits, cash consideration. Having said that, what we have done in the last five months and will continue to do for this year is invest behind this growth. Netstar specifically, we are deliberate in our investment spend into that business, and it is in multiple parts of the business. We need to improve and modernize the systems that the business runs on, because we will find ourselves in a situation where legacy systems can stop you from being able to scale. As all of you know, we are in a very competitive market. The need for this modernization of the business is critical, and we are currently in that process. On top of that, we are also investing behind customer acquisition, opening new revenue channels, new product sets. That's all because of our conviction in the business and its ability to deliver a high return on capital. Similarly, to a smaller scale, we are investing behind our FinTech business. That business continues to deliver very strong results. We want to be able to manage this growth and to be able to support it and be able to have a sustainable business for the long term. So investment is also going into the FinTech business. This is also all in line with what we said to you when we saw you at the capital markets day, and this is the strategy that we've set out for the next three years. I think the business, if you look at it from an H1 to H2 perspective, H2 will look like last year. It will be stronger than our H1 results, as you would expect from a platform business where you keep on adding to the subscriber base. That puts us in good stead going forward, for platforms specifically. If I maybe just switch over to our IT services business quickly. Our Altron Digital Business, as you might recall, turned profitable in H2 last year, and that has continued into this year. What is most promising to me for that business is that we've seen revenue growth come through. You would have seen in the last couple of reporting periods, it was a turnaround plan where we've taken deliberate corrective action costs out of the business. We've stepped away from non-profitable contracts. Now that revenue growth is starting to come through, which is very promising and which should put the business in good stead going forward. Revenue growth for us overall is now a very critical measure. We've done all of the fixing and growing, if you will, over the last couple of years. If we don't get the top line to move now, that would be problematic for the future. So that's a very strong drive for us. Some of the KPIs for our MDs in the business is all behind revenue growth. When we talk about revenue growth, this is profitable, high-quality revenue. This is what we're after. I think, having said all of this on the business, the IT services component of security is not performing the way that we want it to perform. Whereas the platform side of the security business in signing in on digital identity, that part of the business is doing well, even though there is a shift in some of the revenue recognition from H1 to H2. So on a like-for-like basis, that will come through later in the year. On IT services, we are not happy with the performance and we are currently going through corrective action in that business. It's a much smaller part of the security business, but still one that we want to perform better than what it currently is. Andrew and his team is busy looking at that business. This is just par for the course, I guess. Sometimes something goes for you, and other times it goes against you. It's the speed at which you can take corrective action that's important. I think, after all is said and done, the business is still financially very healthy. The balance sheet is strong. Post paying out the special dividend of about ZAR 750 million, the business is still in a net cash positive position, and the balance sheet is ungeared. Even though we are investing into the business, and even though we see top-line growth coming through, what's important to us is to maintain the discipline around capital the way we have in the past three years. One item that I just want to point out, again, we have mentioned it before, but in this year, our tax rate will normalize to 27% for the full year. That will have an impact on the numbers that we report. We've said it before, but I just thought it's worthwhile calling it out again. The last thing is the change in the depreciation in Netstar is now in the numbers, so there's no more normalization for that. The numbers that we will report will reflect that on a like-for-like basis. I think overall, we are sticking to our plan. We are transitioning the business into a multi-platform, high profitability, high cash conversion business. We are careful in how we allocate capital. We want to have the conviction that when we deploy it, that we have a high degree of certainty around return on that money. Our IT services business is now having a return to profitability puts us in good stead going forward. Overall, I think we're happy with the performance for the first five months. But, as always, there will be improvements that we would want to get out of it. Phil, have I missed anything? No. I think we're good. In the interest of time, I think we're going to open up. Sorry, guys. For questions now. Participants on the call, should you wish to ask a question, please raise your hand. You will be unmuted and requested to remain unmuted until Carel has answered the question. Alternatively, you are welcome to type your questions into the Q&A chat on the call. Are there any raised hands? Katherine Thompson from Edison. Hi there. Hi, Katherine. Yeah, you ready for my questions? Okay. Yeah, I've got a few. I just wanted to get my head around the kind of the revenue and the profit movements within the IT services segment. I think you didn't explicitly comment on the revenue progression in Security or Document Solutions. I'm assuming that a big factor was a revenue decline in Security. I'm not sure what happened with Document Solutions, whether we were kind of broadly flat there. Yeah, Katherine, maybe I can talk about that. Document Solutions, specifically, revenue is very close to flat. But that, as you will recall from that business transitioning to higher margin services and support and maintenance, we're seeing that changing the shape of the business. From a profitability perspective, the business continues to deliver profits. It continues to improve the margin, even though the revenue is flat or flattish. That's Document Solutions, specifically. Security, we are under pressure