Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah. We putting on a show today. Welcome to Astral Foods Limited. Interim results for the six months ended 31st of March 2022. We will not be giving you the budget today, unfortunately. A special welcome to Dr. Theunis Eloff, Chairman of Astral, and happy birthday, Theuns. Chris is today joined by a team and, so you will see today Dries Ferreira, CFO, won't be presenting. We're giving the other Daan Ferreira the chance to show his feathers. We've got Gary Arnold, Group COO. We've got Obed Lukhele, he's MD Poultry Agriculture. We've got Michael Schmitz, he is MD Feed. We've got Frans van Heerden, and he is MD Poultry Commercial. We've got some other Astral guys in the audience as well. Just a couple of household rules. If you want to ask a question, can I ask you to just wait for the microphone and I will bring it to you because otherwise no one will be able to hear your question. Then also the Q&A will be after the presentation. I would like to hand over to Chris to take you through an excellent set of results. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Marlize. What happens when somebody steal your opening line, I have to... Theuns, bye. Welcome, and also happy birthday to you. I have my team here, Gary, Dries. Marlize, I've got nothing to say except welcome and thank you for taking interest in Astral. It's absolutely great, and it was very necessary for Astral to come down and make one-on-one contact again. A lot of people said, "It's not good. People won't join you." We wanted to come because we know over the years we've built very good relationships by meeting eye to eye. Thank you for those. There's a couple of young and new faces. Great. Thank you for that. Then there's the old stalwarts here. I can see four of them. Welcome. We're gonna go through the results. Myself will present the upfront part. Gary will do the operational side. Dries Ferreira, also a D. Ferreira, Dan, Dries. It's the only way we could save on admin cost is to get somebody with the same initials. I'll talk a bit about the strategic matters and the outlook. We have also bring on one or two new slides, and you can give us an indication if it's of any value to you. That was over the past two years, people started to ask different kind of question. We thought we'll build something on that. When we get to them, we'll try and talk through it. Once again, thank you for taking Astral. We hope to be out of here by 12:00 P.M. The salient points for the group. We all know that raw materials increased sharply over the period, and we know why, global fundamentals. Broiler production efficiencies improved with a net benefit continuing to be realized through the revised feeding program, and we can talk a lot about that, too, in part offset higher broiler cost. There's a net benefit and I will talk about it a bit later. Poultry margins improved but were partially recovered, not in totality. We still sit with extraordinary costs linked to load shedding, water supply interruptions and ongoing health protocols. That's something three years ago we didn't have. Now it's there and it's almost part of your budget. We still have continued high levels of imports, came off 6% year-on-year. No massive move as what was suggested at the time by the minister on the higher import tariffs or the anti-dumping tariffs. We know this is an issue and poultry is a commodity and it's the cheapest source of meat protein. Unemployment, disposable income will have an impact on chicken sales. The social grant is something we don't know what it's doing. It seems like that ZAR 350, most of it is going towards chicken. We haven't seen a reduction in sales over the past year, not for one day. Our production, remember, it's now at a higher level. We now no longer slaughter 5.5 million birds, but 5.8 million birds. That expansion at Olifantsfontein, all those birds are sold. There's something in this informal market that we're gonna have to suss out what it is. We sell all our production. It's not that less birds are produced. SAPA are still producing the 21.5 million birds per week, and the imports are still high. There's a pull on poultry, and it is maybe because of the prices of other meat protein sources. One will have to go and do that sum. We have now sold our business in Swaziland. Most of you will know why. That country is going nowhere, no growth, no opportunities. We sold it to our partner. The Mozambique feed and poultry assets expected to be closed by the end of this financial year. Then we're out of those two countries that are technically bankrupt and who don't pose any growth opportunities. Indirectly, we're gonna channel that money to Zambia. Zambia is looking great. You will see in the financials later on that Gary will present. Zambia had a massive increase. It's looking stable under the new government. The currency is improving, so it seems like there's a window to take some of your money there. We've been there for 20 years. I think we can say that it was a resilient performance under ongoing tough market and operational conditions. You will know what that is. The consumer, the high input cost, the energy, the demise of municipalities, the strikes, the looting, the flooding. You farm chicken, you know. You have to move it on a minute-per-minute basis. You can't stand and wait and for bill to be bridged. You have to make plans. It all come at a cost. Under difficult conditions, I think, or we think it was a fair result for the period, huh, Anthony? It was. Is that all right? This is all our green arrows. There we go. Revenue up to ZAR 9.4 billion. If you bring in the discontinued ZAR 9.5 billion. Revenue up 26%, driven by higher sales volumes in the poultry division and also higher selling prices in the feed division because the raw material price was higher. Profit, PBIT operating profit ZAR 785 million. It's one of our best halves in our history. I think it's the third best. Profit for the period ZAR 562 up ZAR 145. Headline earnings ZAR 14.20, ZAR 1.30. Then the surprise based on our affordability and what's the other one? Solvency test we did. We moved away from the 2x cover, which is our stated strategy. It was discussed at board level. It was agreed by the members that our shareholders should be remunerated for sticking to Astral and, hence, almost a 1.8 cover at 790. I think that was the surprise. Just a quick divisional overview. Feed, raw material cost up sharply. Internal feed requirements increased because we placed more birds. We also changed our feeding program that made the birds eat slightly more feed. External sales volumes also increased, so that's a good set of results for the feed division. Expenses well controlled. Stable rand per ton margin. If you put that together, I mean, the feed division is like a rock. It's always there. On the poultry side, we changed the feeding program, and that also links to that. The broiler performance improved on top of the fact that we changed the feeding program, and Gary will explain that. Broiler sales volumes increased. Broiler sales prices increased. All the other things besides non-feed was very well controlled in line with inflation. Zambia doing well. ZAR 40 million of ZAR 10 