A good morning to everyone. Warm welcome to everyone in the room, as well as to those that have connected online to this investor morning, which we are delighted to be hosting on behalf of Brait and Ethos Capital as the advisor. It's good to see so many familiar faces. Thank you for joining us. We really appreciate your time, and we will endeavor to make it worth your while. Taking a look at the agenda on the screen. The objective for the first session is to give you insights from the management team of Virgin Active, which is now the biggest contributor to Brait NAV after the successful listing of Premier Foods recently. After the tea break, you'll hear from the management team of Optasia, which, as you know, is Ethos Capital's largest investment. Following that, Nick Rohatyn, founder and CEO of The Rohatyn Group, will address you. We have discussed Ethos Private Equity's acquisition by TRG with many of you in recent months. It is the end of an era in one sense, but the beginning of an exciting new one at the same time. Importantly, for the shareholders of Brait and Ethos Capital, as well as for LPs and our private market funds, there's no change to the way we manage the advisory contracts or the funds for which we are responsible. They continue to have the same teams with the same incentives and the same governance frameworks. It has only been five weeks with our new colleagues. Feels like a lot longer than that which is a good thing, we're already working on a number of opportunities together. Nick will outline his vision for the firm and explain how Ethos Capital could benefit from some unique investment ideas as part of a potentially expanded mandate for Ethos Capital. Just a quick word about questions from the audience. As you can see on the agenda, there will be a Q&A slot at the end of each session, we would welcome questions from the floor, followed by questions from online participants. You can also feel free to send me questions via email, we'll try to get through as many of them as we can after each session. Without further ado, let's get cracking with Virgin Active. Peter is going to start by providing some perspectives from us as the advisor before we hand over to the management team. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks, Ray. See if I can work this thing out. There we go. Do you want to put up the slides there, Francis? Before I start, firstly, thanks very much everyone for attending. As Ray said, it's really good to see everyone here. We've been talking about having this say for a while, we did say, let's get a couple of things under the belt. The first was the listing of Premier, which we have to have gone away in the last couple of months. Secondly, it gave Dean and his team some time to get their feet under the desk and to start to see some of the progress on some of the initiatives that they've set in place. I think we'll see that today. Before we start, thanks very much to Francis in particular. They look in good shape. Let me see if I can work this thing. Before we get into Dean's presentation, especially for me to introduce the team, and then secondly, give you some perspective of where has this business come from since we took it over, unfortunately, three years ago. Just to introduce the team first. On the left is Luca. Luca has spent more than 20 years in the business, started the Italian business, competes with me for best dressed, as you'll see when he stands up to Set up a fantastic Italian business. We'll talk a bit about that, and he'll talk a bit about that today. In his new refined role, he's effectively the CEO of the business, has massive experience, not just within the Virgin Group, but just about the whole sector in general. He will talk a bit about his perspectives on the new role. On his right is Mark Field. Mark's also been around for 20 years in various roles, from strategy to being the MD of the South African business, recently, probably a year or so ago, taken over as the CFO of the business. On his right-hand side is Dean. Dean, I'm sure is well known to many of you. Dean founded the Real Foods business and built it up into a fantastic business, which we took on just over a year ago. Dean is a big investor in the business alongside us, has massive alignment. The downside of working with Dean is many upsides. The downside is when you're at the board meetings, you just about have your last beer at dinner, you remind yourself that Dean goes to gym at 4:30 A.M., he expects the board members to be there. Tony hasn't had a great track record of attending, myself, I'm normally there at 5:00 A.M. It's great to have such a passionate team here. You'll hear from them today. It's not just about the strategy for the business. I think you'll hear the passion that will come through in the slides. Before we go, there's probably worth just touching on briefly the three-year journey since we took over. I think we took over in, I'd say the 3rd of March, I think it was, about two days after that, we had a board meeting in Mauritius. At that board meeting, we heard for the first time that the Italian business had closed. I thought maybe for a couple of days because of this thing called COVID. Since then, it has been a massive uphill climb for the business. We'll touch a bit on that. Before we start on that, just to give people perspective when we talk again about the numbers today. This is a business that made GBP 142 million of EBITDA in 2019. Margins somewhere in the region of 25%, much higher in the South African business, a bit lower in the international business. Had about just under 1.2, 1.16 adult members as of December. Net debt at that time when we took over was 2.8 x. Sounds a bit like the U.S. government. It's now a lot higher than that. If you look at the business cumulatively over five years from an operating cash perspective, post CapEx, it spat out nearly GBP 300 million or over GBP 300 million. It is a great business, high margin business, really high quality business. It has been through an extremely tough time. I do think it's important to remind ourselves what this business can become, and I think when Dean talks a bit later with his team, it's actually about where we can take the business over and above these numbers that are on the screen. Just to take you through the journey quickly. As I mentioned in March 2020, as I sat there in Mauritius, things started to close down. Gyms across the world, all of our territories ended up being closed. We spent the first two to three months, now, in most cases, we hadn't been to some of these territories before, starting to talk about rent deferrals with landlords, government support. We had to go and seek whatever pockets of government support there were. There were massive salary and bonus cuts across the board, it wasn't just shareholders taking the pain. There were massive CapEx reductions as you would expect. All of those resulted in us being able to reduce the cash cost by about two-thirds, which at the time was a lifesaver. I think if COVID had lasted three months, that would've been the end of it. We got a GBP 50 million funding package. Half of that, GBP 20 million of that came from shareholders. Virgin, as the licensed saw, came to the party as well, we got another GBP 25 million from the banking syndicate. As I mentioned, we were hopeful maybe it's a three- to six-month COVID lockdown that would've sufficed, as we all know, it's lasted a lot longer than that. Just taking you through to where we were in December. I'll never forget we had a board call on the 27th of December in 2020, it became very clear to us that actually we needed to do a wholesale surgery to the business. If you look at these numbers, and they differ slightly from the numbers you'll see from Mark, these were our assessments at the time. It's a massively fixed cost business. Somewhere between 80% and 90% of the businesses, the costs are fixed. When you don't have any revenue, that never really fantastically good news. You can see on the right-hand side, that was in December 2020, it got worse in 2021. We went from having revenue of GBP 600 odd million down to GBP 296 million, and just about all of that was coming from the South African business where the Vitality contract remained in place. Again, from an EBITDA perspective, from GBP 142 million down to minus GBP 17 million, it's a delta of GBP 160 million in that nine months. You could see, at that point it was very clear to us that we needed to go through a wholesale restructuring of the business. What did we do? Over the next three to four months, we decided that all the stakeholders needed to take some pain here. This wasn't a story which could have been solved or sorted just by the shareholders. As you'll remember, we went through a restructuring plan. We were the first people ever to do it in the U.K., and it was a high-risk strategy, to be honest. If we'd lost that game, we wouldn't have an international business today. We managed to win. I'll never forget those days of sitting through six days of court process, then finally getting the judgment in our favor. What that effectively did, it was buy us something, somewhere between GBP 130 million-GBP 160 million of liquidity. That was an absolute lifesaver for the business. At the same time, we restructured the debt in the South African business with our lenders here, that gave the business some lifeline, to be able to see it through COVID. Again, I think at that expected time of opening was probably in the region of March. As we all know, I think it lasted till September, in Italy's case even longer than that in APAC, to reopen the business. It was a tough time, but it was something that without which the business wouldn't have survived. Then came, once we were coming out of COVID, I think what we needed and massively needed was two things. A new management team. Matthew, who'd run the business for many years as the founder, had definitely run out of steam by his own accounts and wanted to move on. We looked at a number of options. We obviously went through a proper process around the world to find a CEO. One of the most important attributes of a CEO and his team was about passion and understanding of the business. The second point was to have a strategy to take this business not just from being a gym business, into a wellness business. Dean will talk a bit about that later. Dean came on, Mark took over the role as the CFO, Luca soon thereafter became the CEO, and t he business has done a fantastic job of turning the business around. We'll hear about it today. At that point, we raised GBP 88 million of capital, most of which, GBP 68 million of which was from third-party investors, components of which came from Titan and a component from Dean as well, for which we were massively grateful. All done at the brait valuation, which a lot of people gave us credit for at the time. This gave us enough liquidity to support growth in the business, resume that via safe where it is required, and it continues today. Most importantly, on the right-hand side, started the journey towards a wellness theme. We brought in the Kauai for the Real Foods business. That business as we'll touch a bit on today, has performed fantastically well. I think we started the journey of moving this from just being a bricks and mortar gym business into something that is a wellness-themed business. Just talking about the numbers and what it looked like. You've got the South African business at the top and you've got the international business at the bottom. I think for the first time in a long time, well, I don't think I've ever been able to say this, to be honest, over three years, particularly in the international business, we are above budget. It's been an extremely tough time. You can start to see the recovery, the green part in the chart at the bottom, particularly in the international business, how well it's done. That is credit to the management team who've made some very tough calls around structure, around their management of the businesses, about the people who run those businesses, and about the offering that we can provide to our customers. Even the South African business, which was probably slightly less impacted by COVID than our international business, has continued that trajectory, and again, we'll touch a bit on the numbers in the presentation. On the right-hand side, in a summary, what has happened over the last few years, obviously lots of liquidity support required for the business, raising capital, negotiating with the banks and ensuring that the business has sufficient liquidity. Debt restructures both in the South African business and the international business continue, it looks like we're going to get to a point where we agree to extend the international facilities just because of the performance in the business, which is great news. The restructure plan, as I mentioned, was certainly two weeks of my life that I won't get back and don't want to ever have again. It ended up putting the business in a massively better place. We got rid of some of the clubs that we didn't want to own. We managed to get rentals down across the portfolio, without which certainly the U.K. business today wouldn't be in the position it is. The capital raise and the third-party investors that have come in have really helped reposition the business. I think really today, when we talk about M&A, and we did the first one is Real Foods, there are other opportunities in the group really to progress this theme from being a bricks and mortar business to a wellness. The new management team, and we'll let them talk to, really have done a great job in a relatively short period of time. I think they've had their feet under the desk for just over one year. I think we'll talk about the revised strategy today, and hopefully that provides comfort to you all that we have the right people driving the bus. I'm sure you're very happy to listen to people who actually do know what they're talking about. With that, Mark, I'll hand over to you. Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everybody. Thank you for being with us here today. Just following up from what Peter said, there are a few things I want to touch on. I'll start with the impact that COVID's had on the business, talk to you about the current trading trends that we're seeing, then just touch on the path to earnings recovery in this business. I'm not going to get into EBITDA specifics today. I'll leave that for the upcoming results. Okay. Thank you. Just touching on the impact that COVID had on our business. When we look at the impact, we look at the period that we were closed during lockdown, and then the period in which we operated under trading restrictions. Through the business in terms of first column, between we were locked down or we were closed between five and a half and nine months across the business. During that period, we froze our memberships at no cost. The reason for that was to preserve as many partner members as we could, so when we came out of COVID, we could rebuild the business. Most of the damage in that period was not done by people canceling, i t was done by the fact that during that period, we could not sell. We're a business where we typically churn about 40% of our base a year, and we need to keep selling to maintain those volumes. That was the impact on the business during the lockdown period. More profound was actually the period of restrictions. For an extended period of time, we operated with volume restrictions in our clubs, and that inhibited our ability to sell and to retain because we couldn't simply drive the volumes through the clubs. Those restrictions were slowly lifted from the beginning of last year. S.A., U.K., those restrictions were lifted in Q1. In Italy, they were lifted at the end of May 2022, then APAC, they were finally lifted around about towards the end of September last year. Really, it's only been since September 2022 that this business has been able to operate on an unrestricted basis, and therefore, to be able to properly drive the recovery in the business. Before we get into detail on the recovery, I think one of the most important things to understand when we're looking at the recovery of this business is the role that operating leverage plays in our business. We operate in this business on about 95% of our fixed cost base. We look at our costs, employment costs, rent, utilities. Together, those three are close to sort of three-quarters of our operating cost base. Then we add in things like rates, the maintenance of the clubs, insurance, et cetera. That gets you to about 95%. In that number, I include marketing because of our subscription model. On a continued operations basis, we've got to maintain our marketing at a consistent level. On the right-hand side, you can see how that plays through. If we look at Q1 2019 versus Q1 2022 and Q1 2023, you can see despite the membership in Q1 2022 being 77% of what it was in 2019, our operating costs, if I exclude energy costs, which have fluctuated for well-known reasons and are harmonized for inflation, you can see that the operating cost base has barely flexed despite the change in volumes. That is what has adversely impacted the performance of our business while we lost volume through COVID, but it is exactly what drives the recovery of a business. 