with the IT services part of Security. That's not grown as much as we wanted it to. I'd just say both of them, they're not an enormous contributor in terms of composition to revenue. Security in the IT services segment, the security part is the smallest part of the group. Altron Digital Business, ADB the largest. It is about more than twice the size of Altron Document Solutions. Then Altron Document Solutions and then security. Within ADB, could you kind of characterize what you are hearing from customers now? Are there any specific verticals that are improving? Any particular product lines or areas that are more popular than others? No, I want to say something that we have noticed on our side is just in the value proposition to our actual customers. When we sort of leverage the benefits of AI Factory into the offering, it is really something that they find beneficial and supports the ongoing growth of the business with that customer or the renewal of the contract. Okay. Katherine, I do not think that the broader market out there in South Africa has changed significantly from what it has been. I think it is still tough. But as Phil was saying, our ability to deliver our services more efficiently, a lot of that sits behind the growth that we are seeing. We have done some interesting work on AI Factory. It is too early to mention specific contracts, but they are in one or two POCs at the moment. The only thing I can tell you is whenever you take a product like that to a blue-chip customer, the decision-making process around wanting to move to POC is significantly faster than anything else. Clearly they see the value in it. We think there is value in it. So that is going to be interesting to see how that plays out. Okay. Can I just ask a question on Netstar? Talking about modernization of the systems, just trying to understand what that is going to entail. We are putting a whole new system in place, ERP system in place, D365. We have been busy with it for about 12 months already. You can imagine a business like that is 20, 30 years old, the systems are creaking. A lot of it is not able to cope with the amount of data and detail that we put through it. We have been careful about not going about it too quickly because we most certainly want to make sure that we plan the process correctly. It is required to make sure that we can actually scale the business. The subscriber base has grown significantly over the last three years. The number of data points flowing through that business is chalk and cheese to what it was. We now have to invest behind that to be able to extract the value that we think is in the business. Because at this stage, our visibility on that data and how difficult it is to get it is too slow. It is about the data intelligence, being able to utilize it to make better decisions in growing your subscriber base going forward. It is about integrating all of that into one system. Right. Okay, thanks. I will pass the mic over to someone else now. Let someone else have a chance. Thanks, Katherine. Next up we have Anthony Geard from Investec Securities. Ant, can you unmute yourself and we will take your questions? Sure. Thanks, Phil. Thanks, Carel. Can you hear me all right? Yeah. Good. Great. Can you just help me a little bit with the math? You are saying the group EBITDA and operating profit up low to mid-teens, and then we go through all the divisions, you are talking mid-teen or high teen. You have spoken about the services segment being a little bit disappointing, and I am just trying to understand the, make the connection between the narrative and actually what is going on. Digital Business has made a strong improvement. Then there seems to be a little bit of a wobble inside the Security business. Is that where there is a bit- Yeah -of profit slippage, which has really dragged down the overall group EBITDA growth? Correct. 100%. There are three things. It is the Security business, as you have pointed out now. In platforms, the Security business is just a delay in when we can recognize the revenue. That has shifted from H1 to H2. In the IT services part, the Security business is underperforming. Then overall, in our head office section, that is where we put the investment into AI Factory, which is bigger than what it was previously. Those are the three big sort of items bringing down the group number. Okay. Part of it is timing, part of it is services, where you are taking corrective action, and part of it is costs relating to AI Factory. Correct. Correct. Yeah. If I can just press a little bit, you said EBITDA and operating profits, low to mid-teen growth. Can we assume because of some leverage in the income statement that depreciation's not growing quite as quickly as EBITDA, that operating profit is still growing faster than EBITDA? I'd say either faster or the same. Yeah. With the margins. Yeah. Because the depreciation obviously steps up inside Netstar as you- Correct -continue to grow the top line. For other businesses, let's say like Altron FinTech, there's not really a reason for depreciation to be No stepping up a lot. Anthony, sorry, just on that. Altron FinTech, the depreciation is stepping up. Yeah. Because remember, their PaaS rental model is actually picking up quite a bit of steam. Whereas last year this time you would've had very little of that depreciation in Altron FinTech, and now it's in there. So it's both Netstar and Altron FinTech. Okay. Understood. Cool. Yeah. I am covered. Thank you so much. Yeah. Anthony, I think just to close off there, if you look at it from a margin perspective, I think it is fair to say that the EBITDA margin and the operating margin both increased slightly. Okay, cool. Thanks, Phil. Appreciate that. Any additional questions? Any hands up? Otherwise, I do have a question in the chat. I will read that one out. We have a question from Miles Fareed saying, "Given the group's strong cash generations and completely ungeared balance sheet, what is the current status of your M&A acquisition pipeline, particularly for bolt-on acquisitions in high margin platform segment? Miles, let me try and answer that. You are well aware of our capital allocation strategy and our preference always being to invest behind our businesses that we currently have, which we know better than anything else, and where we have a much higher conviction about a return on that investment. We will always be on the lookout for M&A activities and bolt-on acquisitions. We have recently looked at one or two acquisitions in South Africa. But these acquisitions simply