Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Ethos Capital full year 2024 results webcast. All participants will be in listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity to ask questions later during the conference. If you should need assistance during the call, please signal an operator by pressing star then zero. Please note that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Anthonie de Beer. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody, thank you for joining us. We're pleased to present the Ethos Capital latest performance to June 2024 and update you on the strategy as of September 2024. This presentation highlights the NAV performance, the update on the progress that we've made with realizations, and an overview of capital allocation choices which the Ethos Capital Board is exploring in line with the strategy of the business. Let me start by thanking Peter Hayward-Butt, the previous CEO, for his vision, resilience, and tremendous commitment to the Ethos Capital journey since the IPO in 2016. Peter led with the Board and shaped the Ethos Capital to now representing a mature, resilient, diversified portfolio. He led and navigated the extremely challenging COVID period, and in particular, its impact on one of Ethos Capital's largest exposures at the time, the Brait investment. The work done on Brait did not only save that business and your investment in it, also provided you with an opportunity to now post unbundling of Brait in August to participate directly in the value creation of that investment. Thanks, Pete. As far as the global or the macros are concerned, the global economy faced significant challenges. I think all of us are aware of it. Some persistent inflation, high interest rates, and geopolitical tensions. Domestically, South African economy was marked by slow GDP this year, ongoing power outages, and political uncertainty leading up to the national elections. The suspension of load shedding in March, establishment of the Government of National Unity in May. All of these things have sparked optimism around economic reform. Through Ethos Capital, we have directly or indirectly access to more than 20 private businesses. We receive trading and performance updates from these companies monthly, sometimes weekly, see signs of deterioration or improvement in the economy early. Our portfolio is a bit like the canary in the coal mine, providing early indications of what is to come. For now, green shoots in trading performance remains limited, a significant change observed around boardroom tables is the improving business consumer and investor confidence. The conversation is simply more constructive with more optimism. This should support trading performance of our businesses over the medium term, and in particular, as far as Ethos Capital is concerned, should support the realization program of our fund investments. Throughout the past 12 months, we've engaged with the major shareholders to discuss Ethos Capital strategy, focusing on value creation and liquidity options. Many investments are held indirectly through limited partnership stakes in TRG Funds, meaning that the exit timelines around these exposures are largely fund-driven. Conclusions from these engagements include that we will continue to support the NAV growth of the portfolio companies and support the value creation plans of the underlying funds and investments. We will pursue realizations in an orderly manner, thereby maximizing outcome for investors. The board has agreed to make no further investments in funds for the moment, and we will be reducing leverage and return capital to shareholders in the most optimal way. Let's move over to the first slide of the presentation. The performance of the unlisted portfolio remained robust with LTM revenue and EBITDA increasing by 12% and 18% respectively. Strong operational turnarounds at Twinsaver and increases in the valuation of Synerlytic and Crossfin due to concluded sale processes resulted in an increase in the unlisted portfolio NAV. TymeBank concluded another capital raising round post year-end at a significant premium to the June carrying value. Optasia, the largest exposure in Ethos Capital, making up 32% of total assets at year-end. Its strong operational performance continued. The US dollar EBITDA growth of 10%. However, the valuation was negatively impacted, as reported on previously by the material Naira devaluation, which we've reported on throughout the year. This has been taken into account in our maintainable EBITDA for that business for valuation purposes. The NAV per share declined by 17.9% from ZAR 8.56 to ZAR 7.03, and this was largely driven by the decline in the share price of the listed portfolio. Just to remind you, in that listed portfolio, we have Brait, that was a significant driver of that, and then we got some MTN Zakhele Futhi shares. The Brait ordinary shares reduced by 73% from June 2023 to June 