95% of each additional ZAR or GBP of revenue you bring into the business flows through to the bottom line. The business is now at the point that we have achieved or we have gone past our break-even membership. This will be one of the key drivers of the recovery of our business. Moving on to the current trading performance, we have seen a clear volume recovery being entrenched in our business. Going through each of our territories, South Africa has had a steady recovery since volume restrictions were lifted last year. We started to see some headwinds in the South African business in Q1 this year. As you will note, the macro situation compared to a year ago has worsened. We are seeing the impact in terms of higher interest rates on the consumer. We are experiencing some higher unpaids than we normally get compared to prior years, but we are still selling relatively well, so o ur sales are outperforming budget. We are seeing a strong and steady performance in the South African business despite macro headwinds. U.K. has been delivering quite a remarkable performance since the start of this year. You look at our U.K. estate, it is very London centric. It was impacted by work from home trends in London. Since the start of the year, we have seen a recovery in those London clubs. If you go from 10 business back to from September last year, we have grown about 8% in that base. The more encouraging, the Q1 performance has seen a clear step up in that trend. U.K. business is back to about 87% of pre-COVID levels. I did not touch on SA with 85%. Moving down to Italy on the bottom left, Italy has been a sort of standout performer in our business. I mentioned that COVID restrictions were lifted late May 2022. In Italy, the summer period is very quiet, so we did not see much traction through June and July. It was only late August when the summer holidays ended that we started to see a pickup in membership, and you can see that in the trend. Since then, we have seen a really strong sustained recovery in the Italian business to the point that it is now about 105% of pre-COVID levels. Very encouraging results out of Italy. We look into Asia Pacific, bottom right, that is Australia, Thailand and Singapore. Probably best to deal with those individually. Australia is a very bifurcated market. We have five clubs in CBD locations, five in the residential locations. The residential locations have performed well, most are much above pre-COVID levels. The CBD locations have struggled from work from home trends, probably more pronounced than the London CBD clubs and particularly the Melbourne clubs. Melbourne had the most draconian lockdowns across our portfolio, and that has been late to recover. Similar to London, we started to see a return of footfalls at CBD locations, in Australia and that is driving a recovery in Australian business. Thailand was the last to lift restrictions. It's only since January this year that we started to see a recovery in the Thai business. It's the laggard in the estate, eight clubs in Thailand. The Q1 performance is demonstrating that we're starting to see a sustained recovery in that business. Finally, Singapore. Singapore's seen a full return to work. The clubs have recovered well to the point that they are now above pre-COVID levels. Singapore's probably been the number 2 performer across the estate. All in all, we're looking at strong volume trends that are sustained and really entrenched into the business. Moving on to some KPI trends. Looking across the key KPIs that we use for our business, we're seeing positive trends across most of those KPIs, starting with revenue. Revenue is up 22% on Sorry, I'm talking to Q1 2023 compared to Q1 2022 and 2019. Revenue is up 22% versus 2022, w e're still 9% below our Q1 2019 result, mainly because of the volume shortfall that we're still carrying. From a yield perspective, our yields are up 4% year-on-year. They're up 3% versus 2019. In real terms, that's a negative performance, and I'll touch on yields in a few slides' time to give you some more insights into what's driving that and obviously the recovery. Membership is up 15% year-on-year, still 11% below Q1 2019. Probably the two most encouraging KPIs, gross sales for us in Q1 have been about 151,000 units, and that is 20% up on prior year. Prior year was still influenced by some of the restrictions. Most important number there is 11% up on what we did in Q1 2019. We're still seeing some pent-up demand in the market driving the recovery. Our attrition rates for Q1 2023 is down to 36% compared to 40% last year and 39% in Q1 2019. Positive trend on attrition rates at this point in time, which is encouraging despite, as I mentioned, in South Africa, we are seeing some adverse trends. On a consolidated basis, that remains positive. Strong performance across Europe and APAC. Italy and Singapore back to about pre-COVID levels. Good performance in the U.K. despite the macroeconomic headwinds we've seen. There's some challenges in South Africa which we are currently focusing on, particularly around the quality of sales, which is very much within our control. Okay. Moving on to Kauai, our food business. I think that continues to perform very well, and we're very happy with that acquisition. Looking at gross sales, they're up 31% pre-COVID and up 4% on budget. We've clearly seen a shift towards healthier eating. I think that's become entrenched across the business. Looking at it from an EBITDA perspective, we are 51% up on pre-COVID levels, 11% up on budget. We've exceeded expectations. When we take that 11% and we analyze it in terms of what's the core news in the Virgin Active gyms versus the retail stores, the gyms are recovering or are driving much of that recovery. Gyms are 20% above budget year to date, whereas the retail stores are 10%. What we're seeing is not just being driven by the higher footfall into the gym, we're seeing higher spend per member, which is very encouraging. Kauai, very happy with the acquisition, continues to perform well, and we think that the trends are firmly entrenched around healthy eating. One of the challenges we faced in 2022 and 2023 has been energy costs. The war in Ukraine has structurally changed the supply chains in Europe, as you'll know, and there's been a knock-on effect in terms of global energy costs. Our energy costs when we compare to 2021 and 2022 was increased by 37%. We still benefited by some locked-in fixed pricing in Italy and in the U.K. in 2022. Those unwound in 2023. We look at our 2023 energy costs, they are up 54% on 2021. A significant increase in energy costs across the group. From an SA perspective, we still continue to grapple with load shedding, and we will see continued tariff increases from Eskom for the foreseeable future. We are investing at the moment in inverters and batteries right across our estate to offset part of the impact. The key message here is, we are looking at a permanent structural change in energy costs in our group of about GBP 10 million a year. Right now, we don't see a catalyst for any change in terms of energy costs. We're seeing some normalization, but that normalization is well above where we were in pre-Ukraine war. I touched on yields earlier on. When we came out of COVID, our key focus was to drive volumes, was to get people back into our clubs, and from there, we could manage yield, from there, we could manage ancillary revenues and drive greater penetration. The reason why yields in 2023 are lower than 2019 is because firstly, we've pushed sales promotions. We were offering one or two months free for people to come back into the gym. That gets amortized across the contract period. In Italy, we introduced a gym-only product, so therefore, didn't include group exercise classes. That's been fundamental in terms of driving volume in the mid to lower tier clubs. In South Africa, we have youth products for people 18-21, 21-25, which are discounted compared to normal adult prices. What we saw in the recovery was the first people to come back to the gym were the youth. They felt more confident and robust about coming back into that environment. That's changed the mix. We would expect that to unwind as older cohorts come back to the club. Within the U.K., there's a significant yield differential between our London clubs, in particular CBD clubs, and our provincial clubs. The London clubs trade about 80% yield premium to the provincial clubs. As the provincial clubs performed and the London clubs struggled, there's been a portfolio mix that's dragged down the yields. Once again, as we start to see a recovery in the London clubs, we would expect to see that unwind. Going forward, we as a business, strategically, we're looking at a much more balanced approach towards volume and yields. The first thing that's going to drive a recovery in yields will be reducing our sales promotions, which is happening right now. We have put price increases through the estate. Back end of last year, we put price increases in U.K., Italy, and Australia to recognize the inflationary impact and the energy cost impact in the business, and put our normal annual increases through at the beginning of this year. Collectively, the blended yield increase for the estate in 2023 is going to be about 7%. We're expecting to see, and we are seeing a recovery, the CBD clubs driving some of that recovery. We are also repositioning some of our Italian clubs. Our Italian clubs are at four different pricing tiers, depending on the status of the club. We are slowly, as we reinvest in those clubs, we are moving them up a tier and benefiting from the yield benefits. We expect to see a transition and improvement in yields through the next few years as these drivers of the yield reduction unwind and as we put through new initiatives to improve yields. Putting that all together, key messages, firstly, the volume recovery is firmly entrenched. Secondly, we are business enough through EBITDA break even. The recovery is going to be driven by two things. It's going to be driven by the operating leverage that I spoke about, 95% of every GBP going through to the bottom line, and it's going to be driven by yield recovery. This is simple mechanics here just to demonstrate how the yield and operating leverage works for the business. In the last seven months, we sold 104,000 members. We'll need another 120,000 to get back to 2019 levels. We're expecting to get there back end of 2024, early 2025. If we take those, just round it, 121,000 members and we apply today's yield, that will give us a GBP 53 million upside in terms of EBITDA in the business. If we just process the yield increases that we put through in 2023, so that 7% I mentioned, and we put a CPI increase through in 2024, that gives us another approximately GBP 15 million. Collectively, those two items just mechanically play out to about GBP 130 million, perhaps GBP 115 million incremental EBITDA to this business. That's not what we're going for. Clearly, we are going for more, and Luca and Dean will touch on the initiatives that will drive that. The key thing here is that we're seeing a clear path to recovery in the gym business. The food business is performing above expectation. We've got a solid foundation here for us to build on our global wellness business. On that note, I'm going to hand over to Luca Valotta, our Chief Operating Officer, who will talk to you more about the drivers of the business. I'm going to just caveat this. Luca is not feeling well. He didn't have a good night. He may have to step out if things don't go well. If Dean comes, I feel more comfortable. I have big stomach ache during all the night. Being the fact that I've been all my career in Italian business, and I build, as a founder, a great business, when Dean asked me to be the CEO of the global business, I was wondering where I can add value to this business. One thing is right here in the industry, that a category killer is normally the model club that we are looking at. The category killer in our industry is a club that is very difficult to compete with, is so competitive, is large, it's got international, of course, expansion, and it's got some characteristic that make it very difficult to compete with. I thought that my contribution to the business and to the team was kind of doing what I've done in Italy in my career, so build this category killer that, as you see, is coming off from COVID in a very good shape, and trying to expand it and trying to enhance in the rest of the world. I think that the story is about category killer today is built on three pillars. The first one is the hardware, the second one is the software, and the third one is the brand. Let's talk about first the hardware. What is the hardware in our industry? The hardware is the club, the location, and Virgin Active has got an incredible portfolio of location. 230 club is the most international health club chain. 