Well, good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Mr Price Group's half year results. This is the six months to the end of September or the 1st of October 2022. In terms of structure of the presentation, I'm going to be spending a little bit of time on the backdrop, looking at sector performance, and really what's affecting retail trade, share some highlights with you. Mark's going to dive deeper into the detailed performance. I think I'm going to share the very critical messaging that we've got to leave you with value creation and the long-term outlook of the company. Those of you that have already dialed into competitors' and other retailers' presentations, I think none of this will come as a surprise to you. Whether you're looking at global macro issues or matters impacting S.A. in particular, there's obviously a long shopping list on both of those lists. On the global side, slowing global growth, recessionary fears, interest rates increasing, and of course, the threats of war. Some of those do knock over and impact South Africa and other territories. Of course, we're a business that's got 93% of our revenues in South Africa, the rest in other African countries, and none internationally. Certainly locally, we're not immune to those international shocks. Commodity prices have been slowing. The rand has weakened considerably. CPI is outside of the target range. We've certainly seen a rise in interest rate environment. Probably overshadowing all that, the extreme load shedding that we've had in South Africa, and that's electricity load shedding. Very challenging consumer environment. You look on the right-hand side there, that really does bring it home to what's happening to the consumer. These are all things that are competing for rands and disposable income. Food inflation up almost 12%. Fuel price, which of course, has got a knock-on to many other things, up 40%. We've had a 200 basis point increase in interest rates. For me, one of the standouts is when you look at nominal HCE growth, it is positive at 7.8% growth, but it is outstripping the nominal wage growth of 5.2%. People are spending more than they're earning. I think that starts talking to the accessing of credit and debt. We'll speak quite a lot about what our appetite for that is. Just within the nominal HCE growth, one of the standouts there too is just really the shifts in spending. Durables has actually shrunk by 1.4% and non-durables is up 11%, and that's what makes it 7.8. In that environment, whether it's macro, local, or just things affecting a consumer confidence takes a big dip and the resultant impact of that is less spending. These are the group highlights. Revenue is up 6.5% to ZAR 13.3 billion for the half. EBITDA up 9.2%. Profit after tax, 13.3%. We had a nice increase in our operating margin by 80 basis points to 14.7%. Our diluted HEPS was up almost 11%. Pleasingly, we've maintained our dividend payout ratio of 63%, and as a result, our dividends per share is up 10.6%. To clarify, these results include Yuppiechef and Power Fashion for the full period, but obviously exclude Studio 88, which will be included from the first trading day of the new half, the half that we're presently in. I just want to go into a little bit more detail about the factors that have impacted performance. We did speak on our trading update that we gave in July that we had transitioned to a new Oracle ERP, which had created some challenges. We had also said in that release that April and May trade had been particularly impacted. There's certain things that our merchants couldn't do and we couldn't action as a business. There were two pretty material things in particular. Those have been fixed, but there's no doubt that in the environment of the whole ERP transition, there was a lot of merchant distraction. When you look at the remaining items, and I said on the right-hand side, the response is, well, it's a once-off impact. I suppose you can look at once off in two different ways. Once off, these things are done every 15 years or so, also once off in the event that those few things that we couldn't do to stimulate trade and to react to trade in April and May, they're a once off. We've had obviously a whole bunch of advisors that have been helping us through this. They do steer us to a 12 to 18 month settling down period, we do believe that we're ahead of that curve by some way. What we've done is all the remaining items or the go live challenges, we'd bucket into two things, two different segments. The one was the hypercare phase that we had identified. Those are the material things that we had to address quite urgently. Then there's a whole bunch of other things that we just called optimization that weren't necessarily errors, but they were things that would just made users' lives easier. Access to information being more simple and quicker, those will take the due course and get actioned. Where we're sitting right now, the issues that we had identified in hypercare, those are the big important issues. As of today, we've closed off 95% of those, there are two items remaining. Hopefully those will be put to bed before we break up and go on holiday. Load shedding, I guess this has been spoken to at length by competitors. We think that we've lost about 80,000 trading hours, which is a material number, especially in that month of September, 44% of available trading hours were lost in that month. Of course, it's very difficult to ascertain what trade comes back after power comes back on. It's safe to say that, particularly for our customer base, that as I said a little bit earlier, there are lots of things competing for their wallets. Don't forget that if load shedding's on, a large proportion of our client base doesn't have their own transport, that disrupts the day, it's also obviously very costly to get to the retail outlets relative to what I just said about the fuel price. The good news is that, by year-end, we expect to have power or some form of backup in 70% of our stores, which would be a big jump from where we actually were at the end of September. The weak consumer environment is obviously, as I was discussing, a significant issue. We have to find a way to navigate through it, put our best foot forward in terms of trade and reacting to the short-term circumstances. Obviously, we think long term, and thinking long term and the planning and the execution of our strategy is absolutely key. We've got to keep an eye on that at the same time. We did speak about social grants, the whole disruption of payments, non-payments, late payments. We expect that to normalize as we go forward. I think something that's often forgotten is any performance should be compared to your base. The Mr Price Group posted growth of 37.8% in the base, which was ahead of the market, and therefore would affect growth rates to some degree. Those bases will normalize as we go into H2. Just looking at some other highlights, and we'll go into a lot more detail in the presentation itself. We opened 78 new stores and revamped 27. There's going to be a lot more activity coming up in the second half. If you look at the trading period before COVID-19 induced hard lockdown, up until today, we also mustn't lose sight that the group has gained 91 basis points of market share over that period. We're delighted that our acquisitions have been accretive since the date of acquisition. Power Fashion's performing strongly. It's had a very nice comeback, as we said, and we thought it would. In fact, it's gained market share in every month of the half. In that division, we've expanded stores to 232, and we'll give you a sense shortly as to where we think that can go and what our immediate target is. Yuppiechef's progressing nicely, too. Delighted, and one of the real reasons that we bought it was not only from the e-commerce side, but it's the omnichannel. I'll talk a little bit about the new flagship concept store that we've got in Menlyn and how that's going and the width of the offer that we've actually brought in there, and that's the skills that the Mr Price Group brought to that team. A really positive story there, too. As you would have heard, and I was alluding to a little bit earlier, we concluded the acquisition of Studio 88, and that brings almost 800 stores into the stable, and they really had standout performance in the year to September. As I said, we acquired them officially from October, but I'm going to talk a little bit about how that affected valuation and our thinking around the price that we set there. We launched Mr Price Baby. Hopefully in this presentation, you're going to get a strong sense that the growth vectors that we've got and what our strategy is, it's not all about acquisitions, definitely not. It's about space growth, new departments, organic concepts, and there's a really healthy balance in that. Mr Price Baby, and I will share some information, is a great example of that organic growth idea. Of course, with a business that's got a lot on its plate in an environment that's as volatile as it is, we've had to think long and hard about our people structures and our leadership structures and really what puts us in the best position to execute our strategy. We're almost at the end of the process there, and I'll share some information with you. As I said, we landed the ERP. We know that's disrupted trade, but I think we also got to give credit to the technology team that landed the ERP. This has been a 10-year journey for us. We've had stops and starts, changing vendors. I think we've been through or had three CIOs involved in the process. As troublesome as it's been, the complexity of these things can't be emphasized enough, and full credit to the team that actually did get us to this position. There's obviously the impact on H1 as we've described, but with the complexity and the distraction from the merchant teams and other users, we can't say that we're completely out of any noise relating to ERP. So we'll have to just unpack and trade through the next season and see whether that is the case or not. But certainly, from our perspective, the big issues are done and dusted, and it's looking positive for the long term. Just to show you that it's not all about profits and growth and all those kind of things. We want to do those things, we want to achieve growth, but it's all about doing it responsibly, and we're delighted that