Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Astral Foods Limited's interim results presentation for the six months ended March 31, 2024. A special welcome to our Chairman, Dr. Theuns Eloff, and to Anita Cupido, one of our Non-executive Directors. I'm very glad to be introducing these sets of results versus the last time we saw each other. These results are testimony that Astral's Project 3R, Reset, Refocus, and Restart campaign, has achieved its results targets. The results are further proof of the buoyancy of the group's fully integrated poultry producer. For those of you joining us via the webinar, at the conclusion of the presentation, should you wish to ask a question, please indicate by using the Request to Speak icon at the bottom of your screen. Pelumi will unmute you. Just state your name and the institution you are from. Alternatively, you can use the question tab at the bottom of your screen, and I will pose the questions to the team. I will now hand over to Chris Schutte, CEO, Dries Ferreira, CFO, and Gary Arnold, Chief Operating Officer, who will be taking you through the presentation. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Marlize. As, so as you all know, for all the international listeners or participants, here is our African six months. Welcome, all you there in New York. Welcome, everybody, and thanks for taking time to listen to Astral's results and to be here. We appreciate that. We'll take you through the presentation. There's a couple of small changes just to highlight some issues during the past six months and, comparing to the prior six months that you might have questions about. In general, more or less the same program than in the past, with small changes and some highlights to the slides. Once again, welcome to everybody. As you all know, at the end of last year, we made, we actually made an open statement or an open letter to the public and the investors and the shareholders and all our stakeholders, saying that those results for FY 2023 was embarrassing to the management of Astral. We have never made a loss before. And of course, we had to take actions to improve on that and to fix it. A lot of that had to do, and it will come through in the presentation, unfortunately, on things that maybe was not fully under our control, like load shedding, bird flu, et cetera. But we will highlight that in some of the slides through Gary's presentation and Dries' presentation. There were four key focus areas for us. We put together a team called TAT 20, Turnaround Team 20, with a project Reset, Refocus, and Restart. And we drove that with a lot of diligence, with a lot of inputs from a lot of people in the group. And this first slide is just to illustrate how important this was to us and the focus areas. And once again, people often ask us what is PEF? Gary can explain that in detail. But if you're a poultry farmer, like the miners, like the bankers, there's one or two key factors that they consider to indicate their successes or not, and PEF is one of those measures in the poultry world across the globe. It's not Astral. If you want to compare against Brazil or farmers in Spain or in Europe, anywhere, you use a PEF as a measure, and that includes four critical parts of successful poultry farming, like your livability or mortality, your feed conversion, your weight, and the age of the bird. If you don't get that right, you don't have a poultry business. That's what we focus on. And in this first slide, we illustrate the history of how we improved the performance efficiency factor in this slump year in the first half of 2023, and actually for the full year, which we will indicate at year-end. But look at this drop-off to levels that we've never seen before because of load shedding, the big bird era, with a nice flavor of bird flu. So a lot of focus on what you do on farm, on-farm efficiencies. What we can illustrate today is this vast improvement with a focus. I'll talk about it a bit later. This performance, PEF performance, of Astral over the past six months has now surpassed any previous or historical levels. An excellent result on the PEF, which is the base of a poultry business. If anybody ever again doubt the importance... Good morning, John. The importance of PEF, here is the evidence. If you fix that and you get that right in a poultry business, it will assist your margin, because there's cost factors in there. Once you fix your margin, you see the direct impact on your operating profit and your cash.... This all also illustrates how cash generative this business can be. These are the key focus areas, or was, and still is, the key focus areas with our turnaround strategy. And we can say that we have been fairly successful to return the business to profitability, positive margin, and a PEF, the highest in the history of Astral, definitely in the top 10 in the world. So people often ask about the PEF, why do you use it as a measurement, even in your incentive schemes or bonus schemes? Just go back to that slide. If you ever doubt when you have to vote on, on the Rem policy, go back to that slide and remember that PEF is the base of a poultry business. Some salient points, and of course, there'll be a lot of detail later by Gary and by Dries. Just the salient points that, that turned the two halves around. Poultry feeding costs decreased. Do you know how important feed is or feeding cost is to the business? That decreased year-on-year. Obviously, that will flow into the broiler life costs, that decreased, assisted by lower feed raw material costs. Feed now 64% of the total cost of production of chicken. It was as high as 72% in the past because of high raw material cost. The broiler day-old chick increased following the devastating impact of bird flu in 2023, where we had to import eggs, and the base cost of the import of the eggs was exactly double that of what we produce locally. We didn't use all that eggs ourselves. We also have outside or external market, and we sold that on. So we had to service our customers through our Nutrichick business. So that is still a cost that is currently embedded in our life cost, is the chick cost. The on-farm broiler performance improved significantly over the comparable, surpassing all historical results, and hats off to our farming division. Excellent results. Then we had broiler placement cutbacks. We had high finished goods stock levels at the end of the prior period, and we were not comfortable with that level because you pay outside storage to keep. So to produce a bird at