230 club across the world, from South Africa to Europe, to Asia, and to Australia. We are in one of the best city of Southern America in the world. Actually, building the business for 25 years, we inherited some amazing iconic location, for example, that is very difficult to replicate. Like, for example, London, Mayfair, Kensington, Milano Corso Como, Rome Parioli, Naples Santa Giulia. We have, I don't know, Bangkok. We have Empire Tower in Melbourne, Collins Street. In Sydney, we have Margaret Street, Cape Town, Joburg, Silo, Melrose Arch. These iconic location is very impossible for any operator to build and for any operator to develop. Aside of that, we have also built this big club. One of the characteristic of our club is the size. We have a club that goes from 2,500 square meter, pretty much to 5,000 square meter. This is another difficult thing to build for any operator that want to compete with us, because finding such a large space, getting the capital to build it, and run it properly is very difficult. Actually, we have built some critical factor of success within our business and within our portfolio club. The other pillar of our strategy on the hardware is definitely the financial discipline that we apply to our club. In my opinion, based on my experience, even if we are into a premium segment, we never overspec the club. If you look at now, we're going to show you some of the video of our international club. Traveling the world and see some of the luxury club, I think they are all overspec. I think that when you go overspec, it's very difficult then to create some good returns for the shareholder. Our job, of course, is to create a good return for the money that you guys invest in our business. Actually, when we project the club, even for the future, we always been very financial discipline in order to apply the right capital to the right club. We prove that our model is a model that can generate the IRR over 30%. This is the hardware overview, and let's look at some of our video that we prepared for you in order to show the quality of our club, and then we talk about the software. This is Teatro delle Voci, is one of the club in Milan that we open in the first circle. This is a club that we open in November last year. Is already full capacity, is already over 3,500 members, and with a very good yield. You will see the latest product that we just open in Milan. This is an iconic location, is an old cinema in Milan, is a building that is very important for the city. It's been closed for 20 years. We take it, we put a very good health club. The city is very happy that today we take it back to life. After 14 years in this industry, there was something that it couldn't let us grow the business more. Actually, I recognized that the hardware, so the location and the facility itself, was not enough to create more value into the business. I actually went to the U.S. to do a long trip, and I recognized that the market there, it was moving, was more dynamic than in Europe and in the rest of the world. There was one other player other than the locals that were already impacting our business on the bottom of our business, of The Matrix. Of course, we pushed the business up to the premium segment. There was like the new boutique. I went to see. I was telling Dean yesterday that I went a couple of weeks in America to look at all the boutique operator, all boutique guys, and they were just starting. There was SoulCycle, there were various boot camp F45. There was this only one single classes, but with great experience. They were disrupting the market because pretty much they were offering to customer a different way to see the fitness and then different way to see in the future the wellness. I recognized that our model that was pretty much based on location, yeah, it was not enough, like the cinema operator, it was not enough. We needed to create more value into the business. What we actually did, the right metaphor is that we were like a cinema operator that was buying and supply the movie, so the product from other operators. We were buying from Les Mills, from Zumba, and all these operators. What we have start to do, we have start to create our own software. We knew that we were going to need to be more competitive. Without creating a software, which is unique to us, we were going to lose some competitive advantage. From 2015 on, I've been busy to build a software. Of course, a software is something that evolve. Then we become almost like a Netflix. This streaming operator that other than the platform and the ecosystem, they own also the product, the production, and they are unique to them. That's what we have done to create more value into The Matrix, w e build our own software. Our software is pretty much, just getting down to our industry, is pretty much based on three things. It is based on product. Product, program, and trainers, of course. It is based on excellent customer service. We have to raise the game in order to compete much better and preserve our premium positioning. The third one, which is recent, is our hybrid positioning. What we have done is that we have created a platform where actually the member can interact with us only at the club level. The club is just one touch point, the most important, because it's our distribution across the world, but it's just one touch point. Thanks to the digital transformation, we create, of course, scalability, we create economy of scale, and we create a better way to attract also our members to retain them. Actually creating all this, with Dean, we are both passionate about the product. We managed to gather the product line because we recognized that nowadays, compared to the past, it was almost like a property business. This business has become more sophisticated, and actually having the leader of the business very focused on product is fundamental, because today the fitness and the wellness is very exposed to social network, is a big trend. We need to make sure that we are ahead of the game also on this. We create a product line. We develop our own in-house expert. Sorry. Continuous improvement, innovation. Of course, we continue to innovate, w e call Big Five because we have this in-club experience. We actually take the boutique experience and put it in our club to create new value. Something for everyone, w e are very attentive to make sure that we have a product that appeal to a wider range of people rather than the boutique. They're very niche and very specific to some segment of the consumer. This, of course, exclusive, I was saying before, is exclusive to Virgin Active and is included in our membership. Our subscription model is a fundamental then, as Mark showed, to create value in our proposition and for your investment. The last part of my explanation about the software goes into how we became, progressively, a data-driven business. Of course, for other business, it looks like the normality today to be a data-driven business. I can assure you that in the fitness industry, we are ahead in the game. I explain it to you in one single example, which is down to our industry, down to our decision-making process, how, for example, we use data to improve and to attract more members. Reformer Pilates, for example, if we talk about product, it's been one of our most successful product of the famous Big Five that I was talking before about. When I launched it in Italy and across the world, we were seeing that this product is very important because attract a segment of consumer, which is probably the most precious segment of consumer that we have in our industry, which is the women between 30 to 50 years old. For some reason, we look at the data, for some reason, we didn't attract the Gen Z. The female segment of the Gen Z below the 30 years old, so from 18 to 30 years old, were not attracted by Reformer Pilates too much compared to the other segment of population. Actually, we look at the data. We went to ask them, we do some research on that, and we recognize that our Reformer Pilates was not intense enough to attract that segment of people. Now if you look at our data after two, three years of getting into the market with that product, we are now having a much broader consumer segment that appeal to that product. Actually here I put some snapshots of the result. This result, guys, is on top of the game in the industry. No one has in the world has got 2,700 personal trainer, that will ended up probably to be 3,000 at the end of the year. We deliver 2.3 million session per year in our business. The other snapshot that is very important to see is that we get to 1.6 million attendees on the famous Big 5 in the classics in general. If we annualize it, our goal is to get to 20 million. We want to deliver 20 million session to our member across the next 12 months. This is an amazing achievement because, of course, when you talk about this number, it means that you also control and manage the trend of the future. Here within, we put some basket so you can see how we differentiate and we segment it also, sorry, our product offer. We got the Trinity training, we got, as I said before, yoga and Pilates, and we got exercise and music, which is more appealing to a different segment of people, more choreographic classes. We do music, of course, in cycle spinning, cycle work, in many across the different segment of product. We have some of the picture. We have fitness, BG, and events. We also cluster the product suite. We have, of course, the gym floor, which is very important, because of course appeal to the vast audience or instead of the main segment of the market. We get a personal trainer, which we point a lot on the personal trainer. We keep innovating and develop. We launched recently this small group personal trainer that make the personal trainer more affordable to a vast audience. Don't forget that the people that work out with a personal trainer have a double retention rate than the person that doesn't work out with a personal trainer. Actually, our personal trainer, more wider and more, let's say, more people attached, and better it is for our retention rate. Then we start to look at in events and experience. We're looking to buy a company that does outdoor sports event because at the end of the day, we want to be not an health club chain, we want just to be a wellness brand. Actually, everywhere the member want to work out and experience healthy lifestyle, which is going to be nutrition, which is going to be in the club, it's going to be outdoor, it's going to be at home with our digital proposition, that's going to be Virgin Active. Yeah. Particularly in the U.K., again, we have this big club outside of London, especially, and we develop a lot also in terms of product suites for family. We are looking at expand our ability to do swim classes and to create a new revenue stream for using better and more extensively our huge number of pools around the world. We start recently to also looking at the rackets, particularly the Padel. Dean has been a big promoter of Padel, so it's both in Europe and in South Africa. I think Padel is a good game that can be kind of really well fit in our proposition. Yeah. Finalizing my speech around what I'm doing, the other important things that I've done in the business is to segment the product. This is another unique characteristic of Virgin Active, the product segmentation. The club segmentation, because we have these three different tier of club. We got a collection club, we have 17 collection, plus two in South Africa, three in South Africa, sorry. 20 collection club. We have around 80, 85 premium club across the world, and the rest is the life center and (rec). Particularly internationally, you will see that visiting our club internationally, you won't see much difference in terms of product offering. Between the 3 tier club, the product offering is quite standard and it's quite very high in premium position. My goal was to make sure that in each of the segments, what it change is the demographic, because collection club are in the middle to high demographic. The premium are not in the middle first circle of the city demographic. The life center service is purely a middle catchment product. In all the three segments, so high, middle, high, and middle, we are the leading premium club. We are still a category pillar. This is another piece that enlarge our ability to expand as we grow, because if you only concentrate on the collection club, of course, we will have lesser ability to expand our product physically. Last part that I want to touch with you guys is another very important part of the software, which is the way that we work. The way that we work since the new management has came on board has changed quite radically. We moved from a business that was territory-led, sorry, territory-led, we become more a global business. To become a global business and a global brand, you need to change the way that you work, you need to embrace a new way of working and sharing best practices, making sure that the people understand that they work for an international global brand. What I've been busy to do in the first few months that I took the role is to work on projects. Actually internationally today on people, on operation and acquisition that are the three main area that I manage. We work on projects. We have a platform. We start up a project, for example, in this case, to standardize and globalize our acquisition process and our operation process, for example. We take people from all around the world, like in a matrix, and we work with them to finalize the project. The project normally has a timeline, has a rewarding scheme, and this is helping us to take the business forward. The last part of my presentation is pretty much how we prove that working in this way, we can be very competitive in both mature market. Actually, I do believe that Virgin Active as a category killer can do great both in mature market and in emerging market. The last part of my presentation is about the academy. As we talk about software, I recognize back in the days that when I started to talk about software in this industry, that we needed an R&D. Pretty much the academy is our R&D. It's a place, not only physical, but it's an organization that help Virgin Active to continue to innovate the product. Creating new products, of course, train the people in order to be on top of the game, support them, and implement them. It's our research and development department inside Virgin Active. There is no other player that's got an R&D in the fitness industry, and this has become a key component of our success. Again, it will improve our category pillar position. That is what I wanted to show in the first few months of our work. Thanks, team, to be standing here because I was scared that I could stop. I hope you enjoy the presentation, and I'll let Steve. Thank you. Firstly, thanks to Luca. I know how Luca struggled through the night. He's been up most of the night and been very unwell, thanks for presenting. I've been in the role for just over 12 months, and there's a lot of change that's taken place. Just to emphasize, to have the support of the likes of Mark and Luca, these are absolute industry experts. The experience they have over many, many years is unparalleled. To find people in an organization that have that level of knowledge, know-how, just makes my job so much simpler. The team is incredible. The experience, the knowledge, as I say, just absolutely unparalleled. Aligned and/or alongside that is also their and their team's ability to accept change. A lot of people that have been in the industry a long time and have this level of experience are also not open to new ideas and are quite set in the way they do things. The team that we have, with all their experience, are incredibly open to change and new opportunities. They've embraced it. Mark, Luca, their teams have embraced the changes we've made, and are starting to see the impact of some of those changes. Very much a teamwork over the last 12 months, and w e've seen really nice green shoots. We as a management team fully understand this is just the very, very beginning of the journey. We've got really, really lofty goals and aims, on where we want to go with the business. We understand there's a lot of hard work and a journey ahead. When we start looking at our vision and our purpose and the reason we exist, we're incredibly fortunate that this purpose, this north star of our business, is this ability to change people's lives for the better. It's amazing to work in a company where you have such a strong purpose and can be a really purpose-driven business. Our product, nutrition, fitness, makes a difference to people's lives. It's made a difference to my life personally. It makes a difference to people's lives. It's incredible to be involved in a business, and our team at Virgin Active is so behind this purpose. They understand this is way more than a job. We've got a product that can change lives. At the same time, being a purpose-driven business, a business with such a strong purpose resonates with consumer. There's a commercial reason that purpose-driven businesses succeed. As I say, Virgin has this incredible purpose that we have this ability to change people's lives. Traditionally, in the gym business, in a traditional gym business, customer lifetime value has been low. Retention is low. There's a huge sales machine that's sell, sell, but there's leaky buckets as there's higher levels of attrition and churn, and people fall off the bottom of the bucket. We have to change the mindset. How do we change this business? How do we create a much stickier customer? How do we improve customer lifetime value? Quite simply, customers, members stay with us if they engage with us more frequently. It's that simple. If they use our gyms, they don't leave. We have to find ways to get them to engage more frequently, that's where we start looking at how do we work with physical and in digital environments and get all the data from those. When people access our clubs, when they use our app, what classes they book, what food do they buy? Get all of that data that we can create more engagements, get them to use our club more, and understand their needs. We suddenly start to understand the reason why they use the gym, the reason why they eat healthy, when they train, all of that data. Using that data, we can offer a much more personalized offering. When you offer a personalized offering, when I understand my member's needs, I start to create an emotional connection with the member or with the customer. It's that emotional connection, that