million. Hey, Gary? Compared to ZAR 10 million. This is the graph that some of you. If I'm in front of you, please tell me. For you who don't know this slide, this is actually the story about poultry. This is not real prices. This is the change in price from on an index. The yellow is how the price changed versus the prior period. This price came down versus the previous period. That went up versus that period, so it's the movement. There you can see that massive spike in the feed prices. We introduced our new feeding range, and it actually brought the price of broiler feed down for us. Not raw materials, the cost of the feed. Of course, right here we had some benefits. Now we see even at that feeding regime, raw material prices are going back up again. This was a small benefit to Astral that we could bring our feed cost down, and not give too much away in our performance efficiencies. The blue line, of course, the change in broiler selling price. You can see that over a period of time, there were small efforts to try and catch up this yellow line, and it wasn't done very well. Besides this time around now, we could move prices. The market was well-balanced, and you had to recover that. Otherwise, you don't have a business. That price increase is there. The change on this year is to recover that. This is a new slide. This is for AMIE. What we tried to do here, Chris, is depict the broiler net margin from 2013, and this is real margin. There was a negative margin on broilers of 0.5%. I think first of all you must look at the volatility. You can see that it's all over. Positive 6% net margin on broilers. Look, it's because the broiler price came down. You can see where the dips, your margin go up. Where it goes up, your margin comes down. This is something for the future. I think it's a very good illustration. Look, if the price comes down for a prolonged period of feed, how your margin just increase without necessarily moving your price. Over the last four periods, that's the argument where AMIE now says we're profiteering and they must take away VAT and take away all that. It's a lot of hogwash. There's our margins. Look at that. -3%, flat, 0.1%, 1% and now 4.7%. There is no profiteering in the poultry industry. There's the facts. At the same time, look at the broiler price just going north. There's no profiteering. We're not fat cats. There's the margin history audited in our annual results. To work on a 4.7% margin in this volatile business, this point in time is paper thin. If you sneeze, it's gone. You agree, Chris? You need 10% in this business to have a sustainable business, enough money to reinvest. I mean, if this kind of stuff happened to you don't have money to reinvest. Where we did make money, and we've got a nice slide on that, all that money, surplus of the tax and the dividend is put directly back into the business to create growth for our shareholders. There's a nice slide that indicate that. I don't know if you like that slide. Is it something, Charles, that you can work with? It's a test today. If you don't like it, we chuck it out. The waterfall that tells the story of the period. How did we move from ZAR 336 million operating profit to ZAR 785 million? Which is this jump of 140-odd percent. How did it happen? First of all, Anthony, I think this could have been a bit of a surprise to you, is we were very strong, and we didn't know that earlier in the year, how strong we can force prices down. We did three of them, and they were all taken up by the retailers. The question is always if the retailer accept your price, will the consumer pay it? You have to wait a month or two and look at that. As we stand here today, we sell all our chickens daily, and we're a bit short. Those price increases that stick, and it worked well. It doesn't make chicken that expensive. It's still the cheapest protein, but at least we can recover our raw material and energy input cost. The negatives, the raw material cost, the move in the raw material cost to make that profit or to grow the birds to 40. Broiler feed cost. Non-feed cost, ZAR 139. We sold more chicken. Our expansion, and we sold out of stock. Our stock at the closing period of the comparative year was quite high. It's now extremely low. A lot of product moved out of stock. That volume is a benefit there. There's the feed story. Feed conversion efficiency, we lost a bit because we fed a lower density feed to try and bring down the cost, because higher material, raw material prices are high, you feed denser, so you put less of those expensive in. Your diet is less denser, so the bird will eat a bit more to get the same weight. We calculate it, so it was a management decision. The benefit at the end of the day, the fiscal, the financial benefit was ZAR 75 million. Gary, this thing is busy. The net of that was still a ZAR 50 million benefit. If you want to know more about the science of that, both Gary and Dr. Obed Lukhele is here to explain to you. Net benefit, ZAR 50 million. Selling of one of our subsidiaries, Swaziland, and this is the total movement of all the other activities in the company. I see the key thing is we did have the ability to move the price at a higher volume. I think that's almost the story of this result. Gary will go a bit into the raw materials and then into the operations, and then we'll talk again. Thank you, Chris. Morning. Good to see you again. As Chris has already said, it's a pleasure to be in the Cape and once again one on one. I'm gonna cover the operational aspects of this. Raw material. I think this balance sheet, I'm not gonna go into detail. What we wanted to highlight here was really that South Africa, and with the forthcoming crop that we're going to harvest now, has had three good crops in a row. Anyone on the back of this would expect fundamental fixed price that at least reflects local production, yet it does. I think you all know what's happening in markets. It gives us an implied price of around ZAR 2,800-ZAR 2,900 a ton. That's on historical data. ZAR 2,900 ton. We're certainly not trading that market at the moment, notwithstanding the fact that we're going to see a 15 million ton maize crop for South Africa. What's happening on Safex? I think this tells us we've seen constant increases in cost in the maize price. This rally in our past six months has really been quite dramatic. It's difficult to read the markets. I think you've seen in the last weeks looking at the data yesterday, I mean, maize has moved ZAR 300 a ton on Safex. All are currently full of wheat. The U.S. is behind, so their planting rate is slow. It's very wet. A number of factors actually supporting these high. With the American weather, drought in South America, the La Niña that we're experiencing currently, wet weather for us, America, Brazil and Argentina, dry weather. Increase in the prices here supported by drier weather. Supported by drier weather in South America and we see this dramatic increase in prices. Little bit of relief just recently, but again, the exchange rate playing a factor in local pricing for soy meal. The feed division is Michael Schmitz, MD for Feed. This is his division. We've seen revenue growth for the period that's driven by higher feed prices and sales volume growth in