2024, and the MTN Zakhele Futhi price was down by 27% in the same period. The listed portfolio contributed ZAR 1.38 per share to the decline of the NAV per share. The unlisted portfolio grew 4% year-on-year. In line with our strategy, as discussed earlier, the board made the decision to unbundle Brait ordinary shares to Ethos Capital shareholders. The result of this was a significant distribution to shareholders, which is expected to reduce the impact of share price volatility on Ethos Capital and remove the double discount. Adjusting for the shares unbundled, the NAV per share will reduce post year-end to ZAR 6.58. We provide some analysis on this on a couple of slides to come. The Ethos Capital share price responded positively to the developments, with a discount to NAV falling from just under 50% pre-unbundling to now around 30%. I will briefly unpack this also later in the presentation. Exits from BevCo, Synerlytic, and Neopak, together with repayments of a portion of the Brait Exchangeable Bonds, delivered total proceeds received of around ZAR 457 million, of which ZAR 323 million was received shortly after year-end. It's worth noting that all of these proceeds were delivered at a 31% premium to the prevailing share price. This brought total realized proceeds since listing of the under-listed portfolio to around ZAR 1 billion. I think that's very positive. We've taken capital from investors at the time of listing. We've deployed that into a diversified portfolio of investments. Following the private equity life cycle, we've now disposed of around ZAR 1 billion of those proceeds at a pretty good IRR. Proceeds was also used to repay the debt. As you'll see later on in the report, the debt at the moment is sitting around ZAR 200 million. We've reduced it from ZAR 525 million to around ZAR 200 million post the receipt of some realization proceeds. We're also expecting another ZAR 54 million to come in from the disposal of Adumo to Lesaka, and that will be prior to December 2024. As mentioned, in terms of our perspective on the outlook, the market conditions for the first time in a while seems more favorable for NAV growth, but also supportive of realizations over the next 18 to 24 months. We remain focused on maximizing outcomes for our investors and returning capital to the investors. Turning to the Ethos Capital journey, the investment life cycle is set out in this slide. To recap, it starts with raising capital, then the investments and growth phase, followed by realizations, and then the allocation of capital. As mentioned, following engagement with shareholders, the strategy was confirmed that there will be no new fund commitments made, and hence Ethos Capital's board will focus on the left-hand side of this slide to the allocation of capital between leverage and returning capital to investors. On the right, we split the NAV performance over one, three, and five years between fund and co-investments and Brait, highlighting the material impact that the Brait investment had on Ethos Capital's NAV. It's worth noting that Brait's journey is not over. We simply unbundle it to you. Led by Pete, the Brait CEO, we're still driving the value creation phase of that vehicle with an aim to unlock the discount as well. The Brait share price performed well recently, supported by continued strong performance from Premier FMCG and a recovery in the performance of Virgin Active. In particular, some increased comfort from the market around the material debt restructure and the capital injection into Brait. Ethos Capital shareholders, through the unbundling, were all afforded the opportunity to follow their rights and participate in this improvement in Brait. The share price of Brait increased from ZAR 0.79 a share to ZAR 1.41, slightly higher today, a more than 80% increase in that share price. You'll also note on the slide the material realization activity. In the one-year bucket, ZAR 457 million was realized over the past 12 months from the Ethos Capital portfolio, that is a very big positive. This is all before the Adumo ZAR 55 million, which is expected later this year. In the next couple of slides, I'll unpack the NAV in a bit more detail. The NAV per share on the slide, as you can see, was sitting at around ZAR 8.57, 30 June 2023, and it's now down to ZAR 7.03 per share or ZAR 1.53 per share reduction. ZAR 1.19 per share of that ZAR 1.53 reduction was due to the reduction in the Brait share price at year-end, ZAR 302 million reduction. The Brait Exchangeable Bonds also traded down over the past 12 months, and a dividend coupon of ZAR 15 million was received in this period. Fund VII debt was flat. Optasia was revalued down, mainly due to the devaluation of the currencies in which it operates against the USD. Specifically around the Naira, the depreciation was severe. To give you a sense of that, the Naira was sitting at Naira 760 to $1 at 30 June 2023, and that's devaluated to