personalization, that ultimately drives customer lifetime value. Frequency, how often they train with us, how many times they engage with us, and the average spend. How do I drive up the average basket size, the average spend per member? It's through these levels of engagement, usage, using data, combination of the physical and digital environments to create that. That's where we're very focused on in terms of using this data, the different engagement points. We want to drive customer lifetime value there. The space that we play in is not just the gym space, it's not just the nutrition space, it's the wellness space. It's an incredible space to be in. It is a fast-growing space. COVID was devastating to anyone, particularly restaurants, gyms that were in the physical environment. It goes without saying, it was. We closed our doors. We had no revenue. We had these fixed cost bases, both the food business and in the gym business. There is, however, a silver lining to COVID, is that post-COVID, the awareness and knowledge people have on the benefits of being active, eating healthy, getting good sleep, mental wellness. COVID has been this amazing advert that people have suddenly woken up and understand, "I have to look after myself." This is a primary reason. It's no longer just a lifestyle, i t's a societal shift we'll see in terms of people wanting, knowing that they need to keep well. We're seeing this growth in this industry, this great place to see. We're seeing a huge move, even post-COVID, I mean, obviously through COVID, people had no choice but to exercise online. It was a question, will people ever get back to gyms? I mean, will people want to go to a restaurant? We are seeing a huge shift from what we call from URL, from online experiences, to IRL, in-real-life experiences. People want to train with other people. People are not motivated training at home. We've seen the likes of what's happened to Peloton and other online-only players. We see what happens in the restaurant. We see (kuais) numbers there in terms of the growth post-COVID. People want to be with other people. They want to train with other people. They want to socialize with other people. Despite COVID and what happened through COVID, there is a strong move back into the gym space there. We also seen, in terms of this wellness space. We're seeing major macroeconomic headwinds in terms of cost of living increases. This segment that understands wellness and this growing segment of people that are coming to wellness, despite those macroeconomic headwinds and challenges, are allocating more of their spend to wellness. As I say, post-COVID, they understand the importance of wellness, and w e see this segment, people that are engaged in the wellness space, much more resilient in terms of the hard times that we potentially face. Go back one. Okay, go forward a slide. When we start looking at what does the wellness space mean as opposed to the gym and nutrition, one of the biggest demotivating factors and why a gym can become a chore, eating healthy is not pleasant, is when you don't see results. The converse of that is when you see results, it's motivating. If someone has a goal to run a marathon, and they can train for that, and they run well, and they achieve their personal best in a marathon, that becomes incredibly motivating. The goal is potentially to lose weight because you've got a wedding or an event at the end of the month, and you achieve that goal, it's incredibly motivating. You move from a chore or something you don't want to do, say, "Hey, this is really something. I see the impact. I see the results." The reality is, though, to achieve wellness results where you only look at one vertical is very difficult. In other words, if I train but I eat unhealthily, I don't sleep well, I have anxiety issues, my overall wellness is not going to improve. I could just eat well and never train, same story. What we have to do is find ways to motivate people. The way to do that, the way to deliver results, is to start looking at it as an individual across the various silos of wellness. Not just say exercise, look at it across the whole. There are six different dimensions to wellness. We have strong fundamentals, a strong foundation in the two biggest pillars of wellness, nutrition through the Kauai new acquisition and Virgin Active on the fitness space. We start now delivering a solution that delivers results. As I said, as we deliver those results, we encourage engagement, we encourage usage, we start to drive a customer lifetime value. We start to get a much stickier member or customer within our ecosystem. Just following on from that in terms of a pure gym play versus the wellness play. As I mentioned, we've seen a societal shift to a healthy lifestyle. This is not a fad, t his is not a trend, i t's an absolute shift. It's something that's here to stay and will continue to grow and grow exponentially compared to other industries that we see here. We also have to see wellness as more than just a lifestyle. It's preventative health and governments, insurers, I mean, Discovery clicked onto this a long, long time ago, but more and more insurers, big governments, big corporates understand how effective preventative wellness is. Preventative wellness has become mainstream in terms of the healthcare delivery system. We'll see shifts in terms of spending from corporates allocating funds toward preventative wellness. Significantly cheaper than treatment. We would rather stop people-- our ability through nutrition, through wellness, through activity to stop people getting sick, is very, very powerful from a commercial point of view. Clearly, the wellness addressable market is significantly bigger than just one of the verticals by itself. We go back to this thing you hear me talking about often, the customer lifetime, that frequency, where we can look at a person as a whole, and we can drive additional levels of engagement because we have more data, we start to reduce our churn. Now, the churn is probably the biggest factor in purely the underlying gym business that can have a material impact over and above the areas that Mark spoke about in terms of the pure mechanics of just driving volume to get back to the 2019 membership levels and yield. Over and above that, when you start making an impact, small impacts, 5%, 6%, 7% on attrition rates, that has an impact that's well above those mechanics that Mark started to speak about. We also believe, and when we say believe, we've looked at valuations of businesses that play in the wellness space, lifestyle space, versus businesses that are purely in the gym space or purely in the food space. We see a much larger universe of potential investors that are attracted to the wellness space. We've seen different valuations attributed to wellness businesses as opposed to pure gym businesses. From an investment thesis point of view, we see a strong reason to move into the wellness space. Not gonna take you through this pyramid in too much detail. I just want to emphasize a couple of things, that everything on this pyramid is and has been actioned. This is not a pretty slide that tells you what we want to do. Every step of this, from the ground at the bottom, when we started to look at people, we made changes to people. We're driving culture incredibly hard in terms of how we want to run the business. This radical honesty we have, this ability to communicate, to challenge each other, bold, agile decision, all things that Virgin Active weren't, that we've changed and it's happening today as we speak in our business. Not at the top level, from the ground up. That bottom level is addressed. We've made radical people changes. We've got different people in different positions, and we're driving that culture. You look at all the strategic initiatives and how we're achieving those, tick against every different levels of spaces where we are in terms of them. Some will be more advanced, some we're just starting. There is not anything on that board that we haven't actioned or measuring and reporting on internally in terms of how we perform against those measurements. The thing that's important to understand here is that it's 12 months in, but we're addressing all of these. We understand there's a lot of work to do, but these are actions that are taking place every single day as we speak in our business today. To take a little bit more detail, I'll go through this fairly quickly just in terms of call it is the BAU initiative, just stuff that we do every day. A big change to the business, Luca alluded to it, is that Virgin Active was run by territories, huge head office structures in every single territory we worked in. There's obvious implications there. Duplication of cost, incredibly large head office structure across different territories. More than that, it's just no sharing of knowledge, no sharing of ideas. People worked in silos across these territories. We have unwound that structure. That structure does not exist. We have a group head office, a global head office. That doesn't mean a huge team. I'm talking about six, seven people sitting at global, and we started to simplify and take costs out of the territory structures. There's certain functions at a certain territory that we've got more now to function. In the past, marketing, IT, legal, all reported into a country MD. Those roles, marketing and IT as an example, now report functionally into group. We've made a lot of those changes already. We've appointed a new group chief marketing officer. He starts at the beginning of July. It was amazing when we recruited for the position, the number of people that wanted to come work for Virgin Active. We had an incredibly strong pool of people that wanted to apply for this position. I think we're incredibly fortunate, and I can say today that we've appointed the vice president of digital marketing for Disney across EMEA. Strong digital focus, worked across all the Disney+, Marvel Comics, all their theme parks across Europe and EMEA, and he'll start in July. A real asset. Someone who'll bring total different perspective, not from the gym industry, can really add value to the existing team. On the CTO, I'm pleased to point out David there. David is our new group CTO. The CMO is London-based, o ur CTO is also London-based. Just as a background to David, he headed up, he was the IT head for the NHS in the whole of the U.K. David was responsible for the contact tracing app at the beginning of COVID. David worked very closely with the government, with Boris Johnson and his team, in actually developing from scratch that U.K. contract tracing app that was very effective through COVID. Amazing to have David on board. He's only been on board for two weeks, but already started in terms of his insights and perceptions and understanding of the business add great value to us. As most of you know, we changed. Mark moved up to the group CFO. We appointed Jessica Spira out of the banking space as the MD of South Africa. Numerous other changes, big changes have taken place in almost every other territory. As we simplify structures, as we take costs out of territories, more important that has become a more agile organization that can make decisions quicker, that we as a group team are much closer. There's not layers between us. We have information of what's going on the ground in real time. Those are some of the big changes. As I say, those are the implications of those changes. Sales process, it blew me away. I came into the business of how do we sell in the gym? This is not Virgin Active, this is the gym industry. We have a very direct sales model. People come into the gym to buy their memberships. As a result of that, you need four or five full-time employees sitting in every single club. On top of that, you need a sales manager in club to manage those four or five people. You need regional sales managers, you need group sales, you need central sales. It's an incredibly big, expensive, and inefficient structure to sell. We do very little of our sales online. We do very little of our sales through referrals, through corporate sales. The other implication of having these full-time employees, not only is the salaries, but it's the commission structures that are associated. It's the misalignment with the organization, where you have a sales team that is absolutely driven to hit sales numbers and sales targets and are not responsible for terminations. Ultimately, what drives our business is net member growth. The number of sales we do is not nearly as important as the net of sales and terminations, what ultimately comes to the bottom line. Where you've got a misalignment where a sales team is incentivized and driving sales, clearly the quality of sale is not going to be what it should be, where they don't really care whether that member stays with us for three, 12, 24 months. We already started realigning those sales processes in terms of how we pay commissions, when we pay commissions, and how the salesperson becomes more accountable for the customer or the member throughout their life cycle in terms of training, comms paid over a period of time. Some of you from the insurance sector, things that seem obvious but were not in place and are not in place in the gym space. In addition to the sales consultants and how we restructure that, we have to drive more of our sales through other channels. There is no reason that over time, the majority of our sales shouldn't come from online. People buy hotels without hotel accommodation, without ever seeing the hotel. They buy cars today online. There is no reason we cannot sell gym memberships online. Result of that is not only that we need less full-time employees in our clubs, not only do we save sales commissions, but the quality of that sale. Generally, someone who buys online is a better quality sale than the walk-in to our club, and therefore stays with us for a longer period of time. Also because of the cost of acquisition is so much lower. In fact, if they do leave after six or 12 months, we more than recover the cost of the sale. A big project underway in some countries already well advanced, but in every single territory, the sales process has been relooked at. How do we create additional sales channels, online sales, corporate sales, referrals, and how do we use other partners? South Africa's done it very well with Vitality. How do we use other partners and leverage other relationships to help us distribute our product? Just the last one there is Virgin Active Padel clubs. Padel, one of the fastest growing sports in the world today. What we see Padel as is just to cut through everything, is once again a retention tool. We've decided to go with a very capital-light model, and that we are not building Padel courts. We're finding partners globally to build the courts on our behalf. We will get a commission, we've licensed the brand for that, and we get a royalty for that. Ultimately, what we see with Padel is retention. How do we stop members leaving our gym because they want to play padel outside? It becomes a retention tool for us more than anything, that we'll have padel courts in our own clubs. We'll start using some of our tennis courts and parking spaces to build padel clubs because it drives retention. At the same time, you'll see satellite standalone padel courts that are Virgin Active branding, so our members can go play there. They get quite a significant discount, if they play at those satellite locations versus the man in the street. Not only a retention tool but an acquisition tool. Our first padel courts opened in the U.K., in Chiswick Riverside about two weeks ago. The usage has just been phenomenal. In that model, in that particular club, it's only available to our members. Members of the public cannot come play there, and we've seen the impact it has had on sales and you see it in the U.K. numbers, even in this two-week period, in terms of people signing up with the club because they want to play on these padel courts, so s till early stages. You'll see, I guess, in the next six weeks or six to eight weeks in South Africa, some existing padel courts rebrand as Virgin Active padel clubs. Once again, an exciting initiative to drive retention and reduce churn. Luca spoke about the premium