Hello, and welcome to Virtual Investor Conferences. My name is John Vigliotti. On behalf of OTC Markets, we're very pleased you joined us for our quarterly Small Cap Growth Conference. The first presentation of the conference is from Oceana Group. Please note you can submit questions for the presenter in the box to the left of the slides. You can also view a company's availability for one-on-one meetings through the Schedule Meetings tab found on the conference platform. At this point, I'm very pleased to welcome our first presenters, Neville Brink, the Chief Executive Officer, and Zaf Mahomed, the Chief Financial Officer of Oceana Group, which trades on the OTCQX Best Market under the symbol OCGPF and on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange under the symbol OCE. Welcome, Neville and Zaf. Welcome to everybody that's joining us early in the morning for you and late in the afternoon for us. It's 5:00 P.M. in South Africa in Cape Town. What I'm going to do, and obviously because we've got limited time and I would like to leave some time for questions, I'm going to do a whirlwind introduction to Oceana and more about who we are, what we are. We haven't presented financials, but it'll give you a picture of where we operate and the value chain that we operate in. So let me just give you an idea from a map point of view. Our head office is in Cape Town. We are one of the largest fishing companies in Africa. We operate on both the West Coast and the East Coast of Southern Africa, both in South Africa and Namibia. We operate in the Gulf of Mexico out of our factory on the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. We're across the full value chain. We have vessels that operate, we have factories, and we export to 39 geographies around the world. We have five fishing geographies, and we operate multiple vessels and factories. The species that we operate in is across the board. All the main species in Africa, in Southern Africa, pilchards, anchovy, hake, horse mackerel in the two geographies, South Africa and Namibia, squid, South Coast rock lobster. Although we are on West Coast rock lobster, we have two currents that span our country, West Coast and East Coast, and we have two species of lobster that we operate in. And then we are also. We buy sardine or pilchards from multiple countries around the world to supply our Lucky Star brand, and I'll get into that later. And then, as you see in the top, Gulf menhaden. That's a menhaden species that we fish in the Gulf of Mexico and process in our factory on the Mississippi. The way we manage our business is in three main pillars, and I'll briefly give you an overview of those three pillars. The first one is what's called Lucky Star Foods, and that is an FMCG company that operates mainly in Southern Africa, although we do export some of the product in some other African countries. And this is a canned and food product company. Its main product is canned pilchards, canned sardine, and you may know it. We produce around 10 million cartons annually, supplying the bottom end of the sector of the market with an affordable protein. The brand also has extended itself, and I'll show you just now some of the other products we're in, but that brand has been around for 70 years. Oceana itself has been around for 105 years. So we certainly have got a lot of history behind us. We then have a division called Wild Caught Seafood, and those are all the human consumption seafood products that we sell, mainly caught in Southern Africa, mainly governed by quotas. The authorities here regulate the fishing through a quota system. We get an annual quota every year in the different species. We're only allowed to catch X, and then we maximize returns by maximizing value of those quotas. That product is supplied to Africa, to Europe, to the U.S., and to the Far East, and then on the far right side, we have what we call our fish meal and oil business. This is a business that catches mainly industrial fish, the anchovy and menhaden, as I spoke about earlier. Those are non-human consumption products. The product is caught and put through a processing facility where we separate the meal, dried meal, and the fish oil, and that goes into aquaculture and the pet food market. Both of those products are protein-based, very good for the growth and health of the animal, so we supply quite the U.S. pet food market, and we supply the salmon and Chinese aquaculture markets. We have operations in both South Africa and the U.S. that sit in this pillar. Now, let me go into a little bit more detail about the three pillars, and you may not know, but Lucky Star was voted this year as the number one brand in South Africa. It's an icon brand with the black consumer and the bottom-end consumer. It outperformed many multinational brands that you would know, like KFC and McDonald's and Coca-Cola. It outperformed all the alcohol brands, so it's very, very well-liked and very trusted by the South African consumer. As I said, it's been around for 70 years and really drives consumption. It's an affordable protein that is required, obviously, to feed our nation. We also, just to give you an idea of the products, before I go to the products, just in how we operate, we have a number of canneries. We have two canneries in South Africa, one cannery in Namibia, and we subcontract canneries in Thailand and China to produce this Lucky Star product. Unfortunately, the resource in South Africa, the pilchard resource is simply not big enough for us to supply the demand that Lucky Star commands. So we source product from all