a high cost with high input cost, then put it in outside storage and keep on paying to keep it there for some time, hopefully that the IQF market will improve. We realized that with the unemployment and the state of the consumer, it doesn't make sense to produce chicken and just put it in storage. So we had a planned strategy to cut back our weekly production. And again, we'll go into the detail later of that. Our poultry sales volumes increased. Now, those two, if you read them separately, won't make sense, but the sales volumes increased, but we sold out of stock. So we now, with a cutback, had the opportunity to sell some of our stock that was in outside storage, and there was quite a positive movement on the sales out of stock. And also, of course, the bird size normalized during this period, and we had a better basket to offer to the market. During that heavy load shedding period, almost all of our birds, aside the fresh, was big birds in 5-kilo bags. And if you go with that to the market, it's oversupply, and you have to promote to get rid of the product. We're completely out of that big bird era, and you can see that the basket has also improved, and we will show that later on. Positive broiler margins are reported at 2.4%. The prior six months, comparative six months, was at -4.4%. So a swing in the margin. If you look at these results, you see a 2.4% margin, which is still paper-thin, Anthony. It's nothing for a high-risk, volatile industry like the poultry industry. Imagine that with these performances, volumes, you get to a margin of 5%, 7.5%, or 10%, or our historical high, John, at 15% was. Imagine this company with a 15% net margin. Positive margins. In the past, we subsidized the load-shedding cost and also the cost of higher raw materials. We tried to push back on that. But the key thing is, for the first time in the last year, we went into heavy gearing. Now, heavy gearing in the poultry industry is very different from other industries. Our gearing was at 25%, with debt at ZAR 1.031 billion, Dries. Something that we're not used to, and that was one of the key focus areas, and also discussed at many levels in the board level. We're not comfortable with debt there because of the volatility of the industry. That devil, debt levels, that devil, debt levels was reduced significantly through the six months' performance and the cash we produce. So debt level's now down to 10%, which is more comfortable, but still not where we want to be. We want to be cash positive in order to field any unknowns in the future. And every year I stand here and I say, "I have now seen it all," and every next year I have to come back and say, "Oh, there was something else." And that's our life, that's our business. In Africa, poultry, we have to field these challenges day by day. So quick reference. The green arrows, revenue up 4%, higher sales volume, slightly higher price, better margin, better performance. You will also see that in the feed division, this six months look very different to in the past, and Gary will go into the detail of that. The profit, EBIT, ZAR 550 million, up 461%. Could show that, after the first quarter, we were still around 300% here. Remember when we gave the voluntary update, we said we could be up by as much as 300%. Well, unfortunately, we had to come back and correct ourselves. Profit for the period after tax and interest, headline earnings, 441%. Dries will go into a lot of detail here. Gearing improved to 10.1%. Overdraft or debt at ZAR 444 million, a lot more palatable. And unfortunately, and the chairman is here, I'm not gonna talk about this. You can talk to the chairman about this, no interim dividend. Remember, what we said is, with this business, we don't think it's the right thing to pay a dividend out of debt. So the sooner our project and our focus bring us to a cash neutral position, the sooner we can discuss the dividend and the long-standing policy of a 2x cover at board level again. I know we're gonna get a lot of questions about that during the one-on-ones today, tomorrow, and till Tuesday next week. But we are not at a level where we, the board, considered a dividend at the interim. This slide was produced in the midst of load shedding. These were the costs at the stage 6 load shedding. The yellow part, we also indicate, always indicate feed or maize in yellow, because that's the color of yellow maize and not something else. Additional feed cost during this period was the yellow bars. We did communicate to the market that by June, July, we will be out of that position. That was in 2023. We did exactly that because of our planning and the way we run the business. Additional shifts out, the purple part. Placement cutback cost at that time, that were placements related to load shedding, only gone. And we made it very clear that from that period onward... Gary, was it on the J une 15th, June 20th? We were, as we predicted, on the day, on the hour, we were out of that load shedding situation. Now have generators and contingency plans. So all we're left with is additional diesel cost or generator cost. At stage 6, our consumption of diesel, additional diesel, was ZAR 45 million per month. We had slightly lower levels of load shedding here. So you can see that the diesel cost is not at the ZAR 45 million per month. So quite a saving, if you wanna call it that, but it's now almost an embedded cost, additional diesel for generators, because it's not just load shedding, we also have other power failures or supply of electricity coming from municipalities. And of course, this pre-election, no load shedding was all in April and a bit in May, so that's not reflected here yet. We will report on that. We will report on April and May being ZAR 0, and then June, July, be back at ZAR 50 million. I am told. Just a quick view on how you make a profit. Broiler net margin, negative 4.4% there, compared to a 2.4%. This was in the second half of next year, which we'll report in the full year, down even further than the negative 4.4% there. You make a small margin, 2.4%, and you make ZAR 500 million of profit, under not the best of conditions, with not the best feed prices, and still having additional cost in there, like diesel. Bill for that six months was ZAR 100 million. That could have been in the margin. So the margin improved, also on the back of slightly lower broiler feed cost. Feed cost coming down by 9%, approximately. You get that effect, and this illustrates it even more. This is now an international graph. I think Anthony Clark