sales volumes, up 13.8%. Average selling price is up 6.7%, and volume's up 7.6%. I'll go into a little bit more detail on the next slide there. Operating profit up 2.9%. You'll see net margins come down on the comparable period from 6.7% to 6%. That's merely a factor of the higher revenue. Stable rand per ton margins, higher revenue, just the percentage comes off. No, not in trouble with margins in this division, just the fact that we've got higher revenue. The rand per ton margin's stable, and Chris already mentioned that expense is well controlled. This is just what we've seen on the previous slides, so it tells a story. Those are input costs with feed making up 70% of the live cost of a broiler. You have these spikes in coarse grain prices, maize, and soy meal, and of course, we see this escalation in the feed price. There is some further detail on that in a couple of slides. Internal sales volume growth driven by the higher slaughter numbers. We've actually reduced more birds into the expanded capacity, so we've used more feed to feed those. With a change in the feeding program, which was a management decision, we lost a little bit of feed conversion efficiency, so the birds eating a little bit more feed for the same body weight gain. However, that feed price was better than where we were before in the comparable period. The raw material costs are catching up again. The feed price year-on-year, you'll see in a couple of slides, there's a marginal increase in the feed price, but it was really on the back of the feeding program change, managing that, and then the raw material costs that are coming in. External volumes increased slightly 2.5%. We've seen increased sales into the pig and poultry sectors, but all livestock sectors under tremendous stress and strain with the feed input costs, and some of them have only just recently managed to get price increases through to their respective markets. We've spoken about the expenses and the stable net margin. Sales mix, you can see that, internal requirement for feed up slightly 62% of our sales mix up from 647,328 tons to 691,352 tons. Around about 110,000 tons a month of feed that the feed division is producing and selling. The commercial poultry division, just a consolidated view here for the poultry division. This includes both commercial and agriculture. Revenue up 28.6%, driven by an increase in the sales volumes. Approximately a quarter of that growth in sales volumes or sales out of stock, the balance being the expanded volumes in the new capacity that was commissioned in 2020. We've spoken already about selling prices up 13.4% and breeder revenue up 13.8%. The breeder revenue is principally sales out of Ross Poultry Breeders and a company called National Chicks. We've increased our sales in parent stock, male chicks, and hatching eggs. Chris spoke earlier on about a 4.7% margin. That is the broiler net margin. The 5.7% reflected here is the total poultry division, so that includes the breeder segment as well. The breeder operations coming in lifted the margin 4.7%-5.7%, but off a very low base of 1% in the comparable period. That broiler margin of 4.7% off a negative margin in the comparable period of -0.2%. This broiler feed price doesn't look like a big jump in the feed price, but you must recall we've changed the feeding program. The feed price came off, but raw material costs have still continued to increase. We've seen an increase in the feed price, but through that management decision, we've managed to control that increase somewhat. We benefited from economies of scale, so the additional volumes going through the business obviously have a positive impact on fixed costs and, that's all linked to an increase in broiler slaughter numbers. We've already spoken about sales volumes increasing. The broiler margin's 4.7%, and as Chris said, still relatively thin there. The sales mix positively impacted by further increase in QSR and fresh sales. We've grown sales volumes in this division. You'll see that in the sales mix, the proportion of sales relatively the same in QSR and fresh, but of a much higher sales volume level. We have increased our sales volume-wise into the fresh and QSR sector. We've managed, Frans and his team contain overhead expense increases here to well below inflationary levels. You know, these costs in this division continue to be impacted by the load shedding and more recently, water supply disruptions, not only to the plant in Standerton, but the Festive plant in Olifantsfontein. Disruptions to those operations, you'll see that has a negative effect on our ability to slaughter the birds. We have to put in more shifts to catch up, and that does come at a cost. Sales mix in that division, you can see fresh relatively the same year-on-year, and the QSR that we spoke about, value added, relatively the same, but on a much higher sales volume base. We have grown our fresh volumes and QSR volumes into the market, with the rest of the basket remaining relatively stable. In the farming division, we've already spoken about the higher parent stock sales. The Ross bird, we continue to increase sales into the market, and the market share once again has increased for the Ross bird. Broiler production efficiency improvement, I'll talk about that on the next slide. Non-feed costs, Chris has already alluded to earlier on. I think the point to highlight from this slide is the bird flu situation, highly pathogenic avian influenza. It is still prevalent in the country. The wild bird sampling, and Dr. Petra Keller is here with us today. He can tell you a lot more about it. Through the wild bird sampling that we're doing as an industry together with SAPA, there's a high prevalence rate of H5 and H7 viruses, highly pathogenic AI viruses amongst wild birds. It continues to be a threat, is a concern, and we've spoken about this before with the outbreaks in Europe in their past winter season, been a concern for us. Broiler production efficiencies. This is what disruptions, load shedding and water supply disruptions do. It's pushed the age of our birds out slightly. That represents about 12 hours, half a day. The birds here, the average age around 33 days, achieving a good body weight. The metric that is important here is the average daily gain. How much weight did the birds gain on average every day? That's improved for the first six months of this year. A good improvement in average daily gain. Feed conversion, we've spoken about. You can see improving over the years as we've matched genetic improvement with our feeding program. Even with the change in the feeding program that we made in February of last year, you can see that we've achieved a good feed conversion rate. The amount of feed that the birds have consumed for every kilo of body weight gain. Mortality coming off for those six months, coming off a high base and well controlled. Then, of course, all of these metrics rolling up into PEF, and we've seen an improvement in performance efficiency factor for the first six months. Other Africa. Chris has already alluded to the Zambian performance, posting a profit of ZAR 43 million for the year. That is between the feed and the poultry operations for Zambia. Good margin, 20.3%. Those are the kind of