do not stack up. They normally start off looking really good from a strategic perspective, giving us additional technology we do not have, giving us reach into markets that we do not have. Then when we start looking at the financials and the quality of earnings versus what the expectation is on valuation, we just cannot get there, because we simply do not have the conviction that we can make a return on that. From my perspective, if we cannot find something that we fully believe in, and that we can make the numbers work, we are not going to buy it, because we have no pressure to do acquisitions. All of our businesses are growing healthily. We are investing behind them. The markets that they operate in are not mature, so there is a lot of runway for us. That is going to be our preference. We will stick to the capital allocation strategy that we have. If we find something and it makes sense and it gives us the ability that we do not currently have and we can make the valuation work, well, then we will look at it. Okay. Another question from Miles. "Following the ZAR 800 million CapEx spend in FY 2026, will the investment rate remain at a similar level for FY 2027? And what is the current split between growth and maintenance CapEx across the group? Yeah, I think nothing has changed. I mean, the majority of our CapEx goes to growth. We are very strict on maintenance CapEx and limiting that to the bare minimum. The nice to haves kind of stuff, we do not really want to do that. If you look at growth CapEx, the bulk of our growth CapEx is behind rental devices in Netstar and now increasingly more in the FinTech business. I always remind everybody that those devices are backed by a three to five year revenue contract once you have signed up and get the customer or put the customer on your base. I cannot give a number on CapEx. We will spend as much as we can as quickly as we can, provided that the growth is there. I think the shape of our CapEx will always be the same. Our preference is towards growth and not maintenance. That is not going to change. The last question from Miles: "With your black-owned status rising significantly from 38%- 63%, which operating businesses should benefit the most from this improved procurement credentials over the next 12-24 months? Look, I think it affects all of our businesses to some or other extent. We do business with blue chip listed companies. We do business with government entities, and across the board, your improved BEE credentials and your BEE rating is critically important. It is difficult to say that one business will benefit more than that, because it is only one element of procurement. Obviously, you still need to bid, and you still need to go through tender, and you still need to win the bid. We are very happy about our BEE rating. I think it now fairly reflects our Black ownership in the company after the work that was recently done. Yeah. We've got five minutes left. I just want to check any other raised hands or I've got two more questions in the Q&A chat. Let me read those out. So, "With ADS performing better, is it available for sale again?" This is from Sven Thordsen from Anchor Securities. No. We've said this previously. We look at the portfolio every six to eight or 12 months, and we have a look at what's on the table, and we run the businesses for long-term growth. We don't have the idea of turning something around to put it back on the market. So ADS is part of the group until such time that it's not. There are no plans at this stage for us to change that. Okay, and then the last question, it's Kahu from Nitrogen Fund Managers. Are you able to speak to the revenue and EBITDA composition of Altron Security in terms of IT services and platforms? I would say it's predominantly platforms. No, I don't think we can go into that much detail, no. We won't give you the detail, but in terms of contribution, platforms. Yeah, the platform side is the bigger part of the security business. That was actually mentioned in the full year 2026 results. Yeah. That remains the case. one last question. I think that will have to be the last question. We have Sihle. You can unmute yourself, from Fort. Hi, guys. I hope you are doing good. Hi there. Hi. Yeah, all good. Just to speak about, let's start quickly. Could you just give us a sense as to within the SA business? I know you spoke about there was some strong performance there. Can you just give us a sense as to which customers contributed to the strong performance? Like I said, the consumer side or is it the OEM or the enterprise side? Also just maybe giving us a sense as to whether there was some margin improvements over this period. If there was, are you just seeing it more from a GP margin perspective, or there's some cost savings that were offsetting those investments into [inaudible]? That's it. Maybe from where the growth is coming from. We have seen a strong performance from the OEM side. But remember that is low margin, because we sell the device, we get paid up front. Then it's up to us to convert that to a subscriber later on. But that's been a strong contribution to the business. Then I think in enterprise, we've also seen some good growth. Not all the go-to markets in enterprise. Some of them we're still a little bit behind. Our digital and direct, it's not at the levels where we want it to be at this stage. But overall enterprise is doing well. Then, for us on the consumer side, we've done quite a bit on the retention side on consumers. From a churn perspective, keeping people on the base, keeping them active, there's been quite a bit of work that's gone into that. Which is together with new customers, that is always my focus area because you've already invested behind this customer. You want them to stay on the base for as long as possible. So that's sort of the spread between the lot. I don't know, Phil, you got- Yeah, I think we said that the margins expanded, and I'd say it's more so the EBITDA margin than the operating profit margin. But they both have expanded year to date. Okay, understood. Was it more so just getting some cost saving on the OpEx line or, maybe some mix shift from a GP margin perspective there for you? Just give us a sense. No, it is the ramp-up in depreciation. That is the only difference there. Yeah. Okay. I think that is it. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Carel. Sure. If there are any other questions or you need any additional information, please feel free to reach out to me. Thank you. That is it. Thanks, everybody. Have a good afternoon.