introduced it in his analysis of the industry. So the yellow part, again, it is yellow maize, or it is the yellow maize in the broiler price. This is the change year-on-year. This is not the actual price. So if you see that the price change slowed down or being negative versus the prior year, the movement, you see the benefit. Look in the years where we had good results, was definitely not in that situation. You can go and look there, and you can go and look at that situation over there. Good profits in that period. At the same time, the movement month-on-month, compared to the prior period, the change in broiler selling price is positive. So you— there's the 6 months. Feed cost down, selling price up slightly. Selling price not just up because you moved the price up, your basket has also changed. Your offering to the market has changed because you're out of the big bird era. A quick view. I'm not gonna elaborate on this, because then I'm gonna steal from Dries. Last year, FY 2023, first half, ZAR 98 million profit, paper-thin. Benefit, raw material cost slightly lower, so there's the benefit. Then we had further improvements on our FCR, a critical point in our business. Feed conversion ratio also improved. That's the benefit we got from that. Slightly higher sales volumes, up, was it, 4.2%? 4.2% broiler volumes up, out of stock. Broiler selling price is up 7%. Again, a bit by price increases, and the other contribution comes from the basket and the offering, so that's selling price up. Then the reduced feed consumed. This block is specifically focusing on that graph we showed earlier, the load shedding cost or the impact of load shedding on our cost structure. So ZAR 413 million was the less feed consumed on farm due to the big bird era. Big birds, longer on the farm, the age go out, the weight go out, you feed them, and now you feed them the highest raw material cost in your history. So that's the benefit of not having big birds. So that block is load shedding. And then all the other load shedding costs, the movement year-on-year and that improvement. And there's a lot of detail about that, which you can ask us about. The expense increase, consequential bird flu cost, and you can ask Gary about that. Those are costs related to the import of fertile eggs, et cetera, et cetera, which is still a block that could disappear if we do not have bird flu in this winter. Most of that can also come back to the business. It's higher cost on the back or on the hangover, babalas, from bird flu. And then the net of all the other at 155, and the improvement from ZAR 100 million - ZAR 550 million, up 460%. That is the picture of what happened. You see, what hit us last year, ZAR 650 million, just on the back of load shedding. Most of it is back, except the diesel cost. So fairly good performance, still paper-thin margins. That's the one thing we will keep on working, but the consumer is under pressure. We feel it, we smell it, and we get told that by the retailers. So the prospects of major price movement is not gonna happen during this winter. We are busy with the effort because we now have lower stock levels. We're not sure how successful we will be in that part of the business. It all depends on the pull from the consumer. I thank you. Gary will do the operational review, and then Dries will do the financial review after that. Thanks, Gary. Thank you, Chris. Can you hear me okay? All good. Discovered this morning when we were fitting these headset mics, that my ears are smaller than Chris' and Dries'. So Chris has always wondered why I'm a bit hard at listening. Now we know, so hopefully it stays put. Anyway, good morning to you, and good morning to everyone online. Welcome to the presentation today. I'm gonna take you through an operational overview, touching on raw materials first, as always, which sets the scene for feed division performance and ultimately the costs that we incur in poultry production. Looking a little bit forward, we're currently in the harvest season for our 2024-2025 maize crop.... You all know the El Niño weather conditions have played havoc on this year's crop. We experienced some dry weather at a particular, particularly critical stage of the crop. So we're going to see 3 million tons knocked off the crop this year from a high, a record high of 16.4 million -ton crop last year. Obviously, on the back of lower yields, and I've got a slide on that a little later. The important figure here being the carryout percentage. So if we look at the fair value based on that percentage, on historically, SAFEX maize pricing should be lower than we currently see, but SAFEX is trading higher than those fundamental levels, and there's reasons for that. So this is just a new slide we put in. You can see the drop in yields, 1.3 tonnes per hectare, stripping 3 million tons off the crop for this year. So this pushed SAFEX prices up. During February, March, we saw a rally on SAFEX on local fundamentals, so maize prices moving from around ZAR 3,800 a ton to approximately ZAR 4,500 a ton. But fortunately, in recent times, we've seen a drop-off on SAFEX over the past month in the spot price for maize. So, I looked last night on the April 24th, we put a small peg in on July contracts at just over ZAR 4,500 a ton, and yesterday, that same contract was trading for just less than ZAR 4,100 a ton. So maize prices having come off from the highs after the dry weather conditions, a lot of this has to do with the strength of the rand, and we hope may that continue, because it has assisted SAFEX pricing for maize. But we have also seen more sellers coming to market as the crop is commenced harvest. Although we had this rally in the maize price, and as you know, Astral holds a position, we're not buying spot, so we didn't necessarily participate in this rally. But whilst there was this rally in play, we did fortunately see a drop in international soybean prices and the price for meal, soy meal. So that, to some degree, offset the increase in the maize price. But more recently, you'll see a little spike here on the back of the dry weather we had in South Africa, impacting the South African bean crop and some extreme weather, actually weather conditions in Brazil, leading to some flooding, which has pushed up prices on the international market. So the feed division, Chris alluded to earlier on, that we'll get into a little bit more detail here. So the feed division's revenue down, largely driven by volumes. Feed sales volumes down by 18.7% and raw material costs down. So