margins that you wanna see in Africa. With the volatility that you do see in these countries, you need good returns on your investment, and we'll be looking at Zambia for further investment. Industry matters. Anthony put out a note early this morning. I saw an email regarding poultry imports. The spike in March, 53,000 tons. That was the local importers filling up the AGOA quota, so they had to fill that up. It's an annual quota, which is free of the U.S. anti-dumping duty. So the import is filling up that quota for the year. But you can see that imports remaining fairly high and still equaling around 24% of local consumption. There are the stats. Only down 5.9% on the comparable period. Chris mentioned the slaughter numbers for the industry early on. They're up around 300,000 birds a week of 20.9 million birds a week in the comparable period. I think the important point is the provisional anti-dumping duties that were promulgated in December. These duties expire in June. ITAC has gone and called for comment from all stakeholders. We've seen AMIE making comments on this. Brazil have obviously come back. They were impacted by these anti-dumping duties. We await ITAC's outcome, or their decision on this. We can't see that they will change their decision. Their findings report when they introduced these duties in December was that there was evidence of financial harm to the local industry and dumping. Can't imagine that they would change their decision now. I'm gonna hand over to Dries Ferreira, who'll take you through the financials. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chris. Morning, everyone. I'll be taking you through the finance for Astral just to pull everything together from a group perspective. Just a maybe unnecessary reminder, but this is the income statement for the group as an integrated poultry producer, which resulted in turnover up 26% at ZAR 9.4 billion. What's interesting there is that the poultry division makes up 82% of that revenue. That converted into a profit number of ZAR 762 million at operating level, which is up strongly at 127%. We've got the profit from the disposal of Swaziland in at ZAR 23 million, giving us a net margin of 8.3% for the group. There's no real surprises in the rest of the P&L. I'd like to jump to the EPS and the HEPS. The EPS up 146%, and the headline earnings being up 138% at ZAR 14.20. The main difference between these two is the net gain made on the disposal of Swaziland. Just to point out that we are actually comparing H1 2021 compared to H1 2022. You will see that the revenue for the group increased. It made almost a step change from here, from this point, and this mainly reflects the flow-through of the increased volume that the group invested in, the processing plants and that volume is starting to come through the business. What also supports that revenue growth is the theme that we picked up in the presentation up to now is the strong push on the costs on the soft commodities that's starting to filter into the selling prices. That's clearly being recovered from the market also, which is important in resulting in the 8.3% net margin that we've got there. It's interesting to see the step from the 4.5%, the 3.36% to the 8.3% there, mainly as a result of better efficiencies and cost recoveries. Also maybe just pointing out that we did in the past make good margins in the 2018 financial year, and that profit, as Chris pointed out, was reinvested in the business. That created the platform to be able to grow volumes for the group. On the feed, also again, comparing this first half 2021 to the first half 2022, you can see there's a strong increase in the revenue here, and this is also linking with the theme of the fact that if you look at the change in the feed price and the change in the volume separately, you'll notice that there's an increase in the feed price because of the soft commodity price increases that's filtering into the selling prices. Relatively small movement on the volume, mainly internal for the group. The external portion of the volume in the last six months was the lower part. It's 2.5% growth. That obviously then filtering into the poultry division in terms of the higher costs of feed. On the poultry division, we also see the step-up in the revenue. We're picking up on the higher cost that's been recovered from the market, as well as the strong increase in the volume that's off the back of the investments made after 2018. Here, too, we've got the selling prices and the volume being depicted here, which supports these graphs. On the operating profit for the group, we've got a very stable performance, as you can see in these gold bars from the feed division. Chris also pointed out that it's a very solid performance and reliable performance from our feed division. What is interesting, however, here is you see the volatility in these blue bars, which is the poultry division. What we have here is we've plotted the change in feed price on the red line and the change in the broiler selling prices, the green line. As you can see, the ability to recover the movement in the feed price from the market, where we've got the opening between these two lines resulting in the volatility up and down in terms of the profitability for the poultry division. What we have here, comparing H1 2021 to H1 2022, you can see that poultry was under strain, not being able to recover its higher input costs in the past, and now being able to recover that to, on the broiler side of 4.7% margin, feed overall, close on a 6% margin. On the balance sheet, I've got a couple of extra slides which I will talk to. I'm just gonna pick on the key points here. On the non-current assets, excluding right of use, and we've got right of use assets separately lined up here. Very small movement, 1% down on the non-current assets. The right of use assets, 5% up, and that goes with the lease liabilities. That's 3% up, and that's really just the capitalization of the longer-term leases that we have profiled on our balance sheet. On the net assets held for sale, you'll see there's a strong decrease in the net assets held for sale. That is reflecting the disposal of our interest in Swaziland. The remaining balance there is the interest in Mozambique. Net working capital is down 11%. I'll touch on that in the next slide. We've got non-current liabilities, excluding borrowings and leases, being up 5%. That's two main drivers there. That's the longer-term employee related provisions, as well as the deferred tax liabilities that's being where we're utilizing the allowances from SARS available to the group as we're making stronger profits in our farming division. I've touched on the lease liabilities. Our net assets down 7%, mainly as a result of the movement in the net working, our net working capital. Our surplus cash of ZAR 900 million, up strongly reflecting the conversion of our trading activities into profit and back into cash. The equity net movement of, from ZAR 4.1 billion to ZAR 4.5 billion, reflecting the profits less the dividends that we made in the last six months. Just to unpack the non-current assets, there's three components to take note of here. Firstly, depreciation and amortization, which reduces the carry value of