we're the only fashion value retailer on the FTSE Responsible Investment Top 30 Index. So it's not all about profits, it's making sure that we're good citizens, which is very important to us, and we will share some information with you. This slide is just getting back to market share. There's no doubt that we left quite a bit on the table. So that did create an appetite or an opportunity, should I say, for competitors to come in, and we laser focus on making sure that we actually win that market share back. But if you just look at the trends, and the table is the apparel segment. That's actually looking at market share gains over those periods, as you can see in those graphs, right up until Q4 FY 2022, which is the pre-go live on ERP, very strong gains in the apparel segment. So actually, apparel segment gained market share every quarter in the last two years leading up to the ERP change. When we went live, obviously, some things didn't manifest themselves immediately, and we were off to a real flyer the first two weeks, we were up 26% in sales, and the last three weeks down 3%. But overall, we lost 20 basis points of market share in H1. That's in rands, but in units, we actually gained market share. So we've actually got a higher contribution of people's wardrobes. Just to, I guess, in a way, highlight the impact of ERP, Power Fashion wasn't included in that ERP change, and they've actually gained market share in every month in H1, as I said a little bit earlier. Just carrying on for a second on the apparel performance. I did say earlier, don't forget the base. The apparel base was we were up 42% in the prior period. Okay. 8.5% performance on that with all the challenges that I've actually explained, I think is a decent performance, but it's still recognizing that we left a lot on the table. You can see there the operating profit growth in that segment, a very, very healthy 22.8%. In fact, all our divisions in the apparel segment achieved double-digit operating profit growth. Home was a sector that we really found the going tough. I suppose there are ongoing trends of consumer spending, obviously being tight, consumers being diverted back into holidays and experience and things like that. The disappointing thing for us is that in this environment, we would have expected to gain market share, and we didn't. What you see there is RSR down 1.6%. That was buoyed by Yuppiechef. If you strip out Yuppiechef, then Sheet Street and Mr Price Home were down about 5% and 6%, respectively. What we've seen in this segment, in particular, is a lot of competitor activity on a couple of fronts. First of all, I think because when you look back on the performance of the sector over the last two years as people were working from home, I think the sector shut the lights out. That gave some an opportunity to invest in store rollouts. I'm not talking only the listed competitors here. I'm also talking a lot of the independents, many of whom aren't in the RLC. They're outside of the RLC. They're not included. They have been growing quite strongly. Of course, our business, and in particular, Mr Price Home, has got a much wider assortment than a lot of our competitors, so there's a lot more attacks on it. We've definitely got plans to make sure that that market share comes back. Just to point out that in that sector, we've still got a dominant market share of well over 30%. Like I said with apparel, homeware, also don't forget that base, that 27%. Lastly, in financial services, healthy RSR up 13% and operating profit growth of 7%. Okay. That's a bit of the background. Mark's going to take us through a lot more of the detail now. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm going to start off with our group income statement. Like Mark said, unfortunately, the top line didn't meet our expectations for all the reasons Mark said, I'm not going to elaborate on that further. I think what is good under these conditions is how does a business contain itself when it is under pressure and things aren't going its way, the way it would like to, or the way it planned. You can see that our gross profit grew 7.5% ahead of retail sales and other income, with expenses growing at 5.9%, which created the profit leverage of 13%, and profit attributed to shareholders growing 13.3% for the period. How did we get there? Geography-wise, South Africa grew 6.3% with the rest of Africa growing 2.4%. It's in line with our stated strategy to be focused on the S.A. market at 93% concentration in the S.A. geography. Our bricks grew at 5.8% with our online growing at 11.2%, online contribution is at 3%. We're seeing good reads in our online business, it's one of our strengths, we will continue to invest in there, and I'll show you that a little bit later. From a tender type perspective, this is some of the story that's playing out in the market. You can see our cash, we dominate in cash, 84.9% cash business grew 5.2%, with credit growing 11.5%. Units were up 1.7% at 122 million units, we're able to keep inflation at 3.8% when CPI was growing at 7.5% up to September. From a space growth perspective, we grew 78 stores over the period. We launched six new concepts, including Baby and more cellular concepts, more cellular store rollout. We only closed eight stores. I think this is a very important point for investors to understand, is that the hurdle rates to get into a Mr Price store and the feasibilities are robust and rigorous. You can see over the period to have to close eight stores shows testimony to that, space growth grew 5.7% over the period. What is really pleasing is since our acquisitions, where we took over the Power and Yuppiechef acquisitions, our store base has grown 34% in those two businesses. What we are noticing is that there is a move back to flagship stores. As you'll recall, in the COVID times, the rural stores were. We've got a very diversified store location strategy, which plays into our portfolio theory on location. Our flagship stores, which are very material stores to the group, nonetheless, started to really show signs of customer traffic coming back, the performance in the flagship stores in particular has been strong over the period. When you embark on a store expansion drive like we want to responsibly, one of the key lessons is to try and reduce your CapEx per square meter, we're doing that actively in order to support returns as we go into smaller locations with smaller formats, we're seeing some really good traction there as well. Gross profit over the period was at 40.3% for the group, up from the 39.7% in the prior period, 60 basis points. We had the inventory write-offs of, you know, in the looting and the base. That's mainly affected merchandise GP, which is up at 41.2%. I think the major, as Mark alluded to, the impact of the ERP was predominantly felt as a result of not being able to process markdowns for a significant period in the beginning. The timing of stock flows into our DCs were also impacted. When you're a retail business that is fast retail, you need that nimbleness, you need that versatility in your arsenal, and that's our traditional strengths, and that did impact merchant performance and therefore some of our stock performance, because we have to take deeper markdowns later in the season, which is not our model. Telecoms segment margin grew to 19.8%, and that's as a result of a positive mix change. This segment continues to show amazing opportunity for us. Power Fashion, as you know, is one of our acquisitions. It's a slightly lower margin business, just based on the construct of how that business is put together. It grew extremely strongly, as I showed you in that previous location tab. It increased its contribution to the group, and its margin expanded 330 basis points, which is in line with our strategy to continue to look for those opportunities within that business model to grow it and to be able to expand it. Through this whole period, gross margins obviously had a lot of external factors against it within the cost price or input prices. Hedging strategies to date have created an 8% shield against the average spot over the period. Our shipping costs that we contracted are materially below the average spot rates over the period, and I'll take you through some of that on the next slide. Our logistics cost, which is really our intermodal logistic cost in and around the country, was flat on last year, which helped reduce. That was the pure carriage, which helped to reduce our fuel surcharge, which, as you know, how fuel prices have increased. Again, I'll take you through that on the next slide. Input cost. Key to retail is input cost, as you would know. The ZAR against the dollar has depreciated 13.2% for the half. It's worsened up to the end of October to 23.5%. Consensus view around the rand is that it's oversold, and we expect that it will come back positively in FY 2024. Over the period, oil and cotton, which are key component input costs into our garments, were up at 34.3% and 54.3%, respectively. Shipping rates, which is the graph on your bottom left-hand side, you can see the red line is the Mr Price line. You will see that we. The blue line is the SCFI Africa index, is that we're materially below that index, and we have been for some time. Which just goes to show our buying power and our bulk volume helps us in that regard. We've also contracted very favorable rates up until June 2023, which also will assist in dampening cost inflation. Overhead expenses, as many of you know, we're fanatical about making sure we have responsible cost growth and that our business model needs to respond in times, depending what the times prevail. This is a case in point. Overhead expenses were up 5.9%, which, as I said, was below sales and GP growth. this was also based primarily, you'll see our employment costs, which makes up 40% of this basket of total expenses. They were only up 0.6%. That's our variable REM philosophy, where our associates have bought into a pay-for-performance mentality. In tough times, that gives us that cushion to be able to pull back when we're not meeting our own internal targets, and that helped us through the period. Occupancy costs were up 12.5%. Remember, these occupancy costs don't include rent, and they were driven primarily due to higher turnover rentals as the flagship stores start to kick in. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, we had new space growth of 6.3%. As everyone knows, the utility costs, the electricity, water rates have gone up. We managed to get it at 9.8%. When you take off space growth, that's a really good performance. Other operating costs were impacted by the increase in bad debt. I'll take you through some slides going later on around the performance of our book, the performance of the credit market, and what we're seeing from our perspective. That did, relative to last year, that did create a bit of negativity in that growth rate. We still see, and particularly in our new structure and as part of the key drivers for the new structure, is really the cost engineering opportunities. They do exist within our business. We just feel that we need the right structure and the synergies across our business. There is a lot of potential in there. What I am excited about is that we were able to keep total expenses as a percentage of RSOI down by 10 basis points to 27.7%. All of that helped to contain these expenses. Total expenses, if you exclude Yuppiechef, remember, Yuppiechef is only in the base for two months, and obviously in the full period this year would've been 4.4%. The balance sheet remains healthy and robust. I think there's two call-outs predominantly around inventory. There's quite a prevailing narrative amongst the retailers, but just globally around inventory levels. We were no different, albeit that some of ours was influenced by strategic calls that we made, and that was predominantly around festive trade and mitigating some supply chain disruptions. Excluding goods on the water, our inventory was up 25.5%. We had a slower September, which did place a bit of drag on our inventory carry. We had new space growth of 6.3%, which obviously does naturally buoy your inventory levels. We had higher input inflation as a result of the rand, albeit despite our really good hedging strategies, that obviously has a natural rise on inventory. H2, which you obviously build up your inventory prior to your store openings. We have got 115 store openings. 63% of those will be before Christmas. We anticipate the growth rates in inventory levels to normalize by year-end, and that we don't expect to be in the very low double digits. Cash deployment. Cash on the balance sheet at the period end was ZAR 3.3 billion. Payment of Studio 88 was ZAR 3.6 billion, and that was on the 4th of October, like Mark said. Those cash reserves from a capital allocation perspective have been deployed. Knowing that we obviously generate cash and being quite a highly cash generative business model, there are obviously inflows of cash. Our target cash flow conversion ratio is greater than 80% by year-end. I'm going to take you through a working capital slide after I just show you the cash flow. I can tell you where some of our cash is being absorbed, obviously, the most notable being inventory. I'll also take you through trade and other receivables as a separate slide. This is the cash flow. It's just the basic waterfall. You can see we started in March at ZAR 4.6 billion and closed on ZAR 3.3 billion. We generated ZAR 2.6 billion of cash before working capital changes. Our working capital absorbed ZAR 1 billion worth of working capital or cash flow. Our dividend was at ZAR 1.374 when we maintained our dividend payout ratio in the prior year, second half. We continued to invest in stores where PP&E was up ZAR 296 million invested. Intangibles of ZAR 39 million. Intangibles, for people not familiar with the term, is your software and related assets. There's quite a lot of commentary about working capital management in the market at the moment. I thought that let me put a slide in to just give you my thoughts around it and what's making us feel that, whilst on the face of it looks potentially something that was not our ideal. This is where I think it was absorbed by. Not think, it was absorbed by. Stock management was impacted by the ERP, like Mark explained, the slow September, but it's mostly contained in our non-seasonal lines, which contain lower risk. We've also got elevated GIT, which is your goods in transit, which is your FOB, because risks and rewards of ownership have transferred to minimize the risk of the festive season trade inputs. That absorbed ZAR 452 million of working capital. The strategy around stock turn in order to bring back, which is the right-hand side, is your actions targeting. My target is to create neutral absorption of cash flow year-on-year. That'll be achieved by forward merchandise plans to normalize by year-end, like I spoke to you around the growth in inventory by year-end. Our goods in transit balance is expected to reduce by 30% by year-end. Our stock turn target, which is really the thing that is most indicative of how the performance of your stock is, we're hoping that will be at over 4.8% by year-end on the core business, excluding obviously goods in transit, because you don't have an opportunity to sell that. As I mentioned earlier, credit sales grew 11.5%. Trade receivables absorbed, as a result, ZAR 664 million, primarily due to new account growth and robust credit sales. What is our response? We've got enhanced collection strategies to reduce debtors days. The book status target is to be greater than 75% current to ensure our roll rates, which is basically how clients or customers roll between stages in their payment profile. I think our status profile, if you add status zero and status one, is well over 85%. Obviously, I'll take you through our appetite for credit and where the status of our credit book is. We're fortunate that we don't have an aggressive view on credit, therefore, whilst trade receivables have grown ZAR 664 million and absorbed that cash, the status of the book is actually in a fairly healthy place, considering the environment, and it's well provided for, and I'll take you through that later. From an inflow perspective, we had ZAR 530 million positive swing from trade creditors, and we've got an ongoing supply chain finance program with our creditors, which has also unlocked ZAR 600 million to date, which obviously has helped the ZAR 530 come through. What are we targeting in the short term over the next 24 months? We've got a further ZAR 1 billion target to unlock in working capital through our suppliers and our supply chain, and that should positively come through in the next 24 months. Getting back onto credit, where do we feel things are? As Mark said, when you looked at nominal wage growth and just where inflation and just the basket of goods is moving, you can see there's a definite appetite for credit in the market. Our hypothesis, and it was backed up by our economists that we consult with, have said that out of COVID-19, people had savings. Those savings have dried up. People are accessing credit. That's starting to dry up, and I explained to you where TransUnion see the credit market. We're seeing a tremendous, for not a heavily push on credit, our new applications received are 45% up. We've tightened our scorecard to 27.1%, which is a 640 basis point tightening, which has only let 17.7% of those new accounts through, which is quite a drop-off. Declined applicants, what we do as part of our strategy is to actually move them into our recently introduced Lay-by program that you would know. Yes, there's demand for credit at the store level is rising. New account growth is robust, and I think that's coming through a lot of the results that have come through recently. Our One Card facility, which is basically an internal initiative, and it really revolves around our existing base of customers who weren't able to cross shop. That's given us ZAR 242 million worth of additional credit, which is to our existing base that we know well. It's safer. Credit growth performance as an industry, as I alluded to, this is some work from TransUnion SA Consumer Credit Index, the most recent stuff. TransUnion SA Consumer Credit Index fell to 49, and they make a comment in their report that this is one of the biggest falls in a quarter on record. New credit defaults and arrears are rising. It's up 1% in this quarter, and debt serviceability risk is forecast to increase. How does our credit book compare? This is Principia, who's also an external third party, and their reports in July 2022 said our good to bad ratio, which is basically good accounts are less than 1 month in arrears, is 8.4, and the market is at 3.9. We're almost 2.5 times better quality book than the market. Looked at it differently as a percentage of 4-plus cycle balances, which is four months on book, our balance is 3.9%, where the market's at 12.6%. Mr Price holds a healthy premium, obviously, as a result, our scorecard highly responsive in this credit environment in particular. Trade receivables, since March, is only up 2.6%, which should be positive for you guys. Obviously, September on September is 16.8%. Net bad debt to book was 7.2% for the period, our impairment provisioned at 7.9%, which is adequately provided. The drivers for the retail book, outside of what I've just spoken to you around, the desire for credit is the interest rates, obviously growing 200 basis points in the half. We're just seeing that the new account growth and the active accounts have grown 7.5%. Book performance, the roll rates between stages are actually starting to show early signs of deterioration. Despite our collection recovery targets being met, we're seeing it increasingly challenging to collect, therefore our strategy into the second half is actually to not rely heavily on credits. We believe that's not the strategy going into the second half as the environment tightens. That's our approach in the second half. From a capital allocation perspective, H1, we've allocated ZAR 336 million to date. Forecast for the second half, including Studio 88 in this case, was ZAR 934 million, bringing the total allocation of capital of ZAR 1.3 billion for the period forecast. It's predominantly in our stores. If you look at new stores, expansions, and revamps, they make up well over 65% of our allocation, there's a strong allocation to technology, as you can see there, 15.8%, as we re-platform our businesses and add new technologies into our businesses, which should make us smarter retailers or will make us smarter retailers. What is very important in capital allocation is the way we allocate capital is rigorous and our ROCEs