those two, revenue down in that division, and operating profit down. The operating profit was down only on the back of the loss of internal feed sale volume. So we cast our mind back to the first half of 2023. We had those big birds. Chris spoke of the big bird era. We were feeding them a lot of feed to maintain them on farms and keep them on farm. The birds were old, they were heavy, and our feed bill at that time was massive. It was a benefit in that first half to the feed division. It reflected in their profitability. Our feed mills were full. But that wasn't necessarily a good position for Astral, because that benefit there was a cost to the poultry division, and you can see what impact that had on the business. This year, a more normalized profitability posted by the feed division. If one looks at history, and as our shareholders and analysts know, we've always said this is a bank of the feed division. Normalized profit on normal levels of internal feed supplied, actually even lower because of the feed conversion benefits in the group. We required less feed from the feed division, but then we also had the broiler breeders that we lost with the 2023 bird flu outbreak. So we lost feed volume sales into, onto our parent stock farms there. But as we've repopulated those farms, those feed volumes have come back. Margins in the division at 5.5%, our ZAR per ton margin slightly down on the period. We've seen the graphs on the SAFEX yellow maize and soy meal. I think important to note that on the two comparable halves, average SAFEX maize price down 16.4% and soy, 11.1%. This obviously brought some welcome relief in the feed price to Astral, and you can remember, last year, that massive feed bill of over ZAR 400 million. That additional feed was being fed to the birds at an all-time high in the raw material cost. So feed prices coming off for the period, and then we had lower consumption, and that I've explained already. You can see that reflected in just over 27% lower feed sales to the poultry division. External feed sales slightly down. This was really due to the bird flu outbreak in the commercial layer sector. It was a biosecurity risk to supply a number of those farms up on the Highveld. So we made a decision, a conscious decision, to stay away from that market for a while, not knowing the status of bird flu on some of those farms, not wanting to put our own operations at further risk, and so we didn't actively pursue external feed sales in that sector, which led to a small decline in our external feed sales. This is the mix, and then you'll remember, always recognize this graph. So 60% internal feed sales. That's been the norm for a number of years. That's the consumption into the group and the integrated value chain. 66% skewed, and you can see that in the results for the division. So this wasn't necessarily good for the group. It came at a cost to the poultry division. In the poultry division, this is a consolidated view of all our operations, commercial and agriculture, under this division. Revenue up 6.7%. That being driven by the increase in sales volumes, which Chris alluded to, 4.2%. Get into a little bit more detail on the next slide on that, and then selling prices improved for the period under review. Frans and his team put in a good effort to get the pricing up. As Chris said, for a long period of time, we subsidized the cost base, and there was an effort to recover inflationary costs in the pricing. Breeder revenue up 20%. This is a sum of National Chicks, our day-old chick supplier, and Ross Poultry Breeders, the supplier of parent stock into the market. So good performance from those two businesses under the circumstances. Operating profit up in this division, 200%. So you can see the swing in profitability assisting Astral's performance substantially in the first six months of 2024. Chris already mentioned broiler feed prices down 9%, and as you know, that was assisted by the better raw material costs. For the first half of 2023, the load shedding led to an interruption in our processing. The birds stayed behind on farm. This led to bigger birds, older birds, and when those birds eventually did get to the processing plant, they were quite big. Not quite big, they were a hell of a lot bigger. And this led to an unfavorable product mix. So our product basket, which, you know, we supply the IQF market, the fresh market, the quick service restaurant trade. Some of those sectors take a fairly fixed, fixed specification product. Now, with the bigger birds and the bigger portion size, it was very difficult to service those markets ably. And that led to a lot of our chicken going straight into 5 kg IQF and not servicing those product or market segments. So that in itself led to a decline in sales in those areas. And this year, we've seen the normalization of the bird weight and age, and we've returned to normalized levels of sales in both fresh and QSR. So that's assisted the sales volumes, and we also sold out of stock, notwithstanding the production cutbacks that were implemented. So we went into this period with stock levels a bit higher than we were comfortable with. Demand in the market was also soft, so we put in an effort to manage or better manage supply with demand. We were able to do that and sell out of stock, so that helped support our increased sales volumes as well. Chris has spoken about the broiler margins, still thin. You can see -15% for the second half of last year, 2023, where the brunt of the costs from load shedding were felt, and we'll talk a bit more about that in the outlook later. Operating expenses were lower. Obviously, as a significant cost in additional feed and diesel due to the high stages of load shedding in 2023 were not repeated. This doesn't take anything away from the fact that we still had a ZAR 101 million diesel bill for the first six months of this year. A significant number, given the profitability in the business. This is a sales mix. So percentages, giving a little bit of a false impression here, but if you look at the sales or these percentages and the sales mix against the volumes, you'll see that we sold more volumes in each product category, where last year that was impacted by load shedding and the big birds. In the agriculture division, Chris already mentioned the good performances here, and we'll get into some detail in the next slide. Parent stock sales out of Ross Poultry Breeders decreased very slightly. What we saw with bird flu not only impacting Astral's broiler breeder operations, but