our net non-current assets at ZAR 162 million. Somewhat down from the comparable period by ZAR 213 million. The main movement there being the right of use assets. Depreciation that's come off in a transitional phase where we're changing some of our larger contracts. That run rate is expected to pick up again to the normalized run rate from the second half. CapEx spend is a bit, it reflects on the lower end at ZAR 90 million compared to ZAR 221 million. Here we are dealing with some just some timing issues on our CapEx. We've got. You've got to understand. You've got to read that with our commitments of ZAR 440 million, where we've got strong CapEx programs lining up. We've got most of this that will be spent in the next couple of months, but also some of that will flow into the next financial year. Overall view on the capital expenditure, we're dealing with some timing issues on the CapEx, just timing of projects that will come through in the second half, and that's reflected in the outstanding commitments. On the working capital. Biological assets. You see there's a small movement up on the biological assets by ZAR 13 million, merely reflecting the higher invested base of chickens that we have on our farms, and also some level of the cost increase of the feed price that goes into that. That you can also link with the feed increase. Here you can see it's more exposed, the fact that the feed cost, the input, the soft commodities are actually filtering into the balance sheet. On the poultry inventory, you'll see there's a strong drop-off in the carrying value of inventory. That reflects, as pointed out earlier in the presentation, the sales out of stock in the poultry division. Trade receivables up by ZAR 200 million. This is a healthy growth linked to the strong sales performance of the group. All of this is already banked into cash subsequent to the interim period cutoff after March. We've got the current liabilities that is mainly linked with the working capital cycle that has also followed suit and increased related to the higher levels of trade that we are seeing. On the cash flow statement, important number for us is this cash generated from operating activities. That's north of ZAR 1 billion. Very strong performance. That's relating the strong performance of the poultry division mainly that's recovered, and all of that profits converting into cash. No real surprises from the cash flow statement running down. We've got the tax paid that's up, that links in with the high profits. We've got the CapEx that I've discussed earlier. We've got the proceeds from the disposal of assets held for sale. That's the proceeds from Swaziland. We received ZAR 51 million. There was ZAR 6 million on the balance sheet that we disposed, so the net proceeds being ZAR 45 million. Dividends paid ZAR 145 million, leaving us with net movement in cash of ZAR 639 million. That translates adding the opening balance, leaving us with ZAR 909 million of cash on the balance sheet. In summary, the theme that's been flowing through the income statement and the balance sheet for the group is better trading environment for Astral. Pick up in sales volumes, pick up a recovery of costs from the market, translating into good profits. Those profits converting into cash, some of it being invested into CapEx, leaving the group in a position to declare a dividend of ZAR 7.90 per share. Thank you. I'd like to hand back to Chris. How do you think he did on that? Was he comfortable? Huh? Did you follow him, Chris? I lost him twice there, but well done, Dries. Just a bit on strategy. Sometimes we talk strategy, and you think, "Yeah, they say best cost." But this year we did a quite a detailed exercise from academic point of view, presented it to our board where this comes from, and this is all textbook stuff. Remember the old Michael Porter books? This is an extract from that in a new book in South Africa. When we look at our business and we go and define our strategy, we talk about a best cost provider strategy, and that is what we focus on. It was not just something taken from somewhere. We've worked through it and see where we fit in and what aligns with our business. We're not all of a sudden becoming academics, but there is some thinking behind the straightforward strategy. We also declared at our strategic plan that we will not. That actually came from questionnaires sent out to our shareholders and analysts about diversification. Everybody said, "No. You try and do what you do best. We will diversify if we want to in our portfolios." I had to put that to the board that there is no requirement or need or pressure to move away from poultry into other disciplines. That is there for the next three years. The defined strategy is that we strive to be the lowest-cost integrated poultry producer in selected South African countries, and this was confirmed now in March 2000. That's there. If you had doubts about where we're going with your business, we're gonna try and do what we do every day and try and improve every day on that. This is a new slide. This is actually for you as the shareholders. You see us talking about CapEx and volume growth. This is an illustration and it was not easy to do this graph that is here, and we'll keep on doing. That was our volumes in 2001. 1.5 million birds per week. We're now at six million birds a week. You see? That's how we've grown. This is your money, the CapEx that we invested and applied, and there's all the projects to get that volumes. We talk about a CEO's job as one of the key things is capital allocation. What we wanna prove here is the capital that we did allocate with support from the board gave us that growth, took us into by far the number one poultry producers in South Africa. Your money spent on projects that, not one of that projects had a payback of more than four years. It was all three point what? Some was two years. There's still a couple more to come in the near future. We spend your money. Just go back. We spent the money on capacity and efficiencies. There's the volumes, and in the figures of today you saw that we're selling that volumes at a fair margin. That's that. Now, I hope it will help somehow. Just to give you a bit of comfort what we do with your capital. Strategic update. Investment program has continuously created new jobs in the group. I think we're all responsible to create new permanent jobs. What we also said at the strategic plan presented to the board is if we don't do anything more, if we don't spend one cent on capacity, by April 2023, the company will run fire on all eight cylinders. Running full capacity at 6.2 million birds. So that's it there. Is it done or not? You know, subsequent to that we agreed there's a couple of programs after that to try and further increase our capacity. Because the key thing is, and I think we said here, the more birds we sell, the more benefit right through your integration. Sell more feed, you breed more broiler birds, you rear more, you do that, your labs work at full capacity. One more bird sold benefits the whole integration. My job is to keep on growing the top line, and you do that in two ways, in volumes and a decent price. Selling price. If we don't do anything, that's the situation. Now