continue to far exceed our group weighted average cost of capital. There's significant daylight between our WACC and the desired returns that we ask for. I think just to drive home the point, this is a piece of work that RMB Morgan Stanley did on the retailers, you can see that our return on invested capital is at 49.7% over the last 5 years. If you look at it on a dimension, we add the HEPS growth because there's a lot of talk in the market is that you buying growth and your HEPS growth with these lower margin businesses and the way you're going about it, will you maintain your discipline and your fiscal discipline around your metrics? My next slide should help you speak to where our heads are at on that. You'll see that we continue to be in the top rights there and ahead of all our peers. I think this is a key slide for all our engagement with the market so far, is that how do we model Mr Price? How do we look into the future? This is a piece of work that is obviously external, Bloomberg, the competitors in the Mr Price Group for FY 2022. You'll see that how our ratios compare to the balance of our peers, still very healthy ratios, and we don't expect to try and to deteriorate those. Stewardship of these market leading metrics is an imperative for us and is built into our management incentive schemes. We've put some medium-term targets on the right-hand side. These exclude Studio 88 at this point. You can see that we have got no desire, despite having Power and Yuppie in the base, to drop these standards. From a financial outlook perspective, which is key, I think, how are we feeling? The consumer discretionary retail is forecast. I think Investec put out a note. It's expected to be very tough in the second half. Merchandise calls. Therefore, what is our response? In this type of environment, our merchandise calls have been tailored appropriately, but we've also got a very agile supply chain, which we've spoken to before, that is ready to respond if the consumer shows resilience. Our retail credit growth, we don't believe that we want to lean into that too hard into the second half, and these conditions should support a cash-centric retailer like ourselves. H2 targets. New stores will be 165. New stores, including Studio 88, 115 for the core group. Weighted average space will grow at six, and input inflation we expect to be at 9.1% with some various mixed strategies that will bring that down quite a bit. The GP margin and the medium-term guidance remains intact, and our cash conversion target, as I said, we want to target over 80% by the year end. This is a challenging environment, and it requires cautious approach, which I've spoken to the business around expense management and operating costs, and I know that's probably going to be a question that's going to come up later. We've got to balance the short term with the long term. We know that we've investing for structural changes in our business and we feel that that's appropriate going into the future. I'll hand it back over to Mark and he'll take you through the strategy. Thanks, Mark. First of all, with regard to our vision, I think it's been well documented in the past. We've spoken to you at length about it. It's to be the most valuable retailer in Africa, and that's definitely a long-term vision. No date's been set to it, but what it is a call out to ensure that we're focusing on the things that make the difference and things that can scale. Of course, we can't be that if it's all about growth and we start diluting everything that we've built over the last 30 years. What Mark is speaking about in all that discipline and all that focus on metrics is an integral part of whether we can attain our vision or not. Going to the strategy, we've identified the six strategic pillars that you should be familiar with. I'm not going to talk in detail to each of them. There's some information that you can glean on your own. I'll certainly pull out the highlights of each. Looking at stakeholder engagement, that's one of the pillars I'm absolutely delighted on the progress that we've made here over the last couple of years. One of the key things for us is, well, how do our stakeholder groups relate to us? What do they think of us? Are we actually acting in the spirit of partnership that we do have? By those groups, I'm talking about investors, landlords, our own associates, and suppliers. One of the things that we did this year is set out, through a questionnaire and a program, is to gauge their responses to a whole myriad of inputs. The reason that I'm delighted is the outputs of those questionnaires were so favorable in our regard. Still room for improvement, but quite importantly, for one or two of these stakeholder groups, we asked them to measure us relative to our peers. I'm happy to say that we're definitely on the right side of where we need to be. Looking at growth, the objective is to be the top performer in TSRs in the retail sector. When we're looking at the growth framework, one of the important messages that we need to deliver as well, and I'm talking about our existing businesses at the moment, comp growth comes first. Okay? We have to get improved comp growth out of our businesses. If you get comp growth in the top line and you're handling your margins responsibly, you can cover the overheads and the investments that you need to make as a business. That's definitely the first point of call. You can see there that we've broken it down into items that are receiving group attention and group focus. Obviously the things that are the divisional responsibilities. A couple of things that, in terms of our overall strategy, we're now in the logical phase in how we transition with our strategy. In addition to some of the investment options we're looking at, which I'll come to, is our thoughts around eCom platform omnichannel, and everything around the customer, CRM, loyalty, the customer journey, et cetera. That'll be led from the group, but it'll be aided by some of the organizational design structures that we've put in place, that we'll talk to. Certainly the divisional focus is comp sales and comp profit growth. To deliver that, I think we've got a history of introducing new categories, new departments consistently over the years. Obviously in this environment, we need to make sure that the basket is getting bigger, the shopper's basket. All our internal decisions are making sure that the product's in the right place in the right store, is obviously critically important. As you've got a lot more competitive activity, when you just look at putting the customer first in everything that we do and just relative how we are feeling about some of our in-store environments, they're not at the level that they need to be. I'm not talking about the flagships, I'm talking about the thick middle, we're certainly spending a lot more money on those. I'm equally delighted that where we spend revamp money, all divisions barring one, which is a small division, the new stores are performing ahead of feasibility. It's not like we're throwing CapEx into it and not getting the return. The revamps are working. That's comp growth, then there's non-comp growth, which I was alluding to. Obviously, in real estate opportunities Mark was talking about. Looking out for the next couple of years, we'll be focusing on opening up about 250 stores a year. That's across all the brands, including Studio 88. It might be a bit higher, might be a bit less, it really depends on the availability of the space that we do need. Certainly there's an appetite for enhanced space growth. As we said, our space growth is working for us. It's the new stores are performing and the revamps are performing. Those are two critical elements there. We can think about extending our credit offering, it's not departing from anything that Mark said about our conservative appetite in a worsening credit environment. Obviously the likes of Yuppiechef with the affluent customer that is attracted to that offering, there's obvious credit opportunity there. We have formed an investment committee. We've always been through a process of making sure that we're evaluating new opportunities carefully, we've actually widened and structured it properly, more comprehensively that will give us even added impact into the investment choices that we're making. Non-comp growth on the divisional focus is obviously how new stores are performing looking at category extensions, new departments, examples of some drives, for example, into extended sizing. We dealt with comp growth, non-comp growth, there's a focus on efficiencies and retail insights, really talk about what we get from our data. We've got a future fit project that is looking at identifying opportunities for efficiency. When Mark was going through his cost growth, just reflecting on our interaction with investors over many years now, we're not a business that has lazy costs lying around. We've been very tight on it in the past, had a really frugal mindset. As result, if you talk about where's our self-help in the overhead story, it's through process re-engineering, some of that will also come through technology, as you can see there, unlocked through the organizational design, which I'll talk through in a minute. Transferring the business from a very siloed sort of mentality, trading divisions to a more sectoral view. That will certainly unlock things where we can start looking across the business instead of down in some narrow channels. Any self-help story is certainly in that area. What we're also doing is we've got quite detailed processes that we look at when we either informing strategies, the long-term business strategies or even the short-term merchandise strategies. In the redesign of Mark's role in particular, we want to go even deeper into that. Even deeper insights into what's driving the economy, what's driving consumer spending, what demographics in the market is behaving in which way. I think that in the medium to long term will really drive even further benefit. That was the existing business. We can now looking at new businesses and, as I said, all this is done within the framework that Mark's just painted, making sure capital gets put in the right place. We're under no illusions. In what we would call a tough comp environment, we've got ideas and plans. We have to prove our ability to execute either organic concepts that we're