those of our customer base as well. A number of their farms under quarantine, that slowed down the restocking or placement of new parent stock flocks. So a number of customers have pushed out placements and delayed those by some time. So the order book is still there, but there's just a timing impact on the placement there. So a small impact on parent stock sales. We've spoken about feed input costs, production efficiencies, we'll talk a lot about on the next two slides. Bird flu, we all know the new strain that emerged in 2023, H7N6, a devastating impact on the industry. Astral lost approximately 40% of its broiler breeding stock.... We've had a good restocking, or we've had a successful restocking program in place on top of the hatching egg import program, on top of other contingency plans which we implemented. Having nearly replaced this now, as we move into this winter period, and we'll talk about vaccination just now, which is critical going forward. The shortage in the supply of broiler hatching eggs was mitigated by the import program and contingency plans that we implemented to keep our operations supplied with broiler hatching eggs, so we could supply our own internal requirements and those of our external day-old chick customers. Unfortunately, with the imported eggs, increasing flock ages, so not depleting the flocks. Normally, around 60 weeks, we push some flocks out the production to as high as 74 weeks. You don't get the efficiencies and production out of those flocks. It impacts hatchability. We were setting eggs from younger flocks, again, impacting hatchability. So a number of factors coming into play there, which impacted the day-old chick costs, and then not having all of those broiler breeders, all those parents on our broiler breeder farms, there was an underrecovery in overhead costs in certain areas. So that led to the higher day-old chick costs, which Chris mentioned. This thing is stuck, sorry. That wasn't me. I think the button got stuck. Apologies. These are the important slides. You know, Chris spoke about PEF early on, and the benefit to the business by improving the cost base, having efficient on-farm production performances. This is the picture. So everything here is baseline to 2013. So we've got a well over 10 -year history here. You can see what happened to the age of the broilers during the load shedding period. Birds nearly 40 days of age there. Now back to normal, just over 32 days of age. So what we're seeing is at a normalized age, we've got normalized bird weights. The bird weights, again, back at around 1.85 kilos. That's what you want to see, but you want to also see this, where you achieve those same bird weights and age at a better feed consumption or lower feed consumption, better feed conversion efficiency. So even between notwithstanding the impact of the load shedding last year, I mean, the difference here is close to 300 g of feed per every kilo live weight gain. That cost us a fortune. Notwithstanding that, we've improved the feed conversion on those levels achieved in 2022 and achieved the same live weight broiler at a slightly lower age. So that's benefited the live cost of production, and you can see the PEF at an all-time high, as Chris alluded to earlier on, and mortalities, livability back at an acceptable level. Some quick industry matters, a couple of them topical imports. On average, it's like just over 30,000 tonnes for March, 32,000 tonnes you can see here. We'll talk about the import tariff rebate now. Just some quick stats, the industry for the first half. This was at the end of March, producing on average 21.2 million birds a week. So no shortage in local production, and, you know, the import tariff rebate that was implemented from January, was implemented by, the DTIC, on the back of a supposed shortage in broiler production and poultry meat as a result of bird flu. We had a number of engagements with ITAC and the DTI, and attempted to convince them that there wouldn't be a shortage of chicken meat, as the industry had implemented contingency plans to avoid this. Unfortunately, in the first quarter of this year, they issued permits for these rebates, so a number of importers benefiting from the rebate on imports in the period January through March. We again called for a meeting with Minister Patel. We saw him about a month ago, and the chief commissioner with an ITAC, and we again laid out a case with some history to show them that there was no shortage of broiler meat post the bird flu epidemic of 2023, and that there wouldn't be. They asked us to submit a whole lot of data, which we did, as SAPA, and no permits for the second quarter have been issued. We indicated there wouldn't be a shortage of meat, and in fact, a slight surplus going into quarter three and quarter four of this year. So we don't expect, on the data that we presented, there to be any more import tariff rebate permits issued. On the Competition Commission Poultry Market Inquiry, there's not a lot to say here. The draft terms of reference were published. SAPA, as an industry, submitted our comments to these draft terms of reference on the March 15th, and we haven't heard anything subsequent to that. We do expect we'll hear something at some point in time, and then individual company representations can be made. Vaccination, it's been a slow process. As a country, we've made good progress in that we have guidelines for vaccination, which have been published in November of last year. That's a big step forward, but there has been continuous engagement with the authorities on issuing permits against those guidelines. A couple of poultry producers have made application to vaccinate. We're one of them. We're still working with DALRRD on this process. It's new for both sides, and DALRRD's certainly adopting a quite a conservative and measured approach, which we like. Not necessarily a bad thing, but we need to get to a point where we can vaccinate. It'll just be an additional tool in the biosecurity bag, and will help protect our flocks. I'm now gonna hand over to Dries, who will take you through all of the financials. Thank you. Thank you, Gary. Morning, everyone. Yes, so on the financials, you've heard the moving parts being explained very well by Chris and Gary, and it all comes down to the numbers that's on the screen here. So in the last six months, we focused very diligently on healing the income statement, and the consequence of healing the income statement is healing the balance sheet. So what happens here is we've got a 