Naira 1,535 to $1 at 30 June 2024. A very material depreciation of the Naira. We've reported on it at the half year and also provided updates in March and June on that. I will unpack the Optasia performance a bit more in detail later. Excellent performance from Synerlytic, underpinned by the disposal and cash flow of the WearCheck realization to Bidvest. TymeBank continues to exceed milestones for the business. The customer base increased to nine and a half million customers, with successes in the Philippines and they're piloting in Vietnam, it seems to be performing pretty well there as well. The progress in TymeBank is supported by the valuation increase, this was underpinned by capital raising rounds. The most recent capital raising round took place post year-end at a premium to the 30 June carrying value. We followed the buy and build strategy in Ecotel investment before COVID. The South African operations of Ecotel performed well, with revenue growth driven by the South African operations. The African operations, however, required a cost restructure in the year, the value reduction that you're seeing in the Ecotel valuation was due to us taking a more curtailed view of the African business. A decent performance from the rest of the portfolio, with around ZAR 30 million in distributions and realizations received. The liabilities of the group ended the year at ZAR 544 million. As mentioned earlier, post year-end and post the receipt of the Synerlytic realization proceeds, that debt reduced to around ZAR 200 million. Other liabilities and provisions increased by ZAR 12 million, reflecting provisions for management fees and contingencies in underlying funds. Putting another lens on the NAV analysis, the investment value of the portfolio on a like-for-like basis declined by 9%. ZAR 164 million of this decline was attributed to the Naira devaluation to the USD, or largely the Naira devaluation to the USD. As I mentioned, the Naira went from Naira 760 to the USD to Naira 1,535. Excluding the impact of the foreign exchange devaluation, the unlisted portfolio achieved a gross return of 12%. There was a small reduction in the EBITDA multiple, valuation multiple, the discount it bears that we use is still sitting at 40% compared to 42% in the prior year. No change to the valuation methodology, just a small change and a reduction in that multiple. There was a ZAR 40 million benefit from de-leveraging, you can see there the impact of the reduction in Brait, MTN, and Brait EB share prices. Net distribution from the portfolio was ZAR 125 million, after ZAR 9 million was invested mostly into the TEIS. On this slide, we just provide you with a sense of the drivers of valuation growth. You can see there revenue growth of the overall portfolio was sitting around 12%, EBITDA growth at 18%. This is actual EBITDA growth of all the companies that we are using an earnings-based valuation for. You may ask, "Well, why are your valuations only up by 4% if you have 18% growth in EBITDA?" That is the actual EBITDA growth. We have made the adjustment for Optasia, as we mentioned earlier, where we took quite a big adjustment for the currency impact in the Optasia valuation. That valuation therefore remained or slightly down. The EBE maintainable EBITDA range was 7.4x, excluding Optasia, sitting at 5.8x, which is a pretty comfortable level for a largely asset-based investment portfolio. The debt EBITDA multiple range was sitting at 1.6x debt to EBITDA to give you a sense of the financial risk that is sitting in the remainder of the private equity portfolio, which we certainly feel pretty comfortable with at this stage. At 30 June, the share price of Ethos Capital was sitting at ZAR 4.21 per share, a 40% discount to the ZAR 7.03 per share. Five assets make up 65% of the NAV, with Optasia by far the largest exposure, followed by Synerlytic, which was valued at the expected proceeds from the disposal to Bidvest. The Brait exposure is making up around 11%. Approximately half or ZAR 1 billion of the unlisted and ZAR 883 million of the listed portfolio was realized over the last number of years. I think this is quite a telling slide, and I want to just pause here for a second. There have been 15 material realization events over the last couple of years. On this slide, we show those material events, but we also show what the returns are that were generated out of these material events. Most of these investments generated an IRR somewhere between 15% and 17%, and at times money back of 1.7x or 70% more than the original cost of those original investments. The Brait disposals, clearly also very successful disposals. Consol, Iceland Foods, Premier's rounds of capital that we raised for that business, all were done at quite large premiums to the original costs of them. The capital of Brait from these realizations were used to reduce the Brait leverage and/or invest into the underlying portfolio. I think in