Good morning, everyone, and welcome to SPAR's results presentation for the end of 30 September 2023. My name is Mike Bosman, and I'm back to being the Independent Non-Executive Chairman of SPAR, and I'll be providing a brief overview this morning before handing over to my colleagues. I was previously the Executive Chairman of the group from the 1st of February 2023 until the 30th of September, when Angelo Swartz, our new Group CEO, took over from me. In a few minutes, Angelo will provide a brief operational review. Mark Godfrey, the Group CFO of SPAR, will then be presenting the financial results, and thereafter, Angelo will take you through some of our new strategic thinking. We'll finish off today's webcast by answering any questions that you might have. We'll kick off with a little snapshot of the group. We operate in 11 countries: in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Eswatini, Lesotho, Ireland, England, Switzerland, Poland, and Sri Lanka. Our operation in Sri Lanka is a joint venture arrangement where, as you know, we have 26 stores across various formats. The group delivered almost ZAR 150 billion in turnover this year, with ZAR 1.8 billion in operating profit. We have over 4,500 stores and more than 10,500 employees in our 11 countries. As you would have seen in the SENS announcement, we are reporting ZAR 1.8 billion of operating profit for the year, and we've had almost ZAR 1.4 billion of mostly non-recurring costs during the year. These costs relate to only three issues: SAP, Poland, and Ireland impairments. Adjusting for the effects of just these three matters, the operating profit for this year would have been ZAR 3.2 billion compared to last year's profit of ZAR 3.4 billion. This would suggest that the underlying core business is in pretty good shape. Angelo and Mark will go into all of this in detail a little bit later. Cash generated this year was at ZAR 6.2 billion compared to ZAR 5 billion last year. This slide sets out each country's contribution to our group's turnover: 2023 on the left and 2022 on the right. In FY 2023, SPAR in Southern Africa contributed 62% of the group's turnover, an amount of ZAR 92.6 billion. Ireland continues to perform exceptionally well and contributes 25.5% of the group's turnover, an amount of ZAR 38.1 billion. Switzerland generates 10.5% of our turnover and an amount of ZAR 15.7 billion. So in total, our international operations contributed 38% towards our total turnover when combined. We've had a very busy year. Besides all of the very hard work that's gone into our core business, we've had many issues to deal with. At the end of last year, the group was facing some very serious allegations in the press, and these issues include allegations of poor corporate governance, racism, unresolved disputes with black retailers, and a serious dispute with one of our largest independent retailers, the Giannacopoulos family. We've attended to these matters as quickly and as efficiently as was possible. I've mentioned before that an extensive investigation by the law firm Harris Nupen Molebatsi found that there was absolutely no basis for any of the claims of racist behavior by SPAR. All 10 of the disputes with the black retailers were amicably resolved, as were a further five with other retailers. During the year, the composition of the board changed significantly, and I'll discuss this in more detail in a moment. We have successfully appointed a new Group CEO as well as a new Group Chief Operating Officer for SPAR. The board of SPAR has made a decision, as you know, to sell its interest in Poland, and we moved quite quickly into this process, as you'll hear about later. The SAP implementation process has unfortunately been a disaster. Having said that, we've now got to the point where the system is stable and functioning well. We've completed several deep-dive reviews of what went wrong, and we'll take the learnings from that. We also have new IT leadership in place in the group, and we've assigned a leading external assurance partner to provide assistance to us with the necessary independent guidance going forward. We're working well with all of our banks, and we have their support. We're also in the process of putting into play a plan that will reduce group long-term debt and design an optimal capital structure for the group. This is the makeup of our board currently. Six directors have retired or resigned this year. The company appointed four new independent non-executive directors: Shirley Zinn, Pedro da Silva, Trudi Makhaya, and me. Shirley Zinn was appointed deputy chairman of the board in June. We now have three executive directors, shown in red, and six independent non-executive directors. Shirley is the deputy chair of the board and chair of the remuneration committee. She has a doctorate in education from Harvard and is highly experienced in the HR, people leadership, and culture part of the business. She was previously appointed an independent non-executive director of our group in February 2023. Pedro da Silva was also appointed in February this year as an independent non-executive director. He's a highly respected national and international retailer, and he headed up, as we've mentioned before, the Biedronka in Poland for 18 years. So he's been incredibly helpful in our Polish discussions. Lwazi Koyana is a chartered accountant and served as the SPAR director for several years. He chairs our risk committee, and he serves as our interim audit committee chairman. Trudi Makhaya was appointed to the board with effect from the 1st of September this year. She was the former senior economic advisor to the president of South Africa, and she has three master's degrees, one from Wits and two from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. She is the chairman of our social, ethics, and