4% rise in revenue, as explained. That's a volume correction and a basket correction, mainly in the poultry division. Some negative on that line from the feed division, but all it comes down to a 4% revenue increase to ZAR 10.4 billion. That translated into an operating profit improvement to ZAR 550 million. Also, if you consider the waterfall that Chris highlighted, there's some remaining costs from the bird flu era that's still pre-present in the first six months. That could disappear into the future, but still, we're left with a 461% increase or correction in operating profit to ZAR 550 million, with a margin of 5.3%, which I will touch on a little bit later. Then we've still got some bank interest that is as a result of the higher gearing levels that we came into this year. Despite the strong improvement in gearing levels in the six months, we still have an interest bill that was present in the numbers for the six months of ZAR 58 million net. That leaves us with profit before tax of ZAR 481 million, and then the tax line at ZAR 126 million, of which only ZAR 28 million was cash. And that demonstrates the utilization of the losses that we, that we incurred in the prior period. That's now starting to unwind, and we're getting the cash benefit out of those losses that we incurred last year, at least on the tax line. In attributable profit, ZAR 355 million, a 472% increase, with EPS coming in at ZAR 9.23, or ZAR 9.23 in total, up 471%, and HEPS at ZAR 8.84, with the main difference being the insurance proceeds on the hatchery fire that we had last year. If you consider the long-term trend in Astral's key numbers here, the revenue, firstly, you can see that there's a consistent improvement in the revenue over time, reflecting the, the hard work being put in by the commercial division on the poultry side, as well as the, the feed division in growing their external volumes and market. But the volatility in the earnings is as a result of the, the, the business model that we have. That mainly reflects the timing differences between feed price increases and recovering those costs from the market, which I will also unpack a little bit more detail in the coming slides. The 5.3% net margin, with a ZAR 550 million operating profit, if you consider the history for the group, it is still below the long-term average, which means that we are still aiming to improve on the margins that we've achieved here. Also, maybe to. If I go back here, just outlining the big loss that was incurred in the second half of the prior year. What's also important to note here is the big bump that we had here, running to about a 15% margin, which Chris touched on earlier, in the 2018, coming off the 2017 results. Which is more clearly demonstrated by the movement in the feed price and the selling price changes. When the selling price changes increase and the feed price changes decrease, it opens up the blue bars here, which is the poultry division operating profit. The consistency of the gold bars here is the feed division, and here you can see the return to the more longer-term average operating profit for the feed division, which has become known as the banker for the group. Here you can see again, the selling price increases relative to the feed price decreases is starting to open up there, and it bodes well. Poultry division returning to the profit of ZAR 284 million, as explained earlier. Then we have the balance sheet. So this was the main focus of the group, to rebuild the balance sheet through fixing the income statement mainly, but also there were some moving parts here that we need to get right. Maybe just from the top, not much movement on the non-current assets, demonstrating keeping the capital expenditure programs tight over the last six months. I've got a slide explaining that in a bit more detail. Next one, we've got right-of-use assets. That must be read together with the lease liabilities. You can see both of them decreasing, demonstrating the unwinding of the right-of-use assets and the liabilities that goes with that. Big focus area was the net working capital for the group. I've got a slide unpacking that in a bit more detail. Despite the fact that it looks like it increased by 1% there, there was a big effort that went into managing the quality of the working capital, which we were successful with. Then we have the non-current liabilities, which increased quite strongly. That mainly reflects the deferred tax asset that we had as a result of the loss last year, that gets set off against the deferred tax liabilities. And the unwind of the asset naturally will increase the liability. That remains there. And the deferred tax liabilities mainly relate to the fact that it actually is a farming operation, which means we get a lot of tax benefit from installing fixed capital in the business. You get the tax deduction straight away, which helps with the cash on the tax line, and then ultimately, you pay the tax in later periods, and that creates the deferred tax liability. The net assets or the invested capital in the group has improved, come down from ZAR 5 billion in the September numbers to ZAR 4.8 billion. That's a 5% improvement or a reduction, which means the business has 5% less need for invested capital to generate the profits that we are generating. And that is manifested in two line items. So firstly, the net overdraft or the cash and cash equivalents plus the other borrowings. That came down handsomely by 57% to ZAR 444 million, from September's numbers of ZAR 1.031 billion. And then the remaining equity on the balance sheet, which improved on the back of the profitability that we had to ZAR 4.4 billion or, or ZAR 4 million... Or ZAR 4.379 billion. Capital expenditure, depreciation, amortization, compared to the full year last year, you can see that there's not any surprises on the depreciation and amortization, given the fact that, there's not been any major changes on the CapEx programs for the six months. The total CapEx spend for the six months in the middle block, you can see it's returning more to the longer-term average of capital spend that we have. We always guided between ZAR 250 million and ZAR 300 million, is the rule of thumb for capital expenditure in the group per annum, and we, we well on our way there. The major item there is the expansion CapEx of ZAR 64 million, which mainly relates to the Zambian feed mill upgrade that we've commissioned now, recently. And then some spillover load shedding and water-related CapEx that found its way into this