particular, the core of what we do and what you are left exposed to in Ethos Capital sits in the unlisted portfolio, and you can see there a decent track record with only Autozone returning less than the original cost. On the next couple of slides, we start unpacking a little bit the capital allocation. Where the NAV sits of the portfolio, where it sits relative to the share price. The steps that are taken to unlock either the discount or to distribute capital to investors. The NAV on this slide sitting at ZAR 7.03 per share or ZAR 1.78 billion. Net debt at year-end, as I mentioned, was sitting at ZAR 525 million to give you a total gross NAV of ZAR 2.3 billion. We unbundled Brait shares, ZAR 114 million or ZAR 0.45 per Ethos Capital share. We received some cash back from Brait Exchangeable Bonds of ZAR 43 million, as well as the Synerlytic proceeds of ZAR 271 million. Adding all of those up gets you to gross assets of ZAR 1.88 billion. If you deduct from that the outstanding debt of ZAR 202 million, you get to the NAV per share of ZAR 6.61. That compares to a share price that at the moment is trading around ZAR 5 a share. On this slide, what I tried to do is I really just compare what the board considers when they receive some capital, and to take you through some of the thinking in terms of the alternatives and the considerations that we have. At year-end, we had ZAR 525 million of debt. If you compare that to the cover ratio that we have, we had total assets of ZAR 2.3 billion, which gives you a 4.4 times cover. We received Synerlytic proceeds, and we received Brait Exchangeable Bonds proceeds, and if you add that together, it gets you to a total asset cover ratio of 9.3 times. What the board will do is they evaluate the portfolio. They say, "Should we be considering some unbundling of listed assets? Should we do share buybacks? What about some pro rata share repurchases and then cash and scrip dividends?" There are more options also to consider, but these are the main ones that the board would consider. In looking at these alternatives, they would consider the NAV per share impact, what the implications would be on the share price. We can't influence the share price, but you can certainly try and drive NAV and give the market a sense of your choices that you're making to give effect to share price impact. You look at the overall liquidity, the efficiency with which we can get the cash back to shareholders and to the banks. How long will it take to implement these choices? Are shareholders being treated fairly? Are we giving shareholders the right optionality? Can those that want cash take cash, or should they be considering cash and/or scrip? You have to look very carefully at what your risk distribution constraints are. If we then compare the choices we made on Brait to those considerations, first of all, the Brait share price at 20 June, the day that we announced the Brait unbundling, it was sitting at ZAR 3.70, a 47% discount to the NAV at the time. The share price as of last week Thursday, the Ethos Capital share price, was sitting at ZAR 4.69. If you add to that the Brait ordinary shares and the BEE upliftment shares, which you would have received as an Ethos Capital shareholder, that combined value is ZAR 5.63, a 52% uplift from the 20 June share price level. That's the ZAR 4.69 also now at a 29% discount to the NAV. I think it's pleasing to see that there was a positive response to that unbundling. I think there was certainly, the NAV goes down, but that's understandable given that you're unbundling assets to investors. The share price increased, the discount narrowed. Shareholders had the option to exercise their Brait rights or not, and there was also a significant de-leveraging as a result of the Brait Exchangeable Bonds proceeds, which came into Ethos Capital. With that, I'm going to move to a couple of slides on the portfolio. I'm going to focus on the top five exposures, and starting with what is probably now, without a doubt, your largest exposure in Ethos Capital, which is Optasia, 32% of total assets. It's a business, a global fintech company. Most of our investors should know this business pretty well. It gives access to end customers through an AI-led credit assessment engine. Our valuation at year-end was at ZAR 753 million, we are part of a consortium of investors representing around 16.6% of the ownership of that vehicle. We invested alongside other like-minded financial investors, with an aligned view on where to with the asset. Ethos Capital’s direct and indirect economic interest is at 7.3%. What does Optasia do? It has a micro-lending business. Its own credit services business, that was the original business that we invested in, the micro-lending business certainly has increased dramatically and the data monetization. The drivers of growth here is a growing addressable market for the products they serve. It is a very scalable company, this with