sustainability committee. Finally, Sundeep Naran is a qualified CFO and a retired banker. He's also been on the board for a few years and was formerly with RMB in Johannesburg. And finally, Shana Ashokumar is our company secretary and was appointed during the year. In terms of executive directors, I'd like to welcome Angelo Swartz, the new Group CEO, to his first results presentation. He took over, as I mentioned, from me on the 1st of October, and many of you will be meeting him and talking to him for the first time today. While I was the executive chairman and Angelo was heading up the KZN Distribution Centre, I had the privilege of working with him very closely on a number of projects. And I'm very excited about the future of SPAR and his leadership as Group CEO. We've both worked very hard over the past couple of months to ensure that we have what has so far been a seamless transition to him. As I mentioned, we've also appointed a new Group Chief Operating Officer, Megan Pydigadu, who was appointed on the 1st of November. She's a highly experienced executive and listed company director, and we extend a very warm welcome to her as well. The third member of our group Exco team is Mark Godfrey, our long-serving CFO. Our other top executives are Max Oliva, our CEO for SPAR Southern Africa, who took up his role in August 2022. Leo Crawford, the CEO of the BWG Group in Ireland and Southwest England, who's been part of the management team driving this wonderful success of that business for many, many years. Rob Philipson is the CEO for Switzerland, who has driven so much of our international business, and he's also responsible for Poland and Sri Lanka. Kevin O'Brien was previously SPAR's company secretary and now heads up our Group ESG. He's fully dedicated towards guiding SPAR on this journey, and hopefully that will drive the long-term sustainability of the group. Finally, I'll be a little absent from the picture here showing some of the retailer stores, and I'll now hand over to Angelo Swartz, our new Group CEO, for an operational update for the period. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Mike, for that warm welcome and introduction. It's a great pleasure to be presenting to you today. I took up my new position as CEO of the group on the 1st of October 2023. Before Mark presents the results, I will provide a brief operational update on each of our markets. After Mark's presentation, I would like to share the key priorities for us in a short to medium term. Looking at our core grocery and liquor business in SPAR Southern Africa, we've opened 82 new stores during a period across the SPAR and TOPS formats. That's a total of at least 2,200 new jobs created by our retailers in the communities they serve. A total of 217 stores were upgraded. Considering the economic environment currently, it's very encouraging to see retailers firmly committed to offering enhanced shopping experiences to their communities, and shows the faith they have in the SPAR brand. We have made significant progress in respect of our on-demand shopping presence in stores, with SPAR2U now available at over 350 sites in total. We had 87 sites at the end of September 2022, and impressive progress has been made. Our SPAR private label business reported excellent growth of 11% for the year, increasing to ZAR 18 billion in sales and representing 25.3% of core grocery turnover. That's up from 24.6% contribution in the prior year. The tables provide a comparison between our reported wholesale growth versus what our retailers reported. Wholesale growth in the current period has made a recovery against the prior period with strong retail growth and like-for-like sales. Grocery retail growth ahead of wholesale growth speaks to the issues we've been having with SAP. If you add back the SAP impact, retailer loyalty is flat on the prior year. As a reminder, SPAR launched SAP in KZN during the months of February and March 2023. This has been a very difficult time for us and the retailers in KZN in particular. However, the system is stable, and all retailers in KZN are being serviced by the KZN Distribution Centre again. Retailer loyalty levels have come back nicely, which speaks to the resilience of the SPAR model. The liquor table reminds us of the extraordinary effect in the prior year with the return of liquor sales post the COVID-19 liquor restrictions growing at +40% in the prior year. Our liquor performance in the current year is to some extent a normalization of the sustained period of market-leading growth. Operationally, our Southern African team has made a lot of progress in respect of the six key focus areas as set out in the next two slides and shared with the market last year. Under new marketing leadership, SPAR's marketing plan, which has been completely overhauled, and this will position the business well for 2024. A new PR manager and PR agency has been appointed, working closely with the marketing team to assist in creating a unified and consistent brand voice. All our campaigns reflect the new positioning, as well as a hard push towards single-minded, consistent execution across the divisions. One brand, one voice. We've just launched our new festive season campaign called SPAR's MORE for Sho campaign, with affordability at its core, helping shoppers afford a better festive season than they might have anticipated. Here's a little teaser and one of the associated adverts we'd like to share with you. Look at him glow. It's amazing what savings can do. So much savings. Don't worry. We'll get the savings. So much potential for more pocket money. You're about to pretend my January's lean. Better to sing the black. But we do you cross a month in. What time for who? For what? Savings. But do we have any money? Yeah? Don't worry. You'll grow into it. Okay. More