year's cash flow as well, and the balance sheet items. Outstanding capital commitment is high at ZAR 517 million, slightly down from September at ZAR 594 million. However, you'll note that we've marked here which projects are all on hold until further notice, and that demonstrates the major focus on capital allocation in the group. Also given the backdrop of the quality of the balance sheet that we want to get right as quickly as possible. On the working capital in more detail, makes for interesting reading. The biological assets, considering the fact that from September, the middle column, September number, the previous balance sheet that we've reported, where we had the bird flu impact on the biological assets, which decimated up to 40% of our breeding stock. Here you can see we're starting to replenish our breeding stock, and that has consumed cash and increased the value of the biological assets. For the six months, it increased by ZAR 200 million, but that's a program we have to go through. So that's that was a planned expansion. The inventory, which we touched on earlier, firstly, the quality of the inventory increased in poultry, as well as the total stock holding improved, came down, and that released nice cash back into the balance sheet. And that also bodes well for the quality of the poultry division balance sheet. The feed division, nice and stable, at ZAR 430 million, demonstrating the focus of not expanding the raw materials in the silos. Revenue receivables, ups very strongly, ZAR 335 million here on half year versus full year. But that demonstrates a quality of the top line, and that all that cash, as we stand here today, has been collected already. So there's no bad debts that reside underneath that number, and it demonstrates a good sales line. We've got other receivables up 100... down 117 million, leaving us with current assets expanding by ZAR 136 million, and you can see where the main items were there. Then on current liabilities, reducing, sorry, increasing by ZAR 109 million, and that's just a small movement. There's not much to comment on the current liabilities. That leaves us with net working capital versus September, basically flat, half year versus full year last year. On the cash flow statement, just demonstrating it in a graph or in a graphic manner. Firstly, we came into the year with cash and cash equivalents, and I've got to maybe just quickly pause on that. On the next slide, I'll explain it in a bit more detail. There was a temporary loan that we took out end of last year to assist with the cash flows, and that was technically not seen as cash and cash equivalents for the cash flow statement. So I'm keeping that off this graph, and I'll explain that in the next one. We had cash and cash equivalents overdraft of ZAR 431 million beginning of this year, which excludes the ZAR 600 million temporary loan, which meant ZAR 1.031 billion, which is the number you'll recognize. We generated ZAR 806 million of cash profits in the six months, which again demonstrates the cash generative nature of Astral. We disposed of our 9.8% interest in Quantum Foods for cash of ZAR 141 million net. We had some cash investments into the balance sheet that was necessary, and cash out, cash outflows. We paid ZAR 20 million in tax. If you allocate out of the working capital, the items that relate to more of a, of the income statement nature, you'll see that the cash invested into working capital is ZAR 74 million on a net basis. We had capital expenditure cash, ZAR 142 million. We had lease payments of ZAR 45 million, and then here's the ZAR 200 million reduction in that temporary loan that we took out. So we had ZAR 600 million there, we repaid ZAR 200 million, we left with ZAR 400 million on that loan at the end of March, and that means ZAR 44 million of cash and cash equivalents net debt, almost at breakeven, + ZAR 400 million of this once-off loan, if you consider the total debt. And then the finance expenses paid, the actual interest on all the borrowings, that's ZAR 77 million, which is the one that we wanna get rid of as well. So here I'm gonna start at the bottom line, the 444, which includes all debt, not only the cash and cash equivalents, as defined. So here you can see there's the ZAR 400 million once-off loan versus the ZAR 600 million at September, and there's the... That shows the ZAR 200 million that was repaid. So from the top now, cash profit after working capital changes, ZAR 732 million, compared to the full year last year, of a cash outflow at that level of ZAR 900 million. Here we can see the working capital loan, the ZAR 200 million. That was the ZAR 600 million, where we actually drew on that loan last year. So that showed as an inflow, and we repaid ZAR 200 million, leaving us at the movements in cash and cash equivalents line. An outflow for the last year, full year, of ZAR 1.13 billion, versus a cash inflow of ZAR 400 million in the current year. Leaving us, I'm gonna jump to the bottom again, with net debt of ZAR 444 million versus ZAR 1 billion that we came into the six months with. And in summary, revenue, ZAR 10.4 billion, up 4%. Our operating profit improved by 461% to ZAR 550 million. Our CapEx, nicely controlled, ZAR 137 million, mainly the Zambian feed mill. And then gearing improved nicely from ZAR 1 billion - ZAR 444 million, or a gearing ratio of 10.1%. And then we have sufficient banking facilities in place to ensure liquidity and solvency, and we accordingly also didn't declare a dividend at the interim stage. Thank you. Hand over to Chris. If it wasn't for the leap year, it would have been your birthday today. So excellent news. And thanks, Gary, and he's very comprehensive. I now also have a better understanding of what's happening. Just the outlook, and it's difficult to talk about the outlook because there's a number of things outside of our control. Embedded diesel cost, ZAR 100 million. We don't see that going away. Bird flu remains a major risk. It's wintertime, no compensation, no vaccination, no insurance. So it will always be a high risk up to the time that we can vaccinate on a consistent manner. So Gary and his team, SAPA, our vets are working very hard day to day with government on the back of this, and I'm sure we're gonna make some inroads there soon. The El Niño weather patterns had a big impact, the 3 million tons on the crop, pushing prices up with a slight slowdown later on, like Gary explained, and then the weaker economic growth. So we all know about the impact of that. If you don't