extremely low cost base, very scalable and expandable over geographies as well as in product. Very attractive profile of company and investment characteristics. The half year performance, H1 this year, was driven by the full absorption of FX losses. As I mentioned earlier, you can see to the right there, June 2023, the Naira was sitting at Naira 760. June 2024, it was sitting at Naira 1,530, therefore the dollar-based EBITDA growth was adjusted quite a bit by the Naira and implications of the Naira. There is a step change in the profitability of the company post June 2024. We decided to report on that. We did mention this to investors. We have always said that there are new deployments coming on stream, these new deployments will bear fruit. Specifically on the microfinance side, these new deployments have now come on stream. There has also been enhanced technology and data solutions for products that have been rolled out. They are also coming on stream, that creates more revenues and lower defaults. The currency has been reasonably constant over the last couple of months. We are feeling fairly positive about where Optasia is sitting at the moment. At June, we had higher EBITDA that was offset by the currency. We had a marginally lower valuation multiple. For the past six months, the valuation was largely flat. First six months, we took quite a big step down, the last six months, this valuation was pretty flat. We are unpacking one or two additional slides, which investors continue to request of us, on Optasia. The company is doing pretty well in diversifying away from country risk, also customer risk. On the right-hand side, you can see there the 2019 revenue split, of which 98% of that was ACS, it was sitting in five countries largely, 83% of it in the top five countries. At June 2024, that revenue split has reduced where the ACS business is now 68.5% of the total revenue. Microfinance at around 31.5%. The top five countries is now at 67.4%. We have provided this data point before. You can see there country one and country two on this slide is Nigeria, therefore our reliance on the Naira now is reduced dramatically with Nigeria only making up 19% of the revenue of Optasia. The next asset worth just reflecting on is Synerlytic. It is a business that has been sold. We received the cash in the last month or so. An investment made by the Mid Market Fund in 2019. They completed that acquisition. It had attractive characteristics. This is as I almost always refer to it as opposed to child private equity business. It is at a strong moat, high margins and great cash conversion, a good market share position, it was scalable with great management. It is the business you really are looking forward to invest behind. It was complex in terms of unlocking the value out of a delisting, the enterprise multiple, at the time, was sitting around 6 times maintainable. What was important is to drive the separation of that business into two standalone businesses, WearCheck and the Portico group. That was done so that we can ultimately dispose off WearCheck and the Portico group to likely buyer interests. It was a multifaceted sale process, really driven well by the management and by the Mid Market Fund team. Those two exits delivered ultimately a 25% return, 3 times money back in the 3-year holding period. Excellent job done by the team there. On Batis, a medical technology company, which was really a buy and build strategy that was done over a couple of years. Ethos Capital's exposure to it is ZAR 173 million at year-end, 7% of our total assets. We invested, as Ethos Capital, through Ethos Fund VI, through the AI Fund, and directly in the Ethos Healthcare Platform. The economic interest direct and indirect is 17.6%. Optasia buy and build, the team did a large number of acquisitions there, really to focus the business on capitalizing on organic growth, on integrating those bolt-on acquisitions and the synergies out of it, then trying to drive a digital transformation of the Batis business. It did take some time for that to settle down. They made more than nine investments, I think this year the growth started coming through. We are quite pleased with the performance of Batis. The LTM revenue and EBITDA increased by 22% and 29%, with strong performance from the orthopedics, surgical, and the mobile clinics. We've also lost an agency this year, the team's done a great job backfilling that lost agency and the performance is up there and growing strong. We're also looking into some other software solutions and expanding that into the European market, a contract to that effect was secured this year. Several growth and optimization opportunities for Batis and a business that's doing very nicely for us at the moment. Crossfin invests in high growth, established cash in with the Fintech solutions. It is a couple of different exposures through different companies providing different Fintech services. This