plastic here means more plastic swiped at the shop. I know, right? But we do. You cross a month in. Month end for who? For what? When I can get my favorite and yours anytime, nanini na. But do we have nanini na money? Better to sing the black. They have deals every day, and that's why we shop at SPAR. In line with the three pillars of our sponsorship strategy: nutrition, education, and women's empowerment, the hard decision was taken to give notice to sponsorship beneficiaries not aligned with these areas, and a new sponsorship strategy has been launched. We're exceptionally proud of the SPAR Proteas, our national netball team. The World Cup hosted by South Africa, with SPAR as a lead sponsor, was a great success. These women are incredible ambassadors for our brand and our country. They are also role models for millions of young women across our country. Moving to the second area of focus, an extensive customer and format segmentation analysis project has been completed, helping to identify key gaps and opportunities in the market at a customer and retail level. During 2023, we crafted a retail segmentation strategy that will start rolling out in 2024, and we are confident that the work done in this area will resonate with consumers. In respect of fresh, we completed the rebranding of our private label fruit and vegetable, bakery, butchery, and home replacement ranges. The rebranding of much of our product and packaging has been well received by retailers and consumers. Improved quality and shelf life of product has also resulted in the reduction of food waste, which is beneficial to retail margins, but more importantly, is a key focus for the group as a responsible corporate citizen. In respect of omnichannel, SPAR2U, SPAR's on-demand shopping platform has reached scale. This is rapid progress considering the independent nature of our operating model. During the year, we also relaunched SPAR Rewards, which has been very well received by customers. We saw the benefit of this just last week with the record Black Friday promotional weekend, which was largely executed by our rewards platform. Lastly, in respect of omnichannel, we are building a customer insights hub. This has previously been outsourced, but we are reshaping this business unit by in-housing critical data science capabilities and will integrate this team with our merchandising and retail operations teams. We launched a SPAR CX program to deliver a consistent customer experience in our stores. The Guild completed the alignment and improvement of the SPAR Guild's development fund. This is critical to supporting reinvestment in our stores to drive retail organic growth. In most regions, we have now doubled the value of capital funding available to retailers through this fund, specifically for existing store development, keeping our stores relevant for consumers. We have completed the first phase of a center-led alignment for our retail operations departments across all distribution centers. During this period, the ComCom also approved the acquisition of the remaining stake in Encore effective 1st of April 2023. This exciting deal streamlines the structure of our private label business, and the teams have now been fully integrated at one Encore office. The development of new private label tiering strategy was completed and launched. This has been aligned to our customer segmentation work. Innovation and speed to market is an essential competitive advantage, and we reduced the average research and development time for new products from 12 months to six months. Concept to shelf, I'm sure you'll agree that's an impressive feat. In terms of our new private label tier approach, this slide showcases how the tiers compete. Our trusted quality, best price range leverages our underutilized discount brand, SaveMor. Our middle-tier product is in line with a familiar SPAR private label strategy, As Good As The Best For Less. This will remain our core offering. Our premium range is our SPAR Signature Selection and is completely new to SPAR shelves. Moving on to Build It, during my 16 years at SPAR, I spent some time in the Build It business as divisional Build It executive in the Eastern Cape. This is a great business. We have 400 stores across the country, and the new leadership, together with the rebranding and store furnishings in recent years, has raised the profile of our Build It business. With retail sales growing ahead of wholesale, our building materials loyalty has declined. This reflects how challenging the building materials sector has found the current macroeconomic climate. With disposable income strained, consumer spending has shifted towards covering the basic costs of living. This shift has negatively impacted discretionary consumer spend in various sectors, and the hardware and building materials sector has been particularly hard hit. The building industry has been impacted by load shedding, especially the manufacturing sector, given the reduced consumer demand and inflationary pressures caused by load shedding. Customers have been forced to compromise, often compromising on quality as a means to an end. Despite Build It having had a challenging year, it remains the number one building materials retailer in Southern Africa and has showed market-leading growth. The quality of Build It's building materials offered through its supply chain has ensured its dominance in the sector and will remain a key differentiator. A year has passed since the decision was made to consolidate our pharmacy at SPAR business under the leadership of Jeremy Nicol. This decision has refocused the direction of this business, which has delivered a strong trading performance. The new structure is working well, consisting of a wholesaler to pharmacies, a courier pharmacy for highly specialized medicines, and