over the world. That's raw, frozen pilchards that we then transport to the canneries, depending on where we're catching it. It could be any one of the four canneries that we operate in or the five canneries we operate in. So we buy from Mexico. We buy from Northwest Africa, Morocco, and Mauritania. We buy a lot in the Japanese waters in the Pacific. Depending on where we buy, we will send it to the Chinese or Thai factories, and then they then produce the Lucky Star pilchards, and we ship it down into South Africa. The Lucky Star market is mainly SADC, so South Africa and all the adjacent countries, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Zambia. And it's a massive, we command 95% of the market share, very, very strong brand. To give you some of the ideas, the visuals of what we produce, it's a tall can, as we call it, a 400-gram can. It has about 50% fish, and then it has a sauce in it and a range of sauces. You can see chili, sweet chili, tomato sauce, peri-peri, minced pilchards. And then we do some value-added products. So mackerel, we do a tuna-based product and a sardine and oil. We have also expanded into meat-based products, so mainly chicken MDM that we produce for the South African market under the Lucky Star brand, and then a range of vegetables, the chakalaka, all very synonymous with the customer in South Africa and the SADC countries. So we've got a very strong range of products underpinned by the Lucky Star brand, which is very, very strong in South Africa. Then the fish meal and oil business, and this operates in Louisiana or up the Mississippi. We have a large factory there that produces fish meal and oil, one of the largest factories operating. There are two main operators, ourselves and Omega, now owned by the Cooke family, the Canadian Cooke family. And essentially, those vessels fish in the Gulf. They get daily vessels that will fish every day, go out and purse seine menhaden, bring it back up the Mississippi to our processing plant where it's offloaded into tanks and then put into a drying process where we separate the flesh from the oil, and it's dried into a pet food or converted into oil. The fish meal predominantly goes to the U.S. pet food market. About 70% of the fish meal that we produce goes to the U.S. pet food market. We supply a range of long-standing customers. We have wells that are situated up the Mississippi, and we supply them on a regular basis because they have 12-month requirements. So this is not a spot market. This is a regular customer that customers that we deliver to. Our fish oil is very high in omega-3s, a very important component to the salmon farmers, the aquaculture salmon farmers. They require fish oil with high omega-3s for the health and diet of the animal, the fish, and we supply fish oil to many of the Scandinavian feed manufacturers who on-sell the finished feed to the salmon farmers, and with the growth of salmon farming worldwide, in particular out of Norway and Scandinavia, the demand for fish oil has grown exponentially over the last couple of years, and as you would know, aquaculture, two years ago, aquaculture outperformed the wild capture fish. It was the first year ever in 2022 where there's a greater production of aquaculture species than there are of wild caught species, so we're seeing continued demand for fish, meal, and oil as the aquaculture industry grows around the world to obviously maintain food security around the world. This just gives a map of where we operate. As you can see, we are in the Gulf with our factory and in South Africa. The South African business supplies the salmon farms as well, but a large portion of its fish meal, because it's higher in protein than menhaden, goes to the Chinese aquaculture industries, eel, shrimp, that type of farming where the meal is an important component in the feed of those animals. This is a visual of the menhaden factory. The name of the business is Daybrook. That is on the Mississippi. You can see the Mississippi in the top end of the picture. It's a large factory. We operate 12 vessels, and those 12 vessels carry two purse seiners that they carry on the stern of the vessel. It goes out into the Gulf. It drops the two purse seiners in the Gulf. They go and purse the menhaden. The carrier vessel will come alongside, put a pump into the net and pumps that product into the hold of the carrier vessel. It then picks up the purse seiners, and it steams back to the factory, and we operate both east and west of the mouth of the Mississippi, and the way that the fishery is managed is on a time-based, so it's an effort-based fishery. We are allowed to start fishing from the middle of April to the end of October, and then the fish go into spawning, and the season is closed, so in that period of seven months, seven and a half months, we obviously maximize catch. The resource, the menhaden resource is well managed by the fisheries department in the U.S. We are well managed in the sense that the biomass is very, very healthy. There was a biomass study that was conducted in late 2023 into 2024 and has concluded that the biomass is in its healthiest state as it's been for a long time. We take a fairly small proportion of the biomass every year, between 2% and 5%, so the biomass is well managed, and the key for us is how much we can catch in that seven-month period. Unfortunately, as you will all know, in the U.S., the Gulf of Mexico is in a hurricane alley, and we are unfortunately often subject to hurricanes. Hurricane Katrina, prior to us owning this business, hit the factory in Empire directly, and the