year, the value that Ethos Capital's got exposed to Crossfin is ZAR 170 million. We've got a 33.4% ownership through the Mid Market Fund and the AI Fund. They've started the realization program. Bottom left there, you can see ZAR 170 million worth of value, 38% of that was exited or we're waiting exit proceeds. That exit proceeds will come through in Adumo, as well as the last portion of the Retail Capital disposal, the final tranche that's due on it. In looking at the iKhokha business, that is the point-of-sale devices. It delivered a strong year. The business continued to deliver revenue growth around 22%, the growth is driven by investment in business marketing, some product and staff resources. Although these have contributed at the top line, we have not seen it come through in EBITDA yet. We are hopeful that will come through in the coming months. There is the Okello business, a leading card and mobile processing business. Okello had a mixed performance, to be honest. The cards business delivered according to plan, the venture assets did not perform according to plan, there were some non-core assets that are expected to be sold from the venture assets. The last one, just to mention, on Cybrin, a soft performance in the past 12 to 24 months. We've appointed a new group CEO and CFO, they are focused on revising and re-energizing the strategy of that group. Over the next year, Cybrin's key focus will be on creating efficiencies for it. What do we expect out of Crossfin? First of all, the cash back out of Adumo and the cash out of Retail Capital, some performance uptick, hopefully, out of the rest. Moving over to Gammatek, a distributor of mobile accessories and low technology products. The company benefits from continued growth in the smart mobile devices. They're expanding their channels. They diversify to mid-tier mobile devices, they expand into selected markets outside of Africa. They've also done a couple of smaller bolt-on acquisitions to expand on their channels and on their products, those are being integrated and synergies driven through them. I think for the last 12 months, I think our commentary there on the right-hand side around performance is accurate. I think the truth is that the revenue and the EBITDA is starting to tick up very nicely with LTM revenue increasing by 10% and EBITDA by 13%. The focus will be on margin improvement in Gammatek, it's a very cash generative business, we would also hope that there would be some decent deleveraging coming out of the Gammatek business. Our valuation remained pretty constant. The increases in EBITDA resulted in a 27% valuation increase. Sorry, the multiple remained constant, our valuation ticked up in line with the EBITDA performance of the company. In conclusion, just a repeat briefly of what we discussed before, the strategy of Ethos Capital. The top row, we're gonna support the businesses to drive NAV growth, drive realizations in an orderly manner, drive debt reduction in portfolio companies so that there can be some capital flow into Ethos Capital. The capital allocation choices that the board will apply their minds to is either to reduce debt further in Ethos Capital or to return the capital to investors through an unbundling, share buybacks, a pro rata share repurchase, or cash and scrip dividends. On the left, the non-rate investments or the non-listed investments, without a doubt, are now making up the biggest part of the NAV going forward, which should reduce the volatility in our NAV. We've started the realization program with ZAR 687 million of proceeds to June and a further ZAR 323 expected post-June to deleverage Ethos Capital down to ZAR 200 million. With that, thank you for your support. Thank you for the board for their support over the last 12 months and the constructive engagement with investors over time. We are always here to take any questions, happy to engage in conversation to the extent people need further discussions with us. With that, we are open for questions. Thank you very much, sir. For those on the conference call, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and then one now. If you decide to withdraw your question, please press star and then two. Again, for those on the conference, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and then one now. For those on the webcast, please submit your question via the text box below the webcast. We will pause a moment to see if we have any questions. Sir, at this stage, there are no questions on the conference call. Are there any questions on the webcast? No questions on the webcast at the moment. Just a reminder. As I said, thank you so much for listening in and for your support. You are welcome to give us a call directly to the extent that there are questions outside of this call. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, Sal. Ladies and gentlemen, that then concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.