a trading academy. For our wholesale business, the team has made the tough but necessary decision to withdraw the membership of some pharmacies where loyalty levels were low, reducing the store network to 125 stores. The team also refreshed front-end retail operation support by broadening and deepening the pharmacy advisory services and other services offered to our pharmacies. Scriptwise Specialized Pharmacy is a leader in renal dialysis and ophthalmology, dispensing the delivery of over 50% of the highly specialized medicines in these specialty areas. Lastly, we're very pleased with the progress our academy is making in respect of development on necessary specialist skills in South Africa. We're especially proud of our pharmacist assistance program. The S Buys Trading Academy is the largest trainer of pharmacy support personnel across South Africa, training over 50% of all pharmacist assistant learners across the country. BWG Group has once again delivered a very strong result despite various challenges across both markets. The group has a very strong presence in the Irish convenience food retail space with its EUROSPAR, SPAR, Mace, XL brands. All these brands delivered positive growth during the period. While facing difficult trading conditions with increased regulation, staff shortages, rising input costs, and very strong competition, a recovery in the hospitality sector from March last year continued to boost our food service performance during this period. The Irish team have implemented their new strategy for the EUROSPAR format during the period, competing in the supermarket sector. The focus of the new strategy is to drive average shopper value by increasing fresh departmental participation and improving value in the grocery categories. Better use of data and digital, as well as investment in the shopper experience and growing the store estate, are also part of our strategic ambitions. EUROSPAR competes in the supermarket sector, which is highly competitive and dominated by a few large players. However, our team believes its new strategy is realistic and focused on enabling EUROSPAR retailers to trade profitably. Appleby Westward in Southwest England, where we have 338 stores, delivered another solid performance. The Swiss market has continued to experience volume declines as it contended with the dynamics of a post-pandemic marketplace, with consumers looking for better pricing either cross-border or locally with discounters. The TopCC cash and carry business has been impacted by a contraction in the gastronomy sector, coupled with consumers eating out less. During the year, we launched four Go24 concept stores. These stores are completely unmanned and open to consumers 24 hours a day. The software used to enable this concept has performed exceptionally well, and management are confident that in time we can utilize this platform to extend shopping hours in selected area forecourts and neighborhood SPAR stores. It's early days. However, this does present a great opportunity within this market, especially in respect of access to Sunday trading hours when many stores are closed in Switzerland. We're also trialing our SPAR2U on-demand shopping app, thereby extending our customer reach through an improved omnichannel offering in this country. Management are acutely aware of the need to get back to positive leverage, and are focused on strategic enablers to drive growth in this market, including a revised fresh strategy to drive increased footfall to its neighborhood stores. As mentioned before, we are looking to sell our interest in this market, and I will talk to this later in the presentation. SPAR Poland has 208 stores, one central office and two distribution centers, and a food production facility with good food service potential. During the year, we added 28 new stores. The distribution centers are based in the north and the south of the country. We've laid the foundations for solid distribution facilities to support these stores. Retailer loyalty continued to improve during the period, which is encouraging for any interested buyers. Sri Lanka has a population of more than 22 million, mostly young people, and a predominantly informal retail environment. We believe it offers huge potential and is perfectly suited to the SPAR model. We have a joint venture arrangement with a local company called Ceylon Biscuits Limited. CBL is a leading local biscuit and food manufacturer and exporter in Sri Lanka and understands the local market well. Despite political and economic uncertainty in recent years, the business environment remains stable currently. We're slowly growing the number of stores there with 26 stores across a few formats at year end. The team are considering the best plan for expansion and exploring opportunities with existing retailers interested in partnering with SPAR. I'll now hand over to Mark for the financial review. Thank you, Angelo. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. After Mike and Angelo's presentations to you, it's left up to me to convert that into numbers. I'm sure most of you have seen the numbers that have been released. Let's start with the salient features. The SPAR Group reported turnover of ZAR 149.3 billion, an increase of 10.1%. Interestingly enough, a stronger second half from a turnover perspective. At H1, we were up some 7.9%. It's also reflective of the fact that our European businesses generally have a strong, what would be our second half, that would be their high seasons, and we definitely saw that coming through. Gross margins at ZAR 17.9 billion, 12.02%. In fact, if you go to the second decimal for both financial years, we were exactly the same. Despite a tumultuous year of lots of moving parts, I think our marketing teams have done an exceptional job. The big-ticket item on the