have economic growth or top-line growth, you're not gonna create jobs. And government cannot create jobs. Private sector create jobs. They must create the environment and the infrastructure. Do that for us, and we'll do the rest. We've been telling them at many forums for many years, "Just give us the environment and the infrastructure, we'll do the rest." And you'll hear that from many, many business leaders. So that's not gonna change soon. I, I think it's gonna get worse, the unemployment, because we don't see any economic growth beyond 1% over the next 1 or 2 or 3 years. Where will it come from? Uncertain political landscape. I think Dr. Eloff, our Chairman, also this morning, or was it in yesterday's paper, gave his opinion based on certain research on how we see the landscape. And there's so many permutations. If the ANC get below 50 or—but if they get below 45, but if they get below 41, who will the partners be? Will it be EFF, the MK? So many variables and permutations, I don't wanna speculate on that. But the one thing we do know is that coalitions in this country has not proven to be successful, and I think that's the risk. Who will be bed partners, and will it work, and for how long? That will bring the uncertainty. I think it's almost certain now, with the forming of the MK Party, that the ANC, due to the landscape in KZN, will definitely go below 50. I think that's on the cards from every survey that's been done. So that will bring about some fluctuation in foreign investment or and in the currency. On the positive side, the biological efficiencies of our birds and Astral, the way we run the business, and we focus on bird performance, is still a focus. And Gary and myself just spent a couple of days in Europe with Aviagen, and there is continuous improvement coming from the geneticists and the selection program. So the efficiencies from broilers and breeders have not come to an end. We didn't go there, and now it's gonna flatten off. There is consistent improvement. So if you want to choose a space to be in in livestock production, you wanna be in fish or beef or cattle or pork. Poultry is the more sustainable one over the long run because it keeps on improving. The rate of improvement in efficiency is at a quicker rate than any other livestock on this globe. It also it's also the best converter of raw material into meat, and that makes it more sustainable, and there's a continuous improvement. So that is what our business is about. We already see the some signs in the distant future about improved planting conditions. There is already noise and speculation from a El Niño weakening that could result in a La Niña, which means good rains in the Southern Hemisphere and better crops. So both the top ones are positive to Astral. Maize imports to the Cape, Gary and the team acted quickly on that. When the opportunity was there, we imported maize into the Cape. That puts a bit of a lid on SAFEX prices. Just warn the guys, we'll keep on importing. You can't just run away with the price. And that's beneficial to our Cape mills and our Cape production. Dries, I think, elaborated a lot on our balance sheet. We will focus on reducing our debt, and we want to drive it down as hard as possible over the next 6, 12, 18 months to get to debt neutral or cash neutral or cash positive. We said at the end of last year, we think it will take us 24 months to get to a neutral position. If you look at the trend and the rate at which we could catch up and improve, maybe we will see that returning much earlier than what was communicated at the end of last year. So the 3R project of reset, refocus, and restart is still alive, and that's something that's not just gonna be there. We already spoke to management. It is something you can do over and over and over again, so you can continuously get to a point where you are reset, restart, and refocus. So that's working well for Astral as a business that are not centralized. It's a decentralized, but an integrated business. That makes it slightly more complex than a normal business. So that's what we see on the negative and the positive side over the next 6-12 months. We thank you. If there's any questions from the floor or from anywhere else, Marlize? Thank you, Chris. Uh- We'll take questions from the floor first. Okay. Are there any questions? Anything from the floor? I think it was... I hope it was a comprehensive presentation. There's enough information. There's also a further about 20 slides at the back for information for our analysts and shareholders and stakeholders that we normally produce for you to make informed decisions. So the information is there. We're also seeing a number of you over the next two days here in Cape Town on one-on-ones, and I'm sure there will be more detailed questions there. Marlize, you have a question? Yes, Chris. I've got a question from Andrew Moses, from MIBFA. Can you please explain the large 49% increase in administrative expenses from ZAR 409 million - ZAR 610 million? We can explain. Dries? Here we go. Yeah, so what has happened in the last 12 months is all discretionary spend in the business in any way or form, plus variable expenses that we could manage, was pushed down, right down to the bottom. So what is happening now in the administrative expenses is a lot of that variable spend and discretionary type spend in the group is starting to come back. And obviously, what's also behind the numbers is, with a strong improvement, the way that some of the incentive structures in the group work, is there's a natural provision that is necessary for those improved results that find its way into the administrative expenses. So don't look at it just half year on half year, go look at the longer-term trend of that administrative expenses. You'll see that those expenses are very well controlled, and you will see that those trends are starting to come through again. It comes off a zero base, and- It comes off an absolute zero base, yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. There are no further questions from the floor or from- What? -the webinar. Well, then, I thank you for participating and your effort and time for being here. Thank you for taking interest in Astral. If you have any questions subsequent to this session, please forward them to Marlize. We will get back to you within a jiffy. But then I thank everybody who's on this call, on the webcast, and people here. Thank you for your time and effort. Please have a cup of coffee outside, and we'll see you again soon. Thank you.