starting or businesses that we've acquired, and we have to realize the benefits that we, in fact, the reason that we bought those businesses in the first place. Just to give you a little bit more insight into what drives our behavior and our thoughts. When we're looking at acquisitions, first thought is, well, what is the level of earnings accretion? It doesn't mean that we wouldn't accept something that's not earnings accretive. It would have to have a very good reason that it wasn't, and we'd have to be assured that we can get to accretion in the what I call the short to medium term. We don't have an appetite for fixes and slow burns. It's just not us. Part of when you look at an acquisition is it new products or does it give access to a new customer segment that we haven't been targeting? I think there's some real upside there I'm going to share with you in a minute, in that regard. Certainly, we approach things with an intention to keep management, a management team intact. Life's life and things do change. What we've got to make sure is that before we scale, we've got a management team in there that we can actually scale it with. I'm very happy with the way that things have progressed there. I'll talk about integration. A lot of people have asking, "What are you integrating? What are you not? What are your plans?" I'll share something with you. Quite key for us as well, that when we go into an acquisition, we don't want to be going in with a whole shopping list of things. That'll, I guess, challenge the whole process of regulatory approval. If it's borderline, if we think it probably wouldn't get through because we do certain things ourselves already, is a regulator unlikely to allow it? We obviously stay away from that. That was acquisitions, and then I think an equally exciting part of our opportunities are the organic concepts. Some of the things that we look at there is, first of all, when you look at what we've executed over the last couple of years, the teams in the Mr Price Group, it's a definite skill that they possess. We've got the internal skills, we've got the ability to launch new concepts, new departments, and get it off the ground quickly. I think we've displayed that ability many times over. I guess, a real skill and ability to launch new unique concepts, and in-demand concepts. There again, we're only really looking at things that can scale. In org design, I'm going to touch on our strategic function is going to be expanding what we call the Tomorrow Team. That's really making sure that any new organic concept, there's a bigger tie-in with the strategy team that gets it to the point where we can set it free. If you've been very intricately involved in the design and the build of it, is that you see it through to its first phase of establishing its business, putting the team in, and then when that team's in place, you'll see in the org design, it'll shift over to its new reporting line. Something that we have to just continually judge, it's a bit like I was saying in acquisitions, how earnings accrete a visit and how quickly, is exactly what that looks like from an organic concept as well. The thing with organic concepts, this is why the business case has got to be really stress tested, is it's often loss-making in the first period, year or two. We need to get past that hurdle quite quickly and get it on its trajectory for growth. That, I guess, informs how many you can do simultaneously. We have to think very carefully, and the organic concept that you are choosing has got to be the right one and therefore in the right order. This is the matrix of our companies now. You've seen this before, but just to maybe not speak to the graph so much, but just the focus here is on the top of that page. Comp growth and execution in existing divisions is the first priority. The further integration of our two recent acquisitions, Power Fashion and Yuppiechef, I'll share some details with you, but that's key. I'm very happy the way that those two businesses are going. Then, of course, what we were referring to earlier, onboarding Studio 88 and getting things off the ground there too. Then what I was just speaking about, testing new organic concepts. I look at that investment matrix, and I can see it filling up quite nicely. I think it doesn't mean that in any of those sectors there aren't other opportunities, and I'm going to give you a sort of a cheeky sense of how things are sitting in a minute or two. Certainly, what we're talking about here is the product classification. On this page, it's not the income of a customer that we're talking about. It's a very important distinction. Okay, we're talking about organic concepts and our tests. Mr Price Baby launched in August in 14 stores. Don't forget, we did have some baby product in our existing stores, but this is now a much more expanded assortment. We had two purposeful standalone stores to test this in that mix of 14 stores. We're testing in three different formats, a standalone store, in a kids' store, and in the mothership Mr Price store. It's very important that we get all the reads that we need from those models, so we can make the right investment decision. Overall, happier with the way it's trending. We're getting some good sales reads. There is a higher apparel contribution in that business, but very pleasingly, and maybe you've had a chance to look at some of the product as we're looking at before this presentation. Our private label offer, not only in clothing but in other products, is actually working very well. Very happy with that. I think the takeaway point from Mr Price Baby there is it's in test phase. It's only been about two months since launch. We're not ready to call it yet. There's some tweaks that we're doing to the model. Early signs are good, but we'll wait until the end of the financial year to make that call. It's how it's performing and equally important, what returns it gives us as a business. There's just a few more visuals that you can see relative to the product. In the top left there, that bundle + joy is our internal private label. Moving on to Power Fashion. For Power, the heading there says, "Proving its store base investment case." I think it's important that we don't see an online opportunity for this business at the moment. The store rollout opportunity is massive. In this business, it's all about scaling and gaining market share. I think we've got an excellent team in place there now, and it's a business that I've certainly got a lot of faith in. We were talking a little bit earlier about market share gains. As I said, 11 out of 12 months in the last year, that was on the clothing and the other items, and in Powercell, the cellular side, we've gained market share too. We opened 58 stores. We think we've got an appetite from the current sort of level of store infrastructure to more than double it. Our initial target is 500. I think when we get to that, it'll go way beyond that. If you just look at the H1 metrics there, whether you look at sales growth, our density, the improvements in GP and op margin, that's all part of the story that we said last time we met. Last year was obviously a very difficult year for this business, with the social unrest and everything that it meant and their very heavy reliance or in terms of the store footprint, it being heavily weighted to KZN where those things took place. Great story here that as you leverage and you get that scale in terms of number of stores, you don't grow your internal, your head office cost base and your infrastructure to the same extent, and you get great leverage. Likewise, Yuppiechef. Here it's proving its omnichannel investment case. I think that's a really important differentiation from Power Fashion. I think things are going very nicely here. We've got a very clear strategy of what we're trying to do and tap into that high-income consumer segment. In this business, it's all about omnichannel. We think it's got a really great platform. We can do more on it with new brands and merchandise categories. We can certainly look at, in the medium term, as I target to get to 70 stores from the current 10. I wouldn't be put off by that relatively low store number. As we approach it, we'll take a view on it and see what kind of returns we're getting, but it's more about the omnichannel experience. Online is a big part of that. Of course, it's got a wholesale division that's operating very nicely, and it's growing nicely, too. I think we said at the time that when we acquired this business, that we didn't acquire for what it was. We had some ideas for plans and to take it elsewhere. One of those ideas was the introduction of a softs offer. It's scatter cushions, sheeting, bedding, curtaining, all that kind of stuff, and we definitely had skills in that area, where Yuppiechef was a kitchenware-based business. I'm delighted that as we sort of progress with store roll-outs, that we've been able to translate that softs offer into its latest store, and I'll show you some pictures now. That's exactly why we bought this business. To take our skills, plant it in a high-performing business with an excellent skill set of their own, and together, to take the business to a new place. I do think there's a great opportunity with not only, as I was talking, different merchandise categories, but to then to push our private label assortment, and there you can see Thread Office, Sagenwolf, and Humble & Mash, all showing new growth and, I think, a really great opportunity there. Looking at the first half, I'd say definitely performing in terms of our expectations. The stores are performing well, and we are planning on opening another four stores in the second half. I said a little bit earlier that I'm going to show you the new flagship concept. This is Menlyn Mall in Pretoria. It's a 700 sq m store, a lot bigger than any other store that we've got. It's only been open for a week or two, but performing very strongly. In fact, performing 20% higher than the feasibility study reflected. As I said, try and get there if you can. It's a good example of kitchen coming together with softs offer, so it's in fact a Yuppiechef home store. Not only is that store performing, the store that we just opened recently before that was a store in Ballito. Much smaller store. It's a kitchen-focused store that's actually operating 10% above feasibility, which is equally