income statement, net operating expenses growing by 22% to some ZAR 19.4 million. We will unpack it in detail. There's significant inflation pressure coming through there, but also a number of strategic adjustments, or rather strategic investments. And then from an adjustments point of view, we did recognize some fairly material impairments, and I will unpack those in a bit more detail as well. Operating profit declined some 47% to ZAR 1.8 billion, and it's a margin of a number that I guess we will not refer to again of 1.2% because the business is clearly more focused on driving that number back towards the 2.6%-2.7% range. Profit after tax ZAR 442 million. If we adjust the headline earnings, recognizing the impairments, that number increases to ZAR 606.6. And again, you can see that 47.7% decline, more closely aligning with the operating profit. The most significant number for a lot of you, I'm sure, is the fact that the board's decision not to declare a dividend for the financial year significantly because of the immediate operating short-term cash flow requirements. There is still a great deal of uncertainty, particularly in our South African business around the SAP implementation. But just from a prudence point of view, it was felt most appropriate at this stage to take that approach. The board are still extremely committed to returning capital and dividends to shareholders, and as soon as those profits start reversing, as we've already guided, we expect them to do, we will return to a dividend policy. The next slide I'd like to share with you, and I do this with some caution because we're not intending to reconcile the issues away, but I think both Mike and Angelo have made reference to the extraordinary adjustments that the business has suffered during the course of the year, and I think it's only pertinent that we display them for you so that you get a sense of the numbers and really what we are meaning, so on the left-hand side, the results as we've reported. I've introduced a column which I've headed abnormal items, and I prefer not to get into a technical accounting debate as to extraordinary or abnormal. Let's, for purposes of the exercise, just consider them as abnormal, and at a turnover level, we have estimated a notional loss of turnover as a result of the KZN SAP implementation to the group of ZAR 1.6 billion. That is a net number because the KZN Distribution Centre, in fact, suffered an estimated ZAR 2.7 billion worth of losses, but fortunately, the operational interactions between our distribution centers allow us very quickly to call on the neighboring DCs to assist, and we definitely need to recognize the incredible support that was provided by both the South Rand, the Eastern Cape, and the North Rand distribution centers to our retailers in KZN as we needed their support, so there was a gain to those distribution centers of approximately ZAR 1.1 billion, but leaving us with this net estimated loss of ZAR 1.6 billion. The gross margin loss, and again, there's somewhat a notional exercise being done here. It's not just the margin times by the standard gross profit because obviously there were other forms of income. There were other rebates lost, and we estimated that number at some ZAR 553 million, a significant number. And as you can see, it would have effectively notionally driven the gross profit to quite a high level for the group. But I think the most significant impact sits in our net operating expenses, where there were some fairly significant one-offs, and we speak specifically around impairments both in Poland and in Ireland, and those were some ZAR 640 million. And then we also took a write-off of some ZAR 94 million relating to the work that had already been done in our ERP platform design specifically for the foreign businesses. So we are not impairing or writing down the SAP investment. We have only identified those elements or those costs that had been incurred for the system that would have been deployed to both Ireland and Poland because the board has agreed that those business units be allowed to implement what we are describing as best of breed systems. So as a consequence, that investment cost is no longer relevant. We've expensed ZAR 94.1 million. So if we adjust again those significant one-off operating costs of ZAR 825 million, the increase in operating expenses, and as I said at the outset, not attempting to reconcile away the impacts to the business, but operating expenses would have then grown by just under 17%, an improvement of nearly 6% on where we did report. I think, as has been referenced by both Mike and Angelo previously, the impact on operating profit is quite substantial. Some ZAR 1.3 billion worth of extraordinary reduction. We would have seen operating profits more in the region of ZAR 3.2 billion. Yes, it would have still been a decline on the previous year, and we would have focused on issues, as we will do, around inflationary costs and some of the significant costs the business has incurred. But I think it would have been a far more reflective number of the underlying health of the business and how strong some of our regions actually did perform. As I said, I'm going to leave that slide with you just for illustration purposes. It is not the intention to reconcile away the performance of the business. There might be questions around the decision of the board to dispose of the interest in Poland and why we haven't reflected Poland as a discontinued or an asset held for sale. This is very much a technical decision. As you well know, the board announced on the 28th of September that the decision to dispose of or to commence a process to dispose of our interest in Poland was going to be undertaken. In terms of technical accounting standards, and this is specifically the IFRS 5 standard, there