offering and what differentiates ourselves from the low cost and the budget operators, and he spoke about the hardware and the software, but also from a customer experience point of view, and he started to speak about the experience, customer service. The differentiator is you walk into a budget operator, there's no one that greets you, no one knows your name. You swipe in, you go use the club, there's no facilities. Our experience is really important in terms of our differentiation, and how we use digital to enhance that experience. Very much part of the last 12 months has been around this digital transformation. I don't want anyone to get confused when I say digital, because immediately comes to mind is some sort of online only offering that we're going to monetize and we're going to scale it and sell it. That is a small and relatively insignificant part of the digital transformation. The digital transformation I'll talk about is around how we use data, how we become more efficient with data, how we sell better, how we bring down our cost of acquisition, and then how we use digital to enhance the in-club experience. How do I make access and booking and ratings and you buying food and buying personal training packages easier for our members? Reduce the friction that we have in our clubs. It's digital that once again, improves the experience, gives us better access to data. Having that data, we know what our members want and need, and we can use that to improve the experience. Something that prior to me getting involved in Virgin, I'd heard about for a long time, was the Virgin Active app, and this Virgin Active app coming and there's going to be a loyalty program. I was a Virgin member for the last 20 years and never really saw it. I'm pleased to say that finally we have a world-class Virgin Active app. It launched 10 days ago just to a smallish group of members, a couple of hundred members and friends and family that are testing it. By the end of the month, the Virgin Active app and Virgin Active loyalty program will be live in South Africa, available to all our members. We've done South Africa first, Italy will follow, U.K. will follow, followed by APAC. It's more than just an app. There's the obvious things that the app does, which is around access and booking classes, ratings, but it has a very strong loyalty program that is very aligned with our objectives in terms of what we want to drive. With all of the things I've spoken about that Luca spoke product, super important. We talk about why do we have all these group classes? We find people who do group classes that use PT stay with us longer. Today, you need a little bit more than that. You need to reward them for that, and that's the loyalty program. There isn't a success from Chipotle to hotel groups, Starbucks, all have incredibly powerful loyalty programs that drive frequency and retention of customers. Virgin Active and the whole gym industry does not have a world-class gym program. Most operators have no loyalty program. We launched a loyalty program. I'm going to take you very quickly through it. Just to once again, the reason for loyalty, why do we want a loyalty program? We encourage usage. We want to encourage people, if they come to the club twice a week, automatically on their second exit, they have to scan now. The access to the club will be a QR code on the phone, so it's not like we're asking people to download the app. Every member, cross-Virgin Active, will have to download the app because that will become their access card. We won't do that day one. We need to educate people to most people bring their phones. We move away from cards or bracelets overseas that they tag in. Within three to four months, the only way you access the club is through the loyalty program, is through your app, and then you've got to scan to access. If you've been in the club for 30 minutes on your second visit in a week, you automatically get a free smoothie. We see a huge cohort of members that, funny enough, train less than twice a month. We know with that cohort, when someone trains less than twice a month, they are very likely, at the end of their contract, to terminate. If we can get them to train twice a week, eight times a month, they are very unlikely to terminate their contract. We're rewarding usage, weekly usage, automatically, seamlessly after a second visit, 30 minutes in. You get that free smoothie. We then reward in a streak. If you're able to do that four weeks in a row, you get a different reward. Every access, every online booking of a class gives you points. Different tier statuses open up different benefits. Every month, your points get converted to a wallet balance. You can apply that wallet balance to your next debit order if you want. You can apply it to a physio, to different supply in Kauai in terms of discounts. Very compelling. Very first people to see the app apart from the small user group. I'll take you just here. I'm not going to take you through all the functionality. We believe from a user experience and a user interface point of view, it's an amazing app. Just to demonstrate from an access control point of view, the QR codes, this is what you'll scan to enter the club. As I said, you've got to scan to exit. Doesn't mean you have to exit by scanning. If you walk out the club and you don't scan, which is fine from a safety and security, we can't lock the gate, you won't get your loyalty points. You need to be in there for 30 minutes. Our experience has showed us with the Vitality program, that we have a lot of people walking the turnstiles and coming in and coming straight out. You need to be in the club for 30 minutes from accessing it. The rewards program, you can see here, five days left for the week, two ticks in that. If I want to view my rewards. A guy that has entered the gym twice this week, he's got his free smoothie. You've got 14 days to get it. You just go scan that at the Kauai, you get your free smoothie. Instantaneous, frictionless, on 30 minutes within your second visit. It's on your screen. You can go off your workout and go get that reward. Classes, you can go by club. Depending on which club you are, you can see a selection of the classes on offer in that club. You can book it online, it automatically comes into your calendar. You're booking classes, you can rate classes. Workouts, we recognize, as I said, with digital, there are days that you don't want to come in or you're unable to come in the club. We've got a selection of workouts tailored for yourself, based on what your needs, what your goals were. We'll surface stuff that's relevant to you, but at the same time, you can also view all the online workouts. The workouts will tell you the level of intensity, how long they'll take, what type of equipment you need to have. You can use that to do a workout at home on the days that you don't want to come in the club, or you can use it in the gym. You may want to work out by yourself and not with a personal trainer. These can guide you through workouts. The various tier benefits, depending on what your statuses are. In addition to the Kauai and what we call the instant gratification rewards, there's a whole lot of other benefits that get unlocked as you move up tier statuses, we unlock different benefits. You can manage your profile and everything, your cell numbers, your membership details, everything online now. We believe it's a world-class program. We believe quite game-changing in terms of behaviors within our gym environment and encouraging use to the gym. As I said, by the end of the month, that will be live in South Africa. Apart from the engagement, the data we're going to get from that app, understanding the whole profile of a member, what type of smoothie they like, the time of day, how long they spent in the gym, which class they did, which PT they used. Taking all that data and then using that data once again to create this emotional connection, to personalize our offering and understand our member, puts us on another level in terms of the premiumization, personalization of our product. In addition to the app and the digital and how we're going to use it, we also recognize, and this is particularly relevant in the U.K., that we need to rejuvenate the estate in the U.K. I've now managed to get to most of the clubs across the U.K., and I was expecting something quite different. What stood out to me is what Luca highlighted, the number of amazing locations that we have in the U.K. We have these incredible locations in great city and residential areas. In addition to that, the actual box, the size of the gym, the parking that we've got is phenomenal. You cannot replicate that. Yes, there's reinvestment required in the internals, in the equipment, adding some new studios to do the classes. The actual box that we've got, the actual location we've got is phenomenal in the U.K., and our competitors don't have that. We do need to upgrade those facilities and reinvest into the estate. We have a very inconsistent proposition in the U.K. where you've got the Mayfair-type club. It becomes very difficult to talk to our member when we have such a difference in terms of facilities within those clubs and the number of classes that we offer or don't offer, and the quality of the equipment. If we want to increase volume there, increase yield, and reduce churn, there is a need for reinvestment. We have the digital transformation, and on top of that, there is a reinvestment required in the U.K. M&A opportunities. There are some very unique opportunities we're seeing in the marketplace at the moment. Why do we look at that versus organic? It's very difficult. We have, in the cities that we operate in, we own the iconic locations. All our competitors potentially have to find incredible locations is very, very difficult. In addition, to build those locations is costly. Not only is it costly to build, but in developing clubs, there's a two-year ramp-up period where you're starting to get a mature base in terms of membership numbers. The certain territories that we're in as well, we are subscale. We have this ability to leverage existing infrastructure, existing overhead structures, to add on numerous other clubs. The easiest way to do that, and the most effective and cost-effective and less risky way, is through acquisitions. There are definitely good acquisitions out there that can unlock incredible synergies with existing business and may extend some certain territories where we are subscale. Probably one of the most exciting but forward-looking pieces is the evolution of the gym and what the gym has become. As I said, if we stay just a gym or we stay just a food business, we're going to struggle in terms of retention. Even the wellness model is a great and it's a step on in terms of engagement. A step further from that is turning this away from a gym to a club, the old school club, where families join a club and they never leave. Parents are there. Their children go there. Their children, when they grow up, they stay in the club. You join a club for life. More than a club, it becomes a social space. Now we start talking about social spaces, wellness spaces, this concept of a Social Wellness Club, as opposed to just a gym membership. There's a book out at the moment. It's the longest-running survey, a Harvard study, around loneliness and the results of loneliness. There's more people lonely today than suffer from obesity or diabetes, and it's a silent killer in terms of the diseases that loneliness creates. It kills more people than alcoholism and smoking. There's a pandemic of loneliness at the moment, particularly post-COVID. The gym space is something that we can use to start addressing that loneliness crisis. How do we get people to come into our gyms, to use it as more than a wellness space, more than a gym, more than a place to eat, but a place they can work, a place they can socialize, where young people can come and mix together instead of going to some of the toxic type environments where they do socialize. Creating and encouraging very purposefully and with intent, these social wellness spaces. In terms of where we're going with club design, how we look at the spaces in between, where people move, where people socialize, where people sit, how do we start encouraging social interaction so business people can have meetings or they can meet new people? The youth can also spend time there. How do we build our clubs that are far more than just gym spaces? We have examples where that works really well. If you look at a club like The Silos, that does not have a traditional peak gym time. In other words, traditionally in our gym space in South Africa, you have a peak time in the morning, pre-work, and a peak time in the evening. You go to The Silos, it's busy throughout the day. People use that space to train. The boardrooms, I can't get a boardroom, unless I book two, three weeks in advance. I can't get a boardroom to have a meeting there. People are socializing, t he food space, the lounge space is full throughout the day. We want to evolve that further. If you look at the churn rates in a club like Silos, they are totally different to all the other clubs where people use those spaces for more than just a gym. We try to bring people to social, all of their wellness, their classes, their PTs, their gym training, their physios, and their social element all under one roof. We see that as a major opportunity in terms of evolving from a gym business to a wellness business to a Social Wellness Club. In summary, there's a lot of fan. We talk about engagement, customer lifetime value. At the same time, management fully appreciates that in terms of driving value, there is some foundational primary drivers of value that we just can't ignore. That means stuff you guys all know better than me, in terms of EBITDA recovery, return on invested capital, cash conversion, all those basic fundamental drivers of value we have to focus on. We hyper focus on them. We also understand in terms of the valuations that we expect to get in future, we cannot be seen as a South African business, and we're not only a South African business. Luca took you through and showed you some of the amazing clubs that we have. Sometimes when you're sitting in South Africa, you only relate to the South African side. This is a global business with a global footprint that is not a South African business. What we have to do is address the revenue and the EBITDA that comes out of the other territories. We are focused in terms of hard currency earnings as well. Then there are all the secondary drivers, everything that I've spoken about in terms of customer lifetime value, retention. Those do become important when you start looking at valuation multiples and not just the EBITDA uplifter. I've got to emphasize, though, management, myself, I'm a shareholder of this business, is incredibly disciplined. We understand scarcity of capital. We understand we have to take costs out. We have to manage this business, raise productivity. We can't only do that. I got to emphasize, we are doing that. The focus and the discipline we have in terms of how we invest our maintenance capital compared to the past, how we look at our expenses, approved expense, all those disciplines are very much in place. Management is focused. We can't just do that. We also have to be on the offensive. We want to not only drive EBITDA, but also improve the valuation multiple. We have to look at this business as I've taken you through from the fitness business, from the food-only business, into a global wellness business. We have to take advantage of incredible and amazing, quite unique moments in time, M&A opportunities. Because of our structures that we have in place, the synergies that we could extract from those M&A opportunities there. Then as I say, leverage this new structure. In the past, we couldn't go to a new territory, or if we went to a new territory, we had to create a whole new head office structure. You create that head office structure, then you've got to get scale. The new global structure enables us to go into a new territory with no head office. We can go into a Paris, a Geneva, or Madrid. We can use our central head office to explore new territories without having to overlay