good. Delighted that Yuppiechef and Power are on the right trajectories. They're businesses that I said I'm excited about and I don't lose any sleep about the acquisition that we made and can we execute and deliver the goods there. I'm very confident. That brings us to Studio 88. We have gone into a lot more detail with some of the information that we provided earlier. We'll repeat that just for sake of refreshing your memory in a minute. Just to reinforce that we acquired South Africa's largest independent retailer of branded, leisure lifestyle, and sporting apparel and footwear. The last year, I said a little bit earlier, that they had shut the lights out. Well, that actually shows you their sales performance and their profit performance for their year up to the 30th of September just gone. At this stage, these are unaudited, but it gives you a sense of scale and performance. EBITDA increasing by 25%. Of course, we effectively approached the business, and we sort of agreed terms some time ago. When we agreed terms, it was largely informed by how they were trading up until last December. Because of the weighting of how profits fall in this business, that had really informed what price we were prepared to pay. At the time, we actually say, well, the purchase price is, as Mark said, ZAR 3.6. On the historical, the prior year figures, it actually translates to an EBITDA multiple of 7.5. Of course, when we came to acquire it, and then we took control, as we said, in October, the September year that we already had a good read on at the time when we made the purchase, then effectively reduced that EBITDA multiple from a historic 7.5 to 6.3. For a business of this quality and its growth prospects, I think was an excellent price and would pay that again gladly. I'm not going to go through this whole thing. It just gives you a sense of it's not all one brand. There are a lot of brands in the stable. You can see them on the right-hand side there. Specialty isn't a brand. It's made up of a myriad of smaller ones. You can get a good sense of scale here, and therefore it's not. You look at a group of 800 stores and say, "Well, where to from here?" There's lots of brands that make that up. If you look at the positioning between the customer types, it also gives you a sense that then they're not reliant on one customer. We have spoken to you about this before, I'm not going to talk about it, but it's obviously a very aspirational customer. It doesn't mean that it's a high income customer. It's very important, as I said earlier. Yeah, I think this business thrives in the relationships that it's got with the brands. They've got exclusive licensing agreements, and very importantly, talks to what Mark was talking about. It's all cash. There's no credit in this business. When we look at enhancing the metrics that we've got that Mark was talking about, cash will certainly enhance our aspirations on our cash flow and our balance sheet management. Okay. Yeah, I was delighted to welcome the team last month. They're an excellent team with a long track record. Just don't forget that we acquired 70%, and there's a phased buyout of the rest over the next three years or so. That was dealing with the acquisitions, and then a lot of people say, "Well, how are you thinking about integration?" It does talk to what kind of company we are and our org design that we're building. I'll just tie that all up for you. When we acquire companies, in fact, we don't put in any kind of efficiency through savings because they're integrated businesses. If they come, we obviously do identify what they might be, but we don't model them. We like the business to stand on its own two feet and to generate the returns relative to the price on their own basis. We acquire businesses with a light touch integration mindset. It's very important that as you bring new businesses in, that you don't think you know everything about the business. You've got a management team there that's performed well over the long term, and we've got to learn from them as much as they've got to learn from us. A big part of it is just letting the team settle, getting to know what it's like being part of a public company, developing relationships, and then the opportunities start coming out. That way, it minimizes distraction, lets guys focus on performance in the early days. Certainly what we do focus on is looking at people, our culture, and obviously the financial reporting side of stuff, and I think we've done a good job on that. Looking at some of the successes. In Power, certainly what they've been able to benefit from in the short term is supply chain and sourcing expertise. That I think will have a really positive impact on them further in the future. Of course, the group scale and our infrastructure has enabled them to grow at the pace that they have, which they would have struggled with without being part of us. On the Yuppiechef side of things, also from the merchandise side, I was talking about this wider assortment, for example, the soft offer where we had the skills transferred merchants to Cape Town to be part of their team. That's the kind of skill that we can bring there. We've actually unlocked some really nice, but I suppose initial savings in logistics and enabled their real estate to take on a more aggressive stance with what was really a small team. Overall, very happy and that slow integration, but very considered, that just doesn't deal with the hard facts, but also deals with cultural elements and people elements, is an approach that is well developed in our thinking and will certainly be our approach going forward as well. I'm looking at Sorry, I must apologize. These stats are a few years old, and they haven't been updated by AMPS. The thing that I want to draw your attention to is there's a lot of activity in the value end. The consumer's under pressure there. We've got our own plans to make sure that we still gain market share and do all the right things. When you look at our choice to, say, invest in South Africa and knowing the consumer is a part of the market that we just haven't been focused on at all. I think when we announced the acquired businesses, one of the concerns, and that's why we gave the guidance that we did on margins and how they'd impact metrics over the longer term. I guess there's a concern that if you're investing in sort of Power Fashion, it's this price value segment, might have great prospects for growth, but what does that mean in terms of some of the metrics? Is it going to dilute your metrics that we're so focused on? Our answer was no, or if it is going to dilute them, we still have a runway to make sure that that dilutive effect was minimized and improved over time. On the flip side, as you go into On the graph on the left, if you just look at that LSM 9 and 10, and this is how much expenditure takes place by those consumers. We've never tackled that part of the market. We've got some ideas and concepts and potential investment areas that we think could work well there. As soon as you go into that, it's generally at enhanced margins, enhanced metrics, and the like. You get this nice balance between deep value investing and some of the metrics that might come out of our approach looking at a more affluent, high income customer. I think that's a very important consideration for us, and we're tending to think about the whole market and where can we invest at the best returns and the best opportunities in that market. The high income consumer is definitely part of that. Of course, once you do that, the freshness that you bring into a sector is always appealing for a consumer. You don't have to adjust your glasses or rub your eyes. It's been blanked out intentionally. This is just to give you a sense of the things that we're discussing internally. These could be new concepts, they could be acquisition ideas, category extensions, anything like that. It just gives you a sense that whether it's price value, fashion value, or aspirational value or the niche segments, there's a lot on our plate that we're currently thinking about. Of course, there's various degrees of advancement in some of these ideas. I think, part of the investment committee and my job and Mark's job is to make sure that we steer these ideas, we execute them, or first of all, we go through the proper business case, and that we then allocate capital, and we execute according to our plans. It doesn't mean that we're going to open 20 odd things. That's not what we're trying to portray here. It's to give you a sense of scales, to give you a sense of the opportunities that. If you focused on a market and you know the market well, the opportunities present themselves. We have to go through a very thorough process to make sure that we actually then refine this list from what they are. This is the list that we've, in fact, even discussed at this point, with our main board in our recent strategy session last month. Brand promise, I think I'm going to leave that for you to read on your own. There's a lot of I think we've progressed quite nicely in these areas. I did say there's more to come. CRM, customer journey, of course, I was talking about our revamps and making sure that we do a better job there. Overall, quite happy with how that whole brand promise equation is going. Yeah, evidenced by net promoter scores increasing. We've got the highest brand equity in the apparel and the homeware segments, and we are voted the most valuable fashion apparel retail in South Africa by Kantar. A couple of other accolades. Voted the coolest clothing store in South Africa. That's Mr Price. If you look at the coolest clothing brand in South Africa, we rank third there after international heavyweights of Nike and Adidas. It's not all about Mr Price. Here's some accolades we've got from our other divisions. Miladys, the best ladies' clothing boutique. Mr Price Home, the best kitchenware store, and Sheet Street was voted the best linen store. I'm getting on to people now. Certainly, when I look back in the last couple of years, I think this is where we made real progress. Just in terms of the way that we relate to each other, the way we relate to our stakeholders. Our internal culture is very strong. I'm very happy to say that. I guess there's still a lot more work to do. When we think of our ambitions and what has to still happen, we need people to get us