almost double that of Rainbow. A number of efficiency expenditure projects is currently under discussion. We've got that ZAR 909 million. It's money made. We'll pay out the dividend, the rest we'll reinvest into further efficiencies and volume growth. They also get the economies of scale benefits. Remember your fixed cost is there, so if more chicken you put in, your fixed cost reduce. That is currently working for us. There's our strategy. It creates unique value from our brands. Goldi is now rated the number one brand in the country again. By far exceeded the Rainbow brand. Not that we were in a fight, it's what the consumers said. County Fair is a very strong brand. Again, confirming our strategy, so you can go home, feel at ease that Astral is not, because it's got a bit of money, or become arrogant, or is gonna start buying up a lot of gunk and add it on to look good. We're gonna stick to our guns for at least the next three years. To further improve on efficiencies and make sure that the capital expenditure is there for volume growth and efficiencies, and there will be good returns on that. This is for you. Shaw, this slide is for you. Yeah. There's for you. First time they said to me ESG, I had a very different understanding of ESG. What we did also at the board meeting, we said, "We'll play this little game." Just remember all these things we have already done part of it, maybe not 100%. This is not all of a sudden eyeopener to us, ESG. It's just a different way in reporting on it. We've done it. This thing is gonna have negative impact on companies. Watch it. It's gonna make somebody else a hell of a lot of money. Be careful of this. We've had a couple of articles, Dawn, coming out later on where people say it's the devil. You know, do your things, but to now go and report it and get scored on it and your financial performance is linked to it and your incentives is linked to it, people are gonna do the wrong things for the wrong reason. We've seen that in one or two companies that are actually in trouble because they focus too much on ESG. However, it's the stakeholders. Astral's proud to report that the volume growth in the past 15 years resulted in no requirement to retrench staff or jobs. That's part of the sustainability part. COVID, right. We have never retrenched one person. Never. That's about the only thing I can say the day I retire, because we had top line growth. If you have that. If you have to retrench people, it's a reflection on yourself that you made a stupid mistake somewhere earlier on. I'm not in our business, we don't even discuss retrenchments. According to the Integrated Reporting & Assurance Services, IRAS, Astral's ESG, the first score was at 66%. Now I don't know if that's fair, or good, or bad, or average. Well, what would you say? Is it fair? Bad? Good? No. Doesn't mean anything. Absolutely. Doesn't mean anything. What t hat score, for there doesn't mean... It's. You're gonna have a ranking, and people are gonna be ranked and then say, "Okay, I'm number one. I'm number three." But what does it mean in your business? What we're gonna do, we will now spend some of your money. We'll cut the dividend. We'll take that money and appoint a service provider, Mervyn King's nephew. Bring him here and say, "Come and do a gap analysis for us." He'll come back and he'll say, "Oh, this company is completely stuffed." "Yeah, you need another guy to work here. We need somebody there, and a consultant to stay with the business if we can, and we'll take your score up to where it's acceptable." For who? Okay. We're gonna do that once, and I promise you, if it's a lot of hogwash, forgive me, we're gonna drop it. We're not gonna turn our focus onto stuff that we already do. We score so high on sustainability and on governance. I mean, Astral was rated 2x or 3x the company with the best governance in on the JSE. Now I must go and spend money. What does the E for stand again? Environment. Oh, environment. Okay. We'll look at the environment. We'll build smaller sheds. Then we will use this information to set future improvement targets. You must tell me today, this score that is meaningless, and we don't know what's it about, to what level do you want it to be improved so that I can tell the board? Would you like to see it at 70% and I get a bonus? People are gonna manipulate this stuff. Don't expect this massive effort from Astral as we believe we already do the things well. We're not gonna use this to penalize people or to pay people more, because it's our jobs to do this. That's on ESG. On the prospects, we struggle to find new ones to make it interesting. We worked through it. We asked the board for advice. Actually, we asked for wisdom. We can just report these things again. Unemployment levels is high. It is a concern to South Africa. We know all about this volatile raw material risk, the funds driving the prices, the Ukrainian war, the vacuum in the market. We all know that. It's gonna stay with us for at least another year, Anthony, if not longer. Poor municipal service. We're gonna take the president to court again now. We're gonna use the court order and say, "You didn't perform." I wanna do it a day before his election campaign. We have to tell them they're not performing. We won the court case. We drew up a plan together with them. It was submitted. The plan was approved by the president. From that moment onwards, nothing happened. You now need funds. You need specialists to come in. The plan has not been executed, but it's not the end of it. On the slightly more positive side, we have opportunities in our product categories is available with some of the expansions in Festive. We can make quicker decisions and sell more volumes into higher margin business. Poultry sales volume growth. The second part of that Festive expansion will be done by April 2023, then we will be processing 6.2 million birds a week. Poultry supply and demand currently fairly well-balanced, and we don't know why. Because the more we produce, the more we sell. Now, is it just us or is it the industry? We believe that social grant is working well. We think that's one of. We also believe some of the people who lost their jobs is somehow finding an informal income. Every day, whatever we produce, Frans van Heerden, whatever we produce, now at 5.8 million birds, is sold on that day at a small profit margin. It's not been sold at a discounted price. The market is currently, as we stand here today, pre-winter, is looking good. It's solid for us. We have gained some market share, and we have improved our basket of products. That's the story from Astral. Once again, thank you for taking interest. It was spot on on the hour. Marlize, are you happy? I am. Spot on on the hour. We appreciate you coming here. If there's any questions that you wanna ask here, we'll try and answer them. If not, you can just drop it to us, and we'll come back to you. I know there's some people who've got secret questions, who don't want the rest of the room to hear their wisdom. You can just forward those to us, and we'll try and answer you the best we can, the soonest we can. We're still around for one-on-ones this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, we're moving out