are two hurdles that we needed to get through. The first one fundamentally was, had we started the process by the end of the financial year? And the second one was, how probable was a sale or effectively could we with certainty be able to make a statement that that sale would be completed within one year? Neither of those two points had been concluded or satisfied by the 30th of September. So hence, we will continue in this year to report Poland as a consolidated business. We are not then valuing it in terms of the standard on a disposal value or a value less disposal costs, but what we have done is review very carefully the carrying value, and despite the fact that our Polish colleagues seem to believe that this largely resulted in the impairment, there were impairments then taken around the goodwill and the intangibles. We have commenced a process. We have appointed professional advisors. We have had significant positive interest, but we will cover that, I'm sure, under further conversation during the presentation. On the right-hand side, I've included in the presentation, and I guess you could call it a buyer's teaser, just to give any interested parties a sense of what that business really does look like at a balance sheet perspective. We've got non-current assets in Poland of some PLN 1.3 billion that does include capitalized leases and lease receivables. We've got current assets of just under ZAR 700 million. These figures are in ZAR, and effectively, we've got assets in Poland of just over ZAR 2 billion. So it's not an insignificant business. We do recognize that there are fairly significant liabilities, excluding debt of some ZAR 1.4 billion, and then debt and overdrafts of ZAR 2 billion, and included in the debt, as has been well covered in the past, the parent has provided guarantees to that debt, so part of the process will be restructuring the group's balance sheet to the extent that there's any shortfall on the disposal to cover the debts and the overdrafts. I guess at this point, I would like to say, if there are any interested parties on the call, you can contact our Chief Operating Officer. Her email address will appear at the end of the presentation. So Megan, we'll tee you up for that. Right. If I move forward, and really, I'm not going to unpack this in a great lot of detail, but just to share with you the business from a regional perspective. And this is the income statement on the right-hand side that we've spoken to, the ZAR 149 billion profit after tax of ZAR 442. And then basically just running from right to left, if we start with the Southern African business, ZAR 92.6 billion worth of turnover, some 62% of the business. That number has shrunk a little bit. A year ago, we were 65%, and clearly, the KZN impact coming through there. The South African business gross profit did decline by 50 basis points. And again, the KZN impact coming through, but also recognizing the performance stress on the business, operating expenses, and really the SAP and impairment issue sits across all of the operating expenses. And I haven't attempted to strip them out. These are the numbers as the business performed. But you can see the South African business's profit after tax of ZAR 628.4. And those of you that are immediately looking to the right, yes, you are correct. The Irish business, at a reported perspective, reported more profit than South Africa did. So I've got no doubt that Leo Crawford and the Irish team, who will be following this presentation at this point in time, are celebrating. I just want to remind them that the Webb Ellis Trophy is in South Africa. The Irish turnover has been fantastic, EUR 38 billion, strong gross margin at 15.1%, very strong performance coming through from both retail and across all of their sectors. The Swiss business, CHF 15.7 billion, a disappointing performance. I think there was a far higher expectation that the Swiss business would hold on to a lot more of the COVID growth that they enjoyed. But that said, we also need to recognize that Europe is going through a macroeconomic crisis at the moment with inflation levels that a lot of Europeans have not seen before, and interest and inflation levels in Switzerland, in particular, are exceptionally high. Now, when I say to you that inflation in Switzerland is 3%, that might sound like I've left off a digit or two, but the reality is that the Swiss are not used to inflation of anything above zero. There is a great deal of focus in Switzerland on shopping for price. And as a consequence, it is becoming an incredibly competitive market, but still a performance that we know the Swiss team were disappointed with. The Polish business, ZAR 2.9 billion worth of revenue. Yes, it was loss-making. The loss is exaggerated by the impairments taken. Those were quite significant in the period. In fact, if you strip out the impairments, the business was largely flat at an operating loss level. Let's move on to turnover. And again, a very busy slide. I'm not going to attempt to talk you through all of the detail, perhaps just to focus on some of the more pertinent points. The SPAR South African business at a core grocery level, growing by some 7.1%. And I appreciate that it's always dangerous to start talking to notional adjustments. But if we were to recognize the impact that the KZN business suffered during the year, the South African core grocery business would have actually increased 9.1%, almost in line with inflation, suggesting that there would have been zero volume growth, which I guess a lot of retailers and wholesalers in South Africa can't claim credit to. Unfortunately, the TOPS business declined by 0.1%. And as we spoke to at interim, there is an extraordinary base effect. In the previous year, we saw liquor growing by some 40-odd% as we came out of the