there. The first thing that we've been working on is to make sure that we've got a skills evaluation process which helps inform succession planning. I'm not talking about myself or Mark, although, of course, we'd be in that discussion. Both of us have got no date set for our departure. Certainly, the kind of company that we're trying to build, not at this level. It's amongst all our executives, our managing directors, our merchandise heads, our operational head, and the list goes on. Is to make sure that whenever anybody departs, there's a succession plan that's developed. There's no panic. It's by design, and that it gives us runway to develop people so that the whole transition at any one of those points becomes seamless. It's a very big part of what I want to leave behind and build an organization that's inherently healthy and is still built on this promote from within concept. That really anytime someone senior steps out, there's more than one candidate that's able to perform, and it's a very healthy position to be in. That's the first thing, the succession planning. The second thing is this whole operational organizational design framework. As I said a little bit earlier, that's to make sure that we've got capacity and we've got the focus to focus on our strategy and to execute our strategy. We've been through a whole very collaborative process with our senior people. We've had outside consultants as well. First thing that we did is to say, "What is the kind of operating principles that we want to base the business on? How do we want to make decisions internally? How do we want to run the business?" We've done that. That in turn informs the org structure, and we've now developed the organizational design, and we're going through the process of putting names to that, and going through that process. At a very advanced stage, but there's two slides I want to share with you. The first is just looking at the operating model. A lot of questions on, well, what is this group that Mr Price is trying to build? Are you an investment holding company or are you a fully integrated company? The quick answer to both those questions is no, we're neither. Okay? Investment holding company, we're not sitting at the center allocating capital, never see those people. They've just got to generate the returns, that's not our style at all. At the same time, we're not an integrated company, which is on the far end, the far right, because it's not integration at all costs. I think I explained a little bit earlier the kind of things that lead us to integration considerations. We're neither of those extremes, and I'll just leave it for you to read that middle part. A bit of strategic orientation, a bit of operational orientation, but we are involved in setting the strategy of the divisions, reviewing performance, et cetera. The other thing that I wanted to leave you with was, with a retail environment where there's a lot going on, with a company that's got bold ambitions and a lot going on internally. Having 17 direct reports, in the case of myself, isn't the answer to execute those plans. Part of that org design process that I was talking about is this isn't the new redesigned organizational structure. Starting with the group director of strategy, the red ones are positions that are in place at the moment, but there's some text under there as to exactly what the nature of the change is. I spoke a little bit earlier about the strategy and growth director. Two new positions that I'm putting in place is of two senior executives to look after, on the one side, the apparel divisions, and on the other side, the homeware divisions. That's where I said these two people would collaborate a lot together. At the end of the day, they could be sharing the same brands. For example, the Red Cap brand. That's why I'm looking forward to now looking cross-sector and cross-business rather than just in all the channels that we've got. There you can see what their operational focus would be. Of course, they focused on the strategy of their sector, the operational performance of their sector, brand health and all the customer things that we've spoken about. I'd be intricately involved in all the big decisions that would take place there. The other new role is a group strategic enablement director. With the complexity of where retail is going, and certainly the integration considerations we have to make or should be making at some point, new businesses coming in and how they translate and affect our infrastructure, those are all key to our future success. We're looking to group that into that role. Three new roles at that level. Quite key in terms of that overall structure was that other executives in the group would report to those, that next level down, my direct reports shrinks by approximately half. I think we've spoken about the ERP, Mark's spoken about the ERP. I just want to leave you with the point that it's obviously a team under a lot of stress. There's a lot going on. It's a necessary process to go through. If you just look at where we are and where we want to get to, and it's not saying that we're not doing innovation work and RPA and those kind of things. We are. It's just that the whole weighting of where we're applying those things, we've got a desire to change that. You can't really get there, and we can't achieve our growth ambitions and our vision if your infrastructure isn't sound and in place. That's what is our first priority. As we land these things and we develop that infrastructure, that whole weighting starts shifting in favor of innovation, which is the place that you want to get. I think it's under great leadership. We've got a clear direction. We have to just unfortunately go through a bit of bumpy times, as I said, every 15 years or so, but we're definitely on the right path. Getting on to sustainability. We actually released our first sustainability report in June this year. We've got an ESG engagement day planned for February, many of which of you will get invitations to. Looking forward to that. Got some nice recognition from Investec Securities as one of four ESG leaders. There's some other things that we'll take you through on the next page. Excuse me. I think that the real call-out here is, it doesn't mean you can't be a good corporate citizen and do the right things and have the right focus just because you're a value retailer. It's quite amazing what you can do as a value retailer. In a lot of these fronts, we're actually leading. Just to look at one of those highlights. We said 80 million units sourced in SA in FY 2022. If you look at the Southern African region, we're probably around 45%-50% sourced from those areas. South Africa itself, it's around the 40% mark. Very heavily invested in South Africa, and I'll just reiterate what our strategy is. It's not vertical integration. We've got excellent relationships with our suppliers. We've got an agile resourcing strategy, and it works for us. I think, yeah, there's a lot of challenges in South Africa that we discussed a lot earlier in this presentation. I just don't want the added complexity of trying to run factories and worrying about break-even levels and quantities and all those kind of things, in an environment when I can let the experts do that, and we can concentrate on making sure that we run this business properly. It's all the execution things that we spoke about. Pleasingly, we did onboard 40 new local suppliers this year, and 20% of our units contain sustainable materials. Just on the same score, just looking at some independent recognition on the MSCI, this is exactly what I was saying about shows you what you can do as a value retailer, you can see the score and where they placed us in the leadership category alongside Woolworths there. On the right-hand side, Sustainalytics, which measures the degree by which a company's economic value is at risk driven by ESG factors. There we're in the low category as you can see. I'm going to just move on to closing comments now. Yeah. It's been a tough H1 trading period with a lot of distraction as we've discussed. I think H2 is going to be equally as tough. There's nothing out there that's signaling that retail is about to pick up. All the indicators are in the red, we've got to do the best job that we can in that environment. I think for us, it's hopefully going to be a lot less about the ERP. The thing that we didn't really touch on at all was the floods and all that stuff that we've debated in terms of the first half performance. For me, the outlook is really around the consumer financial health and competitor dynamics in an environment that is what it is. I think it's going to be a tough six months. It's likely going to be a tough six months beyond that, too. I think we've got the added benefit of navigating through some of the internal turmoil that we've discussed. Of course, in the second half, we're going to have a material impact from the inclusion of Studio 88 in our second half performance. I think what's really key for us is that we have to get the fiscal discipline right. We're doing many things right. I suppose in a very volatile situation, maybe one or two things aren't where we would like it to be, but at the top of our agenda. That thinking is going to permeate through to the long term in everything that we do. I see I'm remaining excited. You might think, "Well, that's strange given the picture that you've just painted." I think it really talks to who we are as a business, our ability or our focus on making sure that we win and that we harden ourselves when we don't perform. At the same time, we celebrate successes, and we keep an eye on opportunities of which I just painted the picture. They are abundant. I think that's it from me. The next time that we'll talk is we're in a quarterly reporting cycle as we've been for some time, and we'll share the next quarter's trade with you on the 20th of January. Thanks very much. I'm happy to take some questions now. Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining today, and thank you for all of the questions. There are a lot of questions, and we will struggle to get through them all in the remaining time. I have grouped together just the most frequently asked ones. You are welcome to flood my inbox after this with additional questions or set up some time for some follow-up, and we can go through those. Just to start off with inventory, just to give a sense of where the expected full year inventory position is to be by end of financial year. With that is the elevated inventory level and its increased risk of markdown, if you can give a sense of stock freshness, and just general comments around the current inventory position. I think Mark did cover quite a lot of that. The goal for the year-end is to have stock levels down to, I think Mark said just high single digits, low double digits. That's certainly the internal plan and internal focus. I guess that when you not only look at our stock position, excluding goods in transit, which is still the stuff on the water, we're up 25%. Our competitors are up in the same kind of magnitude. Despite there being strategic reasons why we did that, let's also not shy away from the fact that most had quite a lousy September, and therefore, we're carrying more game to October. In a poor environment for a consumer, that's why I said the second half outlook will depend on the health of the consumer and competitive action. It's obviously going to be more promotional, and I think we have to be ready for that. We also have to make sure that we will have done things right. We have to manage through the stock that we've said, but also we've taken decisions on pricing architecture and some of those other things that Mark was talking about, maybe some of the stuff that could reduce the impact of the input inflation predominantly around mix. I suppose the good news is that relative to the distinction between the businesses that performed well during the half, the apparel divisions, their stock growth is higher than the home divisions who underperformed. The home divisions have got less stock growth, which obviously we're happy about that. I can't give an outlook into competitive action. We can only see what our plans are. Yeah, I'm not going to share those ahead of the timeframe, but we've certainly got plans to navigate as best we can. Just leading into question around GP margin. There have been comments made about the GP margin medium-term target being intact. Can you remind us what the medium-term GP margin target is? In light of the inventory position, whether that is sustainable into the short term. I prefer to talk longer term. Short term, as I said, depends on competitive action, a whole bunch of things playing out in the second half. We said that our existing businesses, that the medium-term target is 42% on GP. The newly acquired businesses, we said 38%-40%. That still remains intact. In fact, I think it's important that anything that we're talking about here in terms of performance, nothing is structural. All what we had set as targets, where our thought process were going, those structures remain intact. It just means that you have to navigate around some short-term disruption, but nothing is permanent structural change that we're seeing. Okay. There've been a number of comments just around expenses and the strong performance in the first half. Just a question around what drove the strong performance on employment cost growth, and then just your outlook in terms of the more medium term in terms of cost growth. Maybe just to Mark Stirton. Yeah, thanks for the question. As you know that we have a pay-for-performance culture, and part of our STI has a high variable component in it. Our objective in our REM packages are to pay for that performance, and our base, our guaranteed pays are below where maybe some of our peers are. That gives us the outperformance in the good times, but it also allows the business to share in the good times and the bad times with our associates. Hopefully, that answers your question, and that's often a material amount. That obviously talks about your store incentives, it's your head office incentives, and the like. Key thing is, obviously, when you're in a higher interest rate environment under IFRS 16, you also note that depreciation becomes a lower component and interest obviously rises. That's obviously one component. Not to get into the technicalities of that, but that's obviously another element. I think overall, it's in our DNA and our philosophy. I think that's what pretty much ran the number that we got to. The second half, like I explained, it's tricky. We're trying to balance the short term with the long term. We have made some investments into some structural things like Mark spoke about, which will elevate them above these levels here. In the same breath, we also got plans to reduce budgeted or forecast expenditure that we were planning. We've made our own internal calls around this. Whilst I can't give you absolute guidance, I think all you can take comfort in is that it's in our DNA, it's in our philosophy. Great, thanks. I'll wrap up two more questions in the finance section just together. The one was just a question around were there any insurance recoveries during the first half? Just a question in light of the activity with the Studio 88 acquisition on the net cash position going forward. Yeah. On the first half, no or very little to material the amount that was received. We received most of our insurance proceeds from Sasria last year, and that's relating to the riots. There's a separate part of insurance, which is the business interruption cover. We're continuing to negotiate or debate. This is obviously quite a subjective area at times, particularly when you look at a network effect on insurance and BI cover. We're hoping to seal out our negotiations with the insurers and the adjusters by the end of the year. Again, it's protracted. It has to go through multiple layers all the way into London and reinsurers. Sometimes these processes always take longer than you would anticipate. There's definitely, as you know, last year we communicated that we had received ZAR 91 million as an initial payment. We haven't booked that ZAR 91 million. It still sits on the balance sheet. If that comes through, hopefully, it'll come through in the second half. The second question was on- Studio Studio 88. Studio 88, obviously, with the working capital activities that we're performing, that'll naturally just bring money back into our cash balances. Studio 88, with the ZAR 3.6, we obviously went into short-term debt initially. We've got the facilities in place that buffered that in the short term, and by year-end, we end forecasting positive cash flows. I think the key thing for Studio 88, and it's probably a better time to talk around year-end when you had six months under our belt, is that although they're going through an investment phase, they've been on it for many years now. The store rollouts will continue. We're expecting them to be self-sufficient from a cash generation point of view, barring any other larger investment that that division would want to make. Great, thanks. There was just one more question that was quite widely asked as well, just in the finance section, is how should we think of the current provisions given the weaker consumer outlook? Is there a risk that this would need to be increased going forward? We expect it to. In our forecast, we've got a slightly higher provision that will grow at the end of the year, but it's not a lot. Based on what I can see and on the forecast that we've got in our book, we're going to be within range and within the tolerance. No, I don't feel that we. I think it's worthwhile pointing out that particularly when it comes to the debtors book, which was a lot less than competitors, our provision is only 7.9% at period end. That's the result of a very detailed calculation with a lot of assumptions, that a lot of it relates to the behavior that we've seen, and yeah, it's a really informed number. Yeah, it's part of an ECL, that expected credit loss model that is run through the accounting IFRS 9. There's not a lot you can do there. If you can, the management overlays and stuff, which we have put in there, on top of what the model is saying. That's what the audit is, and that's what we're capable of putting through. Yeah. That's what it's a forward-looking model, I think that should give you comfort. Right, thanks. Just two more questions coming out of the strategy section, one on an existing business. How will Mr Price Home continue to differentiate as competition increases in this market segment? Yeah. I think Mr Price Home, over the years, has really done an exceptional job. I think, certainly in its positioning. I think, as I was saying a little bit earlier, it's got a wide assortment. The area that I think was lacking was its store environment. In a business that generally attracts a higher LSM consumer than perhaps another Red Cap division, it's important that the store environment there really picks up. In terms of revamps, we're certainly looking at that. It's all the focus on the customer and CRM and all those kinds of things that we said. It's focusing on the brand health attributes. It's continually looking for comp growth via new products, new hand writings, shifting the weight of performing versus non-performing areas of the business. Of course, when I was talking about space growth, Mr Price Home particularly has had decent space growth, and the space growth is working very well. That's an additional lever. Great, thanks. Then just the last question relating to Studio 88. Are there any trends in South Africa with brands choosing to go directly, like we've seen internationally with Nike and Adidas? Does it impact your view on the business? Yeah. Look, I think there is that trend. It's a global phenomenon. In fact, it's even been in South Africa for some time. I think when you go back to the page that we had on Studio 88 and what that business is and what's its location strategy, this is a business that's been built on taking the brands to the people. Yes, it might be in a super-regional mall, but there aren't a lot of those, and that's typically where those international brands would go. I think the beauty is the diversified location strategy, and so far it's worked. Great. Thank you. That's all the time that we have for today. There are, as I said, a number of questions, all with different nuances. You are welcome to send those through directly to me, and I will look to get back to you just over the next couple of days. Otherwise, to set up some time for some post-results engagements as well. Thanks for joining today. Cheers. Thank you. Thanks for joining.