factory was rebuilt in a way that it can withstand hurricanes, so certainly, it's got structures that can withstand high winds. Fortunately, since we've owned it, we haven't had a direct strike. Obviously, when a hurricane comes through that Gulf, it disrupts the fishing. We tend to have to stop fishing, even if it goes up to Florida or west of us, because the whole Gulf of Mexico becomes unfishable because of the size of the swell and the conditions. That's a factor of how we operate there. Lastly, the pillar as we call Wild Caught Seafood. The species there that we fish, and it's a full value chain. We have vessels, factories, and a full sales and distribution network. We have Southern African hake, which is sought after, one of the top-end hake products in the world, very sought after in Western Europe. Our main customers there are Spain, Italy, Portugal, and France, very big in demand for hake. We also do a product called horse Mackerel. It is a type of mackerel caught in bulk form in big midwater trawlers. Customer base is Africa. It's a low-cost protein. It's frozen in whole form, head-on, guts in, tail-on, frozen in blocks of 10 kilos, and then exported into mainly West Africa from Cameroon down through Nigeria, DRC, Southern Africa as well, and Mozambique. Very, very strong because of the need and the price point for a low-value, high-volume protein. We do two species of lobster, one on the West Coast, one on the East Coast. 90% of our lobster goes into the Far East, the Chinese and Japanese markets in live form. A portion of it does go to the U.S., the U.S. tail market. Our deep-water lobster on the East Coast is sold in white-table restaurants in the U.S., Vegas, New York, where we supply the, and it's frozen at sea. So it's caught at about 300 meters, brought up onto the vessel and tailed and frozen immediately. So we maintain the freshness level. And then the last species that we do in bulk is squid. It is a hand jig squid, so very, very quickly frozen. It's not damaged by the net at all, so it's not purse-seined or trawled. So it comes up in a pristine form. Yes. This just gives a visual of how we, so it's all caught in Southern Africa, and it gives an idea of the markets that I spoke to. We do Europe, Africa, U.S., and the Far East. And just to end off in terms of Oceana's investment case, as I said, we're a 105-year-old business started in Southern Africa and has grown after it. We've been listed for over 75 years. Very diversified. Part of the strength of Oceana is we're not dominated by one particular species or one particular country or one particular currency. So we've got a range of species and diversification, which part of the nature of fishing businesses, we often have uncontrollables like regulations, like catch rates. So this diversification of our different businesses allows us to weather the storm when we have, sorry, weather the storm when we do have disruptions in one or other of our businesses. We have a very strong operating platform, obviously been around for 105 years. So we understand the business across right from fishing, processing, and sales and marketing distribution. Our brand strength, both Oceana is recognized strongly, in particular, Western Europe and Southern Africa. But the Lucky Star brand, as I said, is the number one brand in the country voted this year. So very, very strong brand. We do play in the affordable quality segment. So most of our products are in the mid-range, mid to bottom range where affordability and quality are key components, with the exception of West Coast and South Coast lobster, where we play right at the top end of the market. Our balance sheet has certainly been well managed. We certainly have scope for additional acquisitions, and we are currently looking. And then obviously, sustainability is a key component of our business. We are in fishing. We've been around for that for a long time, and we need to make sure that we are catching the various species around the world in a sustainable manner because we want to be around for the next 105 years. So that is a very short overview. I've taken 20 minutes, so it gives us 10 minutes for questions. Myself and Zafar Mahomed are available and happy to answer any questions as we go along. Okay. Well, Well, I'm going to read out a few of the questions that have come through. So the first one is, can you speak to the competitive environment and your growth drivers for the next several years? We compete, and it's different for the three pillars. Obviously, Lucky Star is very much a Southern Africa product. We don't really compete worldwide with that, SADC countries. The growth driver under the Lucky Star is to expand that brand. As I said, it's been voted the number one brand, and it has huge opportunity to actually expand that brand outside of pure canned fish. We've recently gone into canned chicken livers. Last two years ago, we went into canned meat, and we've expanded into canned vegetables. The consumer trusts this brand, and it gives us opportunities to expand outside of pure protein. There are a number of opportunities in Lucky Star to expand outside of canned product into other foods. On the fish meal and oil, there's two. As I've spoken about, we operate in the U.S. and in the SA. Both of those opportunities for us are volume opportunities. In the U.S., we are not restricted in terms of how much we can catch. We're restricted in how much effort we can put in. And that's where we are pushing a lot of CapEx into increasing the ability for our factory to receive and process products. So last year, we caught just