at about 12:00 P.M., doing the same presentation to our staff. And then Thursday, a couple of operational visits. We are around. You will get an answer from us if you wanna email us. Maybe to Marlize. She can put it together and come back. We'll come back with you within 24 hours. If you have questions here, we'll try our best to answer it. Thank you, Chris. Just a reminder, you have to use the mic, please. Are there any questions? Oh, good. Thank you. My name is Siphelele Mdudu from Matrix Fund Managers. Thank you for very good set of results. We really appreciate it, and capital allocation. Just few questions on raw material prices. I mean, you've shown that slide nine, which is a newer one that you've basically spoken about. I just want to hear your views and also whether the company and the views are regarding hedging as well. Because at these higher prices, I guess probably you're not hedged because you're talking about that if you are expecting these bumper crops, the prices locally should have been around ZAR 2.8-ZAR 2.9 versus where they are now. That's the first thing that I wanna know. Gary? Is this mic on? Is this on? Is this one on? Good. Thank you for the question. You know, the market, as I said earlier on, it's volatile. So, Astral maintains a relatively short position. I think at these levels, no one is aggressively buying maize and taking a longer view on it. We are moving into a new crop, so we have been between an old crop and a new crop. Typically, in that situation, you know, one would be buying, waiting and buying the new crop, and on the back of a good crop, you would expect better prices. Unfortunately, prices are now also being supported by what's happening globally. If someone can tell me what's gonna happen in Ukraine, I can probably give you a better answer, to be quite frank. Ukraine is a major exporter of maize. They are in their planting season now. We've looked with the trade at various scenarios. If they produce a third of their crop and export it, 60% of their crop and export it, or if they're actually lucky and they manage to get it all in the ground and export it, that changes the world balance sheet quite dramatically and will have an impact on what happens on Chicago. Chicago at the moment trading $8 a bushel. I've seen reports that people speculating it could go as high as 11, but then there are some people that expect a pullback. We are seeing wetter weather in the U.S. It is holding back the planting a bit, but the rain is good for their crop. You know, we stay in the market. We're buying maize and soy on the opportunities that we see in the currency and in the prices on Safex or Chicago, and we'll continue doing that. As Chris said earlier on, you know, our job is to recover our input costs, and feed makes up a major portion of our input costs. Together with Frans and his team, we'll keep on looking and seeing how we can recover that in the market. That's also, it's not an easy game. Frans will tell you to get these prices through is a hard negotiation. I hope that gives you. It's not a specific answer, but I just don't have that crystal ball. Thank you. Thanks a lot. It does. The other one that follows through on the feed costs is the price increases. You guys earlier mentioned that you had three price increases over the course of the year. I just wanted to find out those negotiations that you have with retailers regarding prices, and how often do you push through the prices? Thank you. Yeah. That's a different art. Yeah, as you said, we've had three price increases during the year, which has settled. Which has enabled us to recover up into a position where we're now. We're concerned about further raw materials and fuel prices. We can't forget about the fuel prices. In winter months, historically is not a season where price increases is prevalent. With our margins, as we've shown, that's thin, we also cannot absorb those type of costs. We'll always test the market, and then depending on the outcome from the consumer, we'll manage the position going forward. Just a slight one that follows still on pricing. Have you guys had any prices post this interim period? We've recently in April also implemented a price increase, but that's still, as Chris referred, it's about two to three months to see how the consumer will react to that, and we're in that time period now. That price increase was to cover our input cost for the third quarter, and that could maybe happen. What happens beyond that in the fourth quarter with raw materials, we will have to take a different view. Is that the question? Right. The first one is from David Fraser. Morning, all. Congrats on good set results. Please can you indicate current capacity utilization in both the broiler and feed divisions? Yes, I can. On the feed division, we're running our feed mills at just below 80% capacity. We don't have to expand. If you expand on your broiler side, there's enough capacity. Michael? Correct. Okay. On the broiler side, we're close to full capacity now, but we're bringing in additional capacity from about August up to May next year that will create another 400,000 bird capacity. When we expand, we try to fill up that expansion as soon as possible. As we stand here, we're running at full capacity on the broiler side. Phase two of that project will come online end of August, end of April next year. 200. Another 400, which will take us to the 6.2 million birds capacity per week. Thank you. Second question from David. Can you confirm if you still have bird flu insurance in place? Yes, we can confirm. Thank you. Kobus le Roux from All Weather Capital. Congratulations on a good set of results. Can you touch on your current hedge position on soya meal and maize? Touch on my what? Your hedge position. What was... He-hedging posi- Position on soya meal. Oh, gee, I almost got that wrong. Gary, hedging? We don't hedge, but-. Yeah. As Chris says, we don't hedge. We buy to use, so we buy, we're buying delivered contracts. As I said earlier on, you know, we're maintaining in this market, in this environment, as short a position as we can. You're not gonna go long at these levels. I mean, yellow maize yesterday or this morning trading at ZAR 4,900 a ton. We haven't seen prices like that. So certainly with the prospects of a good local crop, and again, whatever you know, what happens with Ukraine, I think it would be pure speculation to take any different position right now other than our board mandate and the strategy which is agreed to by our procurement committee. One should remember that all of a sudden, the whole poultry fraternity across the globe is in the same position because all local markets are trending Chicago. There is no, what do you call it, Gary? Detachment or decoupling. Decoupling. Currently, every producer in the world is paying the same price for his maize input costs, except in those three, in the Western Europe, North America, and in Brazil, where they are subsidized when prices go beyond a certain level. They are also the countries that dump. It's because they're subsidized. Everybody, more or less, is in the same boat. Traders, in fact, in January and February expected our local market to decouple from Chicago with the prospects of a good