that head office cost that was there before. We've got to start looking at these new M&A opportunities, new territories, and we've got to scope, focus, and demonstrate that we can generate hard currency earnings. Where we are today, our target as management, we believe we can get to 1.2 million active users in near medium term. Mark spoke around end of 2024, 2025 to deliver that at 120,000, which gets us back to pre-COVID levels. On top of that, we think we can get to 1.2 million. We are seeing already in terms of strong performance out of the U.K. and Italy in terms of starting to diversify our earnings and hard currency earnings outside of South Africa, which we understand is very important for us. We think the wellness play, the Social Wellness Club, also plays into a multiple uplift. So in addition, as I said, to all those primary drivers which are going to drive EBITDA and will drive return on invested capital, we believe that the multiple from a nine with all these other initiatives, less South African exposure, not just a gym business, a wellness business, start to put us in and see an uplift in that valuation model. Certainly as a management team, we are incredibly focused on delivering the EBITDA that we need to do, the membership numbers that we need to do. In addition to that, adding a couple of terms on some multiple as well. That's all from me. Thank you. Thanks, team. Tim, that was very insightful. We've had a long-term relationship with Discovery, and the area you're moving into is quite supportive and complementary of what they're doing. On the other hand, you're also starting to compete with what they're trying to achieve. Just your thoughts on the importance of Vitality and Discovery and the relationship going forward, and how it's gonna be part of your growth strategy. We found a model within Kauai. We were able to reduce our dependency on them but still work alongside them. They were very supportive of us. I think we're moving to a similar scenario with Virgin Active. The reality is that the growth within the Vitality business is-- they probably won't like me saying this, but it's probably limited. Therefore, the growth we get out of Vitality in terms of where management wants to take the business, we have to start looking at other channels or other partners. We've explored that already with non-competitive partners who we're in discussion with. They can add distribution, they can add scale to our business. So I think Discovery understand that we're gonna expand our relationships. The relationship is good. They're an incredibly valuable partner to us, in terms of what we've done in South Africa. I don't see that changing, but I do see us exploring other opportunities. We did a test pilot, for example, with Shoprite, where Shoprite, on their Sixty60 channel, gave away trial gym memberships. They paid us for that. You'll see us exploring some of those others with some scalable partners that have 20, 25 million members on their programs and how we de-leverage that. In short, it's a strong relationship. Very strong at the moment. We will, in parallel to that, explore other opportunities to become less dependent on them. Hi, there. If you have success in driving user engagement, you mentioned people might not use the gym much at all, maybe two times a month, but you'd prefer them to use it two times a week. Are there certain clubs and certain times where you are going to face bottlenecks and capacity constraints? What is the plan around that? I hope that's the case. It'd be a great position to be in if we had capacity in all our clubs. I think differently, there are certain clubs and the Silos or some of the collection clubs where part of the model is to limit member numbers in terms of enhancing the experience. In any of those scenarios where that happens, better for us is how we enhance the yield. We see our best performing EBITDA clubs are clubs that have higher yields. Volume is important to us, but we're not a volume business. We're not a low-cost business that needs volume, y ield is important. Hopefully, when we get to those capacities, we have all the yield levers that really are actually more beneficial to us than volume. Okay, thanks. Then just on your app, often you see businesses launch an app, the business is quite excited, then the apps don't work so well. It's quite common. Maybe could you elaborate on the app? On it, say the exercise section of the app, are there any other apps that you would compare it to that have had success? I know you said not in the gym space per se, but if that app has exercise, is there a yoga app or another workout app that you would compare it to? Also does the app, forgive me for asking this, but does it upload to Strava? Because for some people, that's kind of binary. If it's not on Strava, it never happened. To your first question, I have no doubt that there'll be bugs in the app. To say I don't tell you this app's gonna work perfectly, we've done a lot of pre-testing. We are testing in a lab environment. I have no doubt when we launch to the members on a scale at 300,000, 400,000 South African members, they're gonna find problems, and we're gonna have bugs, and we're gonna have people shouting and screaming. Hopefully, we can fix those quickly. Similar standalone apps that will purely do exercise, and quite honestly, you can go to YouTube and search yoga and do an app. No one has really monetized that incredibly well. Your Netflix now in partnership with Nike doing online workouts. That's not our model. The online workouts we have on our app are purely. We're not trying to monetize, we're not selling. Those are free to all our members. You get full access to the full library that's online. We're not trying to monetize that in any way. Once again, that's a tool that if you can't come to the gym or you want to freeze your membership, it's big in Europe, for example, through August, they want to take a summer break, and normally you'll freeze the membership. Freeze the membership, but continue to pay us a fraction of your membership because you can do the online workouts while you're on holiday. Gives us a tool as well, when someone terminates at the end of their contract for EUR 9 a month, is actually you've terminated, but we'll keep you on our app with online workouts, and by doing that, it's not about the EUR 9. We are then allowed by law to engage with that member on a continuous basis and continue to sell and continue to speak to them. If they're terminated, we are unable to speak to them. It just keeps even a terminated member engaged with us longer. I don't think, and I'm sure there are, but nothing comes to my mind in terms of an app that is there to enhance the physical experience in the gym environment. Plenty in the food and hospitality space. Within the gym space, where you're using that app to create a frictionless experience and then reward people for certain behaviors. Certainly, as I say, I don't know of a comparable gym app that does that. Sorry? Oh, Strava. The Strava link. Yeah, o kay. I think for the marketing piece we have to leave. I think our absolute and share the community itself and similar like services and current values. Just to kind of share the two of those Just to elaborate a little bit further. In terms of where we've launched now, there will be a full integration that's not at launch now, but even with the Technogym equipment. You'll be able to log in where there's a Technogym-enabled piece of equipment that's connected to the Wi-Fi. You'll be able to get the readings onto whatever your wearable is. It'll come up on your phone. Maybe you can just clarify at the moment in terms of connectivity to wearables and what that rollout is. Part of this we are about to do. We will release it in this month and the relevant information, the data that we will be able to use too. There are a few laws that we need to get checked by Apple and Google, that we can share the data, use that data, we have to ensure we comply. It's not at this launch, but it's probably within two, possibly three months connectivity. We need to use that data. It's important for us to use that data to personalize the offering. There was actually a question at the back. Hi, good morning. You've spoken about sorting out the EBITDA and all the work you're doing around that. Can you help us understand the capital structure side of the business? How much debt would be appropriate at that EBITDA run rate of, say, GBP 115 million? Maybe I talk a little bit broader around funding as opposed to in terms of what's appropriate. Clearly, in terms of where we are from an EBITDA position at the moment, we over-leverage. We do think that in terms of our run rate and where we see the business going, we do deleverage to acceptable levels quite quickly. At the same time, we recognize, particularly outside South Africa, that there's a reinvestment and a rebuilding phase that's required in our business. That rebuilding phase is on plan. In fact, we slightly ahead of budgets and plans. Also, we spoke about some of these M&A opportunities that would also require funding. We recognize and are working with the board in terms of understanding what these opportunities are, what the funding could be required, and then coming up with a plan. Possibly in terms of how that would work, how we fund it, possibly looking in two different phases. To look at a first phase, where we look to existing shareholders, potentially a second phase where we look to third-party capital. It is something we're addressing, looking at in terms of understanding how we best rebuild the business and on top of that, take advantage of the growth opportunities. Brett? Correct. Of your opening members or so. Let me just give some context to that because it's very hard. Netflix, at their best, was 2.5% per month. 36%, it is slightly skewed because you've got Vitality there, which is a Cigna customer. You've got Italy, which sits at around 20% if I exclude the short-term contracts. South Africa is probably higher than most gym groups are at around 50% in terms of churn. You're 100, whether it's 36%, 40%, 50%, it's a leaky bucket. Phenomenally, in my mind, I should have a business model where you sell, sell, and half of it falls out the bottom. That's all these initiatives that we're trying to address. If I can address churn and change it's much easier. It's much less costly to keep that member than to keep acquiring new members, which is incredibly costly process. We can reduce that 5%, 6%, it has a material impact over and above the numbers that Mark spoke about. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the second session. Today, it's my pleasure to introduce Optasia, which was formerly known as Channel VAS, to yourselves. Ethos invested in Channel VAS in late 2018. In fact, at the time, the Optasia team actually had presented to you guys, and we did find a slide yesterday that they had pitched, and we will show you some of the evolution of the business since then. Just from an Ethos Capital perspective, Ethos Capital's exposure to Optasia arises through its commitments to Ethos Fund VII and then through the Ethos AI Fund I. At the time of investing in Optasia, what we saw was really a massively scalable platform where a business could really become the market leader in airtime credit lending. Probably more excitingly, there was the ability to transition the business into the micro-lending or micro-loan space, which is a five times bigger market size than the traditional airtime credit business. We've been really pleased with the performance of the business over the last five years. The team will show you how well the business has actually done. That's notwithstanding deployment delays arising out of COVID and then the massive impact that currency translation has had on the business. Obviously, we earn in currency or revenues in local currency and ultimately reporting in USD, which has clearly had a tough time over the last couple of years. I'd like to introduce Bassim Haidar, who's the founder of Optasia, to you. Bassim is a serial entrepreneur. He has built successful businesses in Africa and across the Middle East. Over the last couple of years, Bassim has stepped out of the CEO role and into a chairman role. We're also joined by Mark Muller, who has taken over the chief executive role. Mark has worked with Bassim for probably 20 years plus. He joined Optasia in 2015 and has really seamlessly transitioned into that CEO role over the last few years. Bassim, Mark, over to you. Thank you. Good morning. Well, you did all the presentations, I'm not sure what's left there. I'll just give you a very quick, maybe brief to tell you about how we started the company back in 2012. It was purely out of a need where there was a very annoying thing in Africa, especially in Nigeria, where people would call you and drop the line. That was because they had no credit to continue the call. We started to think around how to find a solution for this problem. That's how really the idea started. Then we had to find a way to build a platform, and then how does it work with mobile operators, how do we do the distribution, and so on, h ence, Channel VAS was created at the time, which we now call Optasia. The business was very successful in the first deployment. I never raised any capital at the time, I put in my own money, and we started to roll out across several countries with massive success. We hit a roadblock around 2014 because the business did not have, or the platform did not have a proper scoring system, and we didn't really understand deeply what scoring really meant at the time. We hired some of the best scientists in the world. We went from a 12, 13 people company to right now we're over 300 people, with more than 45 data scientists and more than 75 developers, currently all based in Greece. I'll take you through the transition and the performance of the business. Okay. Well, you've already done the introduction. As I said, I've started multiple businesses. I've exited around four of those businesses over the course of my career. One of them being a logistics business I started in Nigeria with a friend of mine, Mark. That's when I met Mark. Mark joined us in 2001. We exited that business. Mark was also a shareholder, and we exited that business. When we started, we started with $300,000 in 1995, and when we left the business, it was a $1.6 billion revenue business, and the business still exists today. We rebranded in 2022. Optasia comes from a very nice Greek word, which is, it could be, well, optics, vision, is what it actually means in English as we know today. Optasia means the appearance of something magical, and that's what we truly believe what we do, in terms of empowering people, financial and social inclusion in emerging markets. Since we started over 10 years ago, we really have become one of the very rare, extremely profitable fintech businesses across the world. I'm not only talking in emerging markets. We redefined our brand, which reflects the image and reflects the next 10 years of the business and where we're heading. What does the business do? I mean, what is it that we actually empower, is the question. We are a white label business. We're not a brand like Coca-Cola, where we sit in front consumer-facing. We're a B2B2C business. We integrate with financial partners, being either banks or mobile operators or any financial institution. We take data that is scattered all over the place within their environment. We make sense of that data. We're able to aggregate that data using AI and machine learning capabilities that we developed over the years, create credit scores. We not only just create the credit score and say, "Here's a credit score," we actually say, "We're going to bring in a financial institution that's going to enable us to lend air time, data, cash," or do simple things like buy now, pay later, or a product completion where you go onto a Jumia website, for example, and you want to buy something, sneakers, and your mobile number becomes your single identifier. You are pre-approved, and we can complete the transaction for you. We guarantee, for example, the e-commerce store that we would pay them their money. This is what we're able to do with this data that we collect. We sit right in the center between the financial institutions, the distribution partners, and the customers. A lot of people claim about AI, and the honest truth is, not many companies can deliver an AI-driven technology. As we've seen now, a lot of noise around ChatGPT, but I guarantee you, even with ChatGPT or things like this, if you ask a question, you would see automatically, and you show it to someone, you see automatically that this has been written by a robot. It's not really AI. It's just gathering data from different sources. That's not what we do. We are really using behavioral science on consumers, and we take many metrics. We monitor more than 26,000 features per customer before we create that score. 