over 520 million fish. The factory has a capacity of a billion fish. So there's a lot of capacity that we could utilize to increase the volume of the product. We certainly believe in this industry because we believe aquaculture will continue to grow. It is growing exponentially all around the world. And one key component of aquaculture, it needs a diet, a fish diet, fish oil and meal diet to continue to expand. And that's the area we play in. On SA, same opportunity in volume. We don't catch 100% of our quota that we allocated to government. And the issue is really our factory capacity. This year, we've invested over ZAR 300 million in our factories to do exactly what we did in the U.S., to expand the ability for those factories to receive and process fish. So there's massive opportunity in our fish meal and fish oil business. Wild Caught is a little bit different in the sense that we are restricted by quota. The opportunity for us there is to expand by buying and investing in family-owned businesses that have small quotas that need scale to ramp up their business. A lot of the rights holders in Namibia and South Africa don't have a balance sheet to actually ramp up their business. We either are going to partnerships with them or in the last couple of years have acquired those rights to expand our business. Second question, Zaf, for you. What is your dividend policy, and do you have an active buyback? We have a dividend practice, and part of that dividend practice is to match our earnings per share growth. We are a cyclical business given our exposure to fish meal and fish oil, which is a commodity product. What we try and do is match our earnings per share growth with our dividends per share growth. Typically, we'd have a dividend cover. The latest dividend cover that we have, in other words, dividends covered by earnings was 1.85 times, and we tried to stay within that range. What we do is we've got a 13.5% growth in our earnings per share, and our dividends per share was 13.8% growth. Then with respect to an active buyback, no, we do not have an active buyback. We've got two anchor shareholders that have 45% of our shares. We do trade at a slight discount on net asset value, but we don't have an active buyback policy in place. Thanks, Zaf. Neville, question, how do you manage for long-term sustainability of the business? So again, this is depending on the pillars. Let me start then on the wild caught side. We operate in only those species that are sustainably managed by the regulators. Many of our species, both menhaden and hake, MSC approved. We have outside accreditation bodies that manage our resources together with government. South African government has a very active and well-managed scientific body that manages all fisheries in South Africa, with the exception of some of the inshore species where we do have a level of poaching. But all the big commercial species are managed extremely well, and the resources and the allocations of the quotas are based on the fact that they have the ability to continue to grow. We don't see that as a problem in terms of maintaining the level of sustainability in our wild caught side. On the fish meal and oil, both Menhaden is MSC approved, managed by the State Fisheries Department. Certainly, we're catching a very low level of the biomass, so not concerned about there. On the Lucky Star side, I mean, that business has been around for 70 years. The demand for sustainable and affordable protein continues to grow. Unfortunately, in our country, we have an unemployment rate of almost 30% or just over 30%. Food security and sustainable protein is in high demand. That's the area we play in, both in canned meat, canned chicken livers, and canned pilchards. It is a sustainable, affordable protein, and we see continuous growth in demand for all three of those products. Another question for yourself. What are the distribution channels for the Lucky Star brand in North America? We don't export to North America. It's not a product that is well known in North America, and we've never considered exporting to North America. It tends to be a more African product. The eating habits of Africa tend to be more in the spicy canned fish mode, and our products that we export or consider exporting to the U.S. are wild caught seafood. We do some hake. We do lobster. That's where the traditional U.S. consumer knows our product, so it's not a market that we would consider. There's a lot more opportunity in Africa. Neville, another question for you. Are there any plans to expand your business in Asia? We have considered. There's certainly some opportunities in the aquaculture space. We have considered doing some aquaculture in South Africa. The biggest problem with us is we've got high labor costs, and we can't compete in Asia. So the opportunities in Asia would be in aquaculture. We've looked at a number of businesses. Nothing right on the radar at the moment. There's more opportunities at the moment in expanding our Lucky Star product into Africa. I think just the point in Asia that we've got three factories in Asia, so. Yes, I suppose from that point of view. [crosstalk] From a processing point, although we are not invested in the factories, but there are long-term partners that process for us and have so for many, many years. There are no further questions at this point. If there are no further questions, I'd just like to thank those who have joined us, and I wish you a good day. It's the end of our day, so we will be heading home, and you can start your day at work. So thank you, everybody, for joining us.