crop. That didn't happen. Anthony disagreed from day one. You did, eh? On the recent AI outbreak in the USA, will this impact the broiler selling prices at all, given less exports will occur from the U.S., which could motivate other exporting countries to redirect their exports elsewhere? So far we've seen the South African government prohibit exports from one state in the U.S. I think it's Idaho and Utah, yeah. They've stopped exports from Utah. Look, AI is spreading around the U.S. It is a very real threat to them as well. If more states are added, it'll depend on the outbreaks. One state so far has been blocked. Europe, as you know, was blocked because the prevalence rate there is very high in all those countries exporting. Our government has acted swiftly when they've needed to stop exports from AI prevalent countries. Thank you. Another question from David Fraser. Administrative expenses moved up more than 50%. Can you confirm this move is driven by the raising of staff incentives, or is there any other large movements in this line items we should be aware of? Thank you for the question. I think the position on that is that we firstly come off a very low base. You gotta consider the structure of the expense base that we're comparing to, firstly. Secondly, yes, it's a volatile income statement that we're dealing with. What links in with that is obviously the staff incentive structures is a large component of the movement in the costs. But that's all linked in with the remuneration policies. That's also clearly defined in the integrated report. Thank you. Chante Cain from Excelsia Capital. Thank you to the Astral team for the presentation. The results are looking really good. Is there any reason to believe that H2 will be weaker than H1? Can you please elaborate on your answer? Gary, do you have a copy of the budget there? I don't. Look, remember what we said at the AGM. It's gonna be difficult. We don't know if we can recover price. You don't, simply don't. You go and try, and you get it, and you go again, and you get it, and you do a third one, you get it. How many of these can you do? If you look at the third quarter, I think it will be fairly in line with what we've seen in the first half. Because we already bought that maize long before this long spike. The hefty price tag on raw materials now we'll only see in our fourth quarter. Are we gonna be in a position to recover that spike with pricing in July, which is in the middle of winter? That remains a bit of a question if we will have that ability. We had a price increase now that will cover the increase in this third quarter or the first half of the second half. The fourth quarter is a bit of a.. It's got a question around it. Massive spike in input cost and energy, and we're not sure if we're gonna be able to go to the market with a ZAR 1.50 price and they take it, and everybody's happy. Because the winter is a bit of a difficult month. I can't tell you more than that because I simply don't know if we're gonna have the ability to move the price in the fourth quarter. For the third quarter, I think fairly okay, fairly in line with what happened in the first two quarters. Thank you. Kobus le Roux. On your QSR customers, is the outlook for the volumes of these customers much stronger in H2 versus H1? Just tell them it's only 0.2% of our business. Thank you, Kobus. Yeah, as Chris mentioned, it's about 7% of our business. The impact on volumes and volatility in our business is managed to a degree. It's a fairly consistent market share. Between winter and summer or let's say seasonality, we see the same demand from the market. I think the influence there currently is it's a weight-sensitive product category, and with the load shedding that we have currently, it sometimes makes production in that category difficult. That's across the whole poultry market, not only to Astral. I think that's where the challenge lies. The demand from the market is fairly stable there at higher levels at pre-COVID levels. We are our own basis higher than pre-COVID. I also think we've seen a bit of a consumer trend which moves more towards convenience eating in that sphere. Thank you. Chante Cain. How has the company's profits been affected by pricing regulations? Now I need to go back in the history. It's been fairly a while ago. The profitability impact of the lower yield was recovered through sales realizations about three years ago. There's not really impact where we are now. Thank you. Sumil Seeraj from SBG Securities. Good morning. Congratulations on a good set of results. Could you please elaborate on this demand pool that you are seeing in the poultry division? How has Astral managed to introduce 15.7% more volumes in this market? Are you gaining market share? What is the overall market growth being at over the same period? I think first of all, the market, we've seen a recovery post-COVID, really to what one would have expected it to be if there was no COVID. It's created a stable base. From an Astral point of view, we have taken some market share, as we've indicated in various categories. Our 15.7% or 16% volume growth is made up of about 12% organic growth through our volume expansions, and that we expect to continue, and about 4% of that was sales out of stock, and obviously we don't have the stock. That's the view for the second half. Thank you. The next question is from Miriam Rajatma Mipha. Can Andre just move up the question, please? Thank you. Chris mentioned that the social grants are helping. Just to understand a bit better, are your volume increases going more into the informal market, and what is the situation in the formal market? In Astral, we pride ourselves that we cover or we service all market or LSM groups within the country. There's been a strong demand in the frozen category. I think it's also important to mention that the retail customers are linking up what they call basket deals in line with that social grant as well, and chicken is always or poultry is always part of that basket deal, which we've benefited from. As we've seen, we've had very good growth in fresh and QSR categories as well. It's across the board. There's a strong demand for frozen chicken, and poultry still is the most affordable protein source in South Africa, and other meat sources are quite a bit more expensive. I think across the board, we benefit from that. Thank you. There are no further questions from the online platform. Chris, would you like to close? Yes. Once again, if there's more questions, please channel them through Marlize to us, we'll come back to you. We're also gonna have a cup of coffee outside, and whenever you see the need to have a one-on-one with us, please communicate with Marlize. We will try and set it up. We are quite fully booked up to Thursday evening, but if you want to have a telephone conversation with us next week, you're welcome. Thank you for being here in person. It was quite nice to see some of you guys again, really. We hope by year-end, we can fill up the bigger hall again at the other hotel with a hundred people. Thank you very much for your time. Please enjoy coffee. Chat to our guys. You've all been briefed to give the same answer to everybody. Thank you very much. Go well. Thank you.