2,000 of those features are the most telling. Tell us 80% about the behavior and the probability of that customer defaulting. Anyone can say, "Yes, you started." Yes, I started at the right time. That is the truth. Anyone coming in to start today, we are more than 10 years ahead on the curve. Some small competition we faced between 2013 and 2017, 2018. Unfortunately for them, we humbly, I say, we took them out of the market. They don't exist. We hardly see any of those competitors today. That's for the very simple reasons, not because we're better. We just understood that we needed to invest a lot more into technology, into the data science itself, and the ability to put the customer first and be socially responsible. That's where many of these companies actually went wrong, is that they assumed, just lend to anyone. We do a seeding, meaning you throw seeds out there and you hope that 30%-40% are going to pay back, and those 30%-40% become your clients, and they pay for the 60% that defaulted. We never did that. Our policy has always been, we need to be profitable from day one. The defaults demonstrate this. On our airtime and data credit products, we have less than 1% default globally. On our cash lending business, it's less than 3.5% lending, and this is on secured loans. When you look at a company this year that will probably disburse around $4 billion in value, that is incredibly significant with 725 million customers on our platform and processing more than 20,000 gigabytes of data daily. This is the kind of platform capability we have. This just gives you a very simple snapshot about the opportunity we have at our hand. This is a GBP 60 billion plus market. When you measure our size and considering we're the leader in this field, you can just imagine the opportunity we have in front of us, and there's no one out there to fill this gap. There's not a single company. We scan the market all the time. We are in the leading position to actually capture the bulk majority of this market. Goes without saying, 62% of people are sitting either with no access to standard financial access. Let's take a very simple example. You take a country like Nigeria, over 200 million population with 4,000 or 5,000 branches, mainly in three cities in a country with 37 states. Imagine someone wants to get $50 or $100 equivalent. You think any bank is interested in providing a $50 or $100 loan? Just the cost of acquisition loan is more than that. There's simply no way for banks to even compete with us. If anything, actually, banks need us in order to create the distribution for them today that they cannot get. There's no credit bureaus. If you look at the percentage of the world or the emerging markets covered by credit bureaus, simply doesn't exist. One of our biggest countries where we operate cash loans is in Pakistan, and they have a very funny law. Before you lend to someone, you need to obtain a credit score from the central bank. Very nice. Except that when you ask for the credit score, it takes two weeks to come, and when it comes back, it comes nil. Effectively, you have to do that every time. Every time we register a customer, we have to ask for that credit score, but we know nothing is going to come back, so it's zero. It's just a law they put in place. You can imagine the opportunity that has created for us, and we started to think differently. What if we start creating the credit scores for these customers on behalf of government, where the likes of Experian, TransUnion, Equifax are unable to do that? I'll come later on when I'm showing the three main verticals, what we've been able to do in Egypt in order to capture this unbelievable opportunity. What is it that we actually do? I spoke about the micro lending solutions. This is typically a customer that requires a loan, say, up to $100, $50, okay? They need the money instantly. They are pre-approved on our platform. They request a loan, or they're trying to do a transaction, it fails, w e offer them the loan immediately, t hey accept. Money is immediately disbursed into their account, into their mobile wallet account, and then they can pay bills, they can pay utility, hospital bills, schools, et cetera. They want to do a taxi ride, whatever is it that they want to do, and t his product right now is growing at over 100% year-on-year. This is only because of the limitations of our capability to grow faster than that. Otherwise, it'll even be growing a lot more than this. The airtime and advanced solution is growing at about 30% a year. This is the technology that we developed that allows someone surfing the web, trying to make a call, someone that doesn't even know how to write. They'll get immediately a voice while they're making a call in their local language, telling them, "You do not have enough credit. Would you like to borrow X?" They say yes, verbally, t hey get the money credited instantly, the call continues. There's no missing of calls, with operators or any bad customer experience because they forgot to charge or there's no way to charge their airtime wallet. The data monetization. We always speak about creditworthy customers. The reality is, what about those customers that are not creditworthy for whatever reason? Does that mean we cannot monetize them? Yes, we can. By having, I'm a bad credit worth, Mark is a good credit worth. How about Mark takes care of my credit risk? This is what we did. In a lot of the markets where we provide airtime credit, we say, "I'm trying to call Mark, but I can't even borrow." I will alert Mark to call me back, Mark takes the charge on that call. This has been an extremely successful product in every single country that we've deployed it. We go to the T-Score product, this is what I was saying earlier about banks, governments unable to credit score the customers. In Egypt, we worked with the government, we're currently deploying our platform there, is to collect every single data point from every single financial institution, insurance, telecom operators, banks into our platform. We create the credit scores. Every time anyone wants to do a consumer loan, they can call on our platform for the credit score on that customer. What we've done is we've created data where there was no data on these customers. This model, I believe, can be replicated in many high population countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and so on. Our first test country is gonna be Egypt. This is just the short-term loan, as we call it, the extra cash. The extra balance is where you're trying to acquire anything. You just need a little overdraft for a very small period of time. This is now being deployed in Uganda as our first country, where it will be tested. Again, it's a short-term facility where you just need an extra float in order to conclude certain transactions. How does this actually work? We've simplified it. The technology behind this is extremely complex. On the interface, we understand that this must be very, very simple. The customer applies for a loan, could be anything, data, cash, airtime credit, and so on. We already have the data, we already pre-approve and auto-approve. Every single person in this room applying will get a different menu based on your capability to borrow. We understand that. Not everybody in this room will get the exact same menu. It's run the algorithm straight away. Financial decision is taken. The money is credited. Customer repeats the cycle over and over again. I know what's going on in your heads right now. How does the customer pay back? Correct? Well, very simple. When the customer recharges their phone, the money comes to us first, plus our fee, before any remaining balance goes into their main wallet, be it in the cash sector or in the airtime sector. When they want to pay back the loan, they can go to the tens of thousands of agents on the streets or to any financial institution, or when they receive their payroll into their wallet. We have the first right to actually deduct what is owed to us. Then the cycle repeats. From the moment the customer requests the loan to delivery to that customer is under one second. This is how powerful this technology is. The average customer for the airtime and data credit borrows about 4.7 times a month, every month from our platform. The customers that are on our cash lending borrow an average between 1.7 to two times a month because we do very short-term loans, one week, two weeks, and one month. This is our global footprint. We're extremely active in Africa, Middle East, and Southeast Asia. This chart does not actually reflect the new countries that we've actually recently signed contracts with. We don't put them here till we've actually launched the service. Just look at the quality of the banks and mobile operators that we work with globally that trust us to do this for them. We've become a core service. We've become a core platform within their environment, one of the best generating revenues for them. A lot of you know Vodacom here in South Africa. Very simple, just go to their financials, the latest financials, and read about what we did for them. We are responsible for 48% of their total airtime revenue distribution in South Africa. 48%. This is what this platform does for them. It goes without saying that I learned something from the Nokia Motorola case, which many of you may be are not familiar with, whereby Nokia, obviously with their Symbian technology and their phones and designs and so on, decided, "Well, we're not going to patent our technology." Motorola saw this as an opportunity, went and patented Nokia's technology, and t hen sued Nokia, then won the case. This is a very well-known case. I thought that was never going to happen to us. We did. Today we have, I think it's even now more than 154 patents. I'm proud to say that one of the most powerful patents we ever got, and this is from the Patent Cooperation Treaty Office, which means it's global coverage, is the ability of Optasia. We own the technology and the trademark that allows us to collect data from telecom operators and create a credit score. We have the exclusive right to do that. Why do I mention this? It's because, again, I follow the Microsoft model. Microsoft, over the years, encouraged piracy across the world intentionally to get you used to their product, and they knew the day will come where they will start to license that product. In 5- 10 years, these patents are going to be an amazing source of revenue for us. We don't put them on right now, but this is something that we think of down the road, is how are we going to monetize our patents down the road? Michael mentioned when I was here, I did give a promise that we would double our business, everyone was thinking, "Yeah, is this business ticking off?" I got a lot of questions and so on. Well, I'm here three years later, I like to show you some of what we did considering this COVID came couple of months right after I presented, so we couldn't deploy in many countries. Obviously, we couldn't. Mobile operators were not allowing us into their premises and so on. Just have a look. We've gone to 31 countries. We've gone from 550 million customers to 730 million customers on our platform. Look at the engagement. We've grown the engagement with our customers daily by 2.5 times. Over 100 million customers a month engage with our platform. The deployments have gone from 31 to 49, we've had multiple deployments in same countries. The distribution has gone from 1.5 billion to 3.5 billion last year. This is 2022 numbers. I think the most beautiful thing of all, which I think Ethos and every other investor will be happy with, we've actually more than doubled our revenue in three years considering. This is in dollar terms. After discounting foreign exchange losses, after discounting all the challenges with COVID, we still managed to double the business. I can tell you right now, there's some amazing, exciting things. Unfortunately, we can't talk about them now. They will probably be announced around October this year. If I'm invited here in the next three years, I can tell you we're going to double this number again, at least. I guess that's it, happy to answer any questions that anyone has. Thank you. Thank you very much for the presentation. A question about the airtime credit. Why would there be a 1% credit loss ratio if the person has to pay back before they can reload data? Surely credit losses would be lower. What happens is, within mobile operators, you've got porting. That's one of the biggest issues, is that when a mobile operator is offering very special rates for a period of a month or two, you see all of a sudden, mostly in Africa and Middle East, people carry two mobile phones because one is cheaper to call at night, one is cheaper, et cetera. Sometimes a mobile operator is desperate, and they offer you a three months very special offer, buy this and go on, and any unresidual balance goes on to the next month. You see these offers. What happens is, the usage of that customer drops where we lend. They were a good customer, and they stop borrowing for a period of time. We start to notice that behavior. We put them in a little kind of box, say, "Okay, this is potentially about to churn." That's one of the key elements that we're constantly monitoring. You have, of course, other factors. I mean, factors that we cannot see. A guy lost his job or lost his phone, never bothered to actually go. His phone got stolen and decides to go get another SIM card and so on, and he had a phone with the daughter and the daughter. There are these things that we cannot really see, hence why the default is around 1%. When you look at, for example, there were a couple of companies out there back in 2015, 2016, 2017, and their default losses were between 7% and 12%. We've brought it down to the 1% only because of the factors that we cannot control. Thanks very much for the presentation, t hat was very interesting. Can you remind me what the size is of Nigeria for your business? What exchange rate you're using, what's the impact of the recent launch of the payment service banks by the MNOs in that country? Thank you. Yeah. Nigeria, about five years ago was 70% of the business. Nigeria right now is under 30% of the business. By end of this year, it's probably going to be around 23%-24% of the business. That's not because it's shrinking, it's actually quite growing, but because of some major deployments that we won that are going live at the end of May and in June. That ratio is changing, number one. Number two, regarding the foreign exchange, what we do is we do buy export proceeds and so on. We do pay a premium. Why? Because we don't want to keep the currency, the naira, in the country itself. As soon as we get paid, we find dollars from the export proceeds market and then we ship that money, basically, we transfer that money out. We've recently now started the process of NOTAP, which allows us to apply to the government and transfer about 40% of our money through intellectual property rights at the official exchange rate. That is starting to happen. There's a six months waiting period. We already took the pain of doing that already months ago, we should start seeing the flows of that. That's going to drastically reduce our foreign exchange exposure. Regarding your third question about the PSB, the banks are very powerful lobby in Nigeria, it's one of the only countries where mobile operators are not actually allowed to lend into the wallet. The PSB is as a payment system through the banking. However, we found a legal loophole that actually allows us to lend into the PSB wallet, and we've obtained the approval to do that. That's simply because we're able to get microfinance licenses and then use that as the basis to lend into the PSB. You would question, why do you need a PSB then? Well, we need it for the distribution, because currently, since MTN launched, they have 7 million PSB customers in Nigeria. We don't want to use a microfinance solution, which is not our model. We want to use the mobile wallet or what we call the PSB as a distribution platform. We are integrating actually now in Nigeria, and soon Airtel is also coming on board, we'll be able to address actually the bulk majority of the market. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you. Data privacy is becoming an increasingly looked after thing. Just your comments on data privacy. If you look at remittances and the Mukuru system of transmitting Forex from one country to another, is that an opportunity for the future to do micro loans or Forex transmissions? I'll answer the last first. Basically, from our perspective, it's not something we're currently looking at because we need to focus on what we do best and not what others can do and copy. We try to put all our energy on our intellectual property. What is it that we can do that no one else can copy? Are we in a position whereby we can deliver a product today that it'll take six to eight years for someone else to follow us? If the answer to that is yes, that's what we do. We've been approached by a few of the remittance companies saying, "We can have someone living in the U.K. remitting a loan, and they guarantee the loan to" Yeah, okay. I mean, how much is the volume of that really at this stage? We're so busy with our growth, with the products we have and so on, we do not want a distraction. I'll never say no. In three, four, five years, this could change, right now it's really not on our radar. On the question regarding the GDPR and POPI Act and so on, remember one thing. We are a white label company. We sit behind the Vodacoms and we sit behind the Standard Bank and FNB of this world and so on. We have no business with the regulators. All the KYC and the consents are done by the financial institution or Vodacom. Our job is to deliver a product to that user after they've consented to that. No loan is ever provided to a customer without them consenting first to that, and all the AML, KYC is done. This is all automated in the back end of the platform. We don't have any issues really, technically today, with anything relating to KYC. Any other questions from the floor here? There has been one that's come through from the online audience. What is your current ROE, and what is your three to five-year target? Where do you think it can go? I don't know if I'm allowed to speak about this right now. I don't know what Michael thinks. You go. I mean, for these few years, we will maintain our current growth rates. We're north of 30% year-on-year growth. I mean, extremely exciting what future can give to us, and we see that growth continuing all the way through 2025, 2026. There's no slowdown in our momentum. As it is, our core vertical in terms of the market lending is extremely rapid growth for being out there. The airtime advance still remains quite a nice snowball in terms of the business we keep inserting there. It's extremely deliverable. I mean, as I said, the 2029 will be 30% deliverable in terms of where we'd like to participate in 2023's numbers. We see this continuing through 2024 as well. We've got good tracks, we've got good rails. We've got a deployment pipe which is full. We're not out there hunting for business, just so I'm clear. We are just in a space of really execution and delivery. It's quite a fortunate position to be in. Thanks a lot. There's been one more question come through. You guys have been working together for a long time, you taking over as CEO and you stepping into Chairman role, how has that affected the responsibilities that each of you have? Honestly the amazing thing is, there are a few people that I've worked with in my life that I get on at every level with. Socially, we're best friends, f amily-wise, we're best friends, at work, there hasn't been any time sort of a disagreement on how we should go forward, he listens to me and I listen to him, we always actually agree on what the best thing is for the business. This is not happening only with Optasia. He's been involved in other businesses with me, w e work together amazingly, w e've built an amazing company in Nigeria in the logistics space and other businesses, we just understand what his role is and what my role is. He's been leading the teams. He gets on also with his team. That's very important, too. It's not only with me. I'm the least important person to get on with. I think he gets on with all his C-level teams and so on. I think the relationship is really absolutely amazing. Any further questions? Paul? I'd like to speak about, at the end of the day, the mobile networks own the customer. You sharing those commissions and that commission sharing has been squeezed over time. The new areas that you deploy into new geographies, is that sort of sharing that ratio similar to today or similar to your initial sharing that you had when you started with MTN and Vodacom? Is there something coming out where this is the global norm of what people are willing to share in terms of what you provide to their businesses? It's a very good and sensitive question, the answer to it is the following. On the airtime and data credit, the mobile operators see the level of revenue we make as a company, and they say, "Well, yeah, you've invested, but you still make a lot of money. We want a pie of that because we're doing very bad in every other sector of our business." They always try to come to us. At the end of the day, around 2019, 2020, we said, "This is where it stops. We draw the line here right now, we do not want to keep negotiating this anymore. We are a core supplier, we want to stop being a core supplier. We want to become a partner of yours. We do not want this vendor relationship anymore." That has transformed things. Unfortunately, I can't speak about this now, I said in October there'll be some announcements where you will see the relationship transforming from being a vendor-supplier relationship to a full partner relationship. Regarding your question about the revenues, actually, on the cash loans, we are dictating the revenues because we control that. The fact that we've become such a core revenue earner for these mobile operators, we hold the power. The fact that we have those patents and there is a company, I wouldn't mention names, a very large client of ours that had an IP case, someone made a claim on them. We were asked to come in. We defended the case. We won within nine months in court, that demonstrated, put the stamp that, yes, our IP is solid and our patents are solid. That discussion about revenue share is actually not as important anymore. These guys are saying, "What else can you do? What else can you bring to the table that is going to generate revenues for us?" Hence, our microfinance products, which are, I would say, the key distraction for them right now, for at least for the next six or seven years. This makes a massive differential. Say a score of 620, 73, whatever it may be. Each bank will allocate a different sort of risk-based scoring to that. We don't do that. We're in a very good space. We're standing behind and we're talking, you may have a 730, your colleague may have a 730, but you're going to get 500 and he's going to get 200. That's the uniqueness and that's where our relationships come into play, is actually differentiating, not just that credit score, but moving towards credit limitation. How much debt those mentioned parties have, how much can they actually then get. That's where the incremental value starts coming in. It's not actually just a score. Scoring 1.0, but that real tech, the real algorithms and the science behind is that. That's what drives phenomenal growth. That's why I said, look at the market we use this. The growth is 100% year-on-year because, as you said, we move those customers, we develop those customers, both in terms of retail as well as with the existing enterprise. That's where the value proposition of PayGo comes in. Also, I just realized one thing that I didn't answer your question in full actually, because you were talking about ownership of the customer. To be honest, the value of owning the customer is zero. This is zero and very simple because of GDPR and POPI Act. There's nothing you can do if you own that customer. There's absolutely nothing. The value sits in the IP on that customer, and that's what we own. The mobile operator and the financial institution does not own that. I don't care if someone's name is Johnny or Henry or whatever it is, or his age and so on. This means nothing to me. What matters to me is the behavior of that customer and how I can monetize that customer. That technology and that IP sits with us. That's it. It's part of taking into account the competition. I think there's a question there. Yeah. Sorry. Can you just talk a little bit about how you guys were so successful vis-a-vis a competitor like JUMO, which I understand has now had three rounds of layoffs and probably headed for a fourth. Yes. There is still some competition around. Just want to understand what differentiates you versus that competitor. Maybe just discuss channel conflict if you get to be a partner with one of your big customers, how does that impact the rest of the- Yeah customer base? On the first one, I don't even know where to start, where they went wrong. I'll tell you a few. One is, they built a banking platform to own the customer. They were competing with the same financial institutions that they said, "We're going to increase your retail lending." Conflict in itself, which doesn't work. Two, JUMO charges a fee for every loan that they give, irrelevant if the customer pays back or not. When we did the math and looked at their overheads, they needed to lend GBP 3.5 billion a year just to cover their overheads and their running costs. That's very simple. Three, they created so much churn so that banks like Ecobank and Letshego and all these guys said, "We're giving you the book. We're the ones lending, but we're not seeing the returns. You're making 0.75%, but we're not making that." Four, they are a commercially weak company. They are a product-driven company. A product means nothing if you cannot deliver it with value to the customer. They've gone wrong in many different aspects of the business. Regarding a question around the channel, there's actually no conflict whatsoever. It's just that we are eliminating the discussion and eliminating any risk about revenue share going forward. That's what we wanna do. The product and what we do remains the same, except that we are now a partner. We're no more a vendor. This gives certainty and predictability on revenues going forward without anyone having to question anything around revenue share. All right. You spoke about how you own the IP for scoring, I think there's two pieces to that. 1 is the algorithm and the other one is the data. Do you also own the data itself? Is it possible for someone else to come in with their own algorithm and access the same database and offer what you guys do? We own both. We own the data on the customer, but we never, ever share that data. What we would do is, with the consent of the customer in the future under the T-Score product, we would be able to use that data to provide credit scores where it allows us to do so. We would never share the IP. Mobile operators have asked us to share this with them, and we have categorically said, "Absolutely not." We would rather walk out of that environment than share that data with anyone. This is where the value sits, is in the behavioral science behind that customer and how that customer behaves, probability of that customer repeating, growing with us, and so on. That is something that we treasure and we hold for ourselves only. Can I just add to that? There's features that gets created on top of the data. You've got the raw data, and then there's 27,000 features that gets created on top of the raw data. That's a derivation of the data. That feature generation goes from telco to telco. It's almost like this meta telco play. That's not just algorithms. To get to that feature set, that is real gold in terms of what sits in the business. An individual telco cannot replicate that because they haven't seen what has been seen over 30 countries and- Yeah 49 people. It's not only about the actual features themselves. There's one thing that we discovered and started to improve upon, and this is what the AI-driven technology in the platform does, is that which feature with which-- this is very important. Which feature with which works the best and is available on that specific customer? Those 2,000 features I spoke about earlier are 80% of the behavior of that customer in terms of the probability of defaulting. The combination of those 2,000 is critical. You can eventually, at some stage, find out what those 27,000 features are, which will probably take 8 to 9 years. How are you going to identify those 2,000 that work together to create that score? This is something that requires some serious brains, some serious data scientists. This is what the team has been able to do. You spoke earlier about the 1% bad debt ratio as looking at almost optimization of your monetization of airtime credit. Now, on your cash loans, you spoke about a one-week, two-week, or one-month, and maybe a $50 up to a $100 sort of loan value. Have you looked at optimizing both the periodicity of the loan or the period of the loan and the quantum of the loan? Is there some further optimization that can be done there, or? All in on this consideration point. Our biggest focus really on the product side is really is convenience and velocity lending side. In order to do that, because we don't create a customer acquisition cost, we actually bring in products that are affordable. Working with financial service partners, specifically those partners that can reach into those customer pockets that they would actually like to reach into, and they can build a bigger brand themselves and get their technologies in there. Also have sort of an institution source of the mobile money players that also detached from those few years side, which is going to respond to the financial inclusion partners that have been set for themselves. That sort of product is aimed at specifically around that convenient lending, around velocity lending. That's the market. In emerging markets, you have a certain human informal sector. We see that pattern in terms of how the lending behavior acts. The products are geared according to those patterns as well. It's not one size fits all. The model is extremely flexible. You must also bear in mind that if we wanted to grow at 400% in the micro-lending space today, we could. We don't for the very simple reason. We do not want to burn our base. Remember, this is so new. It's a few years old, what we're doing. We need to learn a lot more. We're controlling the defaults. Maybe 3.5% is not the optimal revenue for us. We don't know. At least we know right now we're making a heck of money from that level of default. As we continue to deploy in many countries, that's the ratio we're keeping. In two years, three years, five years from now, we could possibly maybe increase that or decrease that without having to create churn. If you burn that good base and you lend them more than what they could actually afford to borrow, what are you achieving? You're achieving top-line revenue, but you're losing your base over time and you're degrading that base, which is something we never wanna do. All right. Let's leave it there. Bassim, Mark, Maurice, we really appreciate your time, i t was a great story in 2018. It's become an even better story since then. We're looking forward to I think there was a five-year gap, but we'll cut you a bit of slack because of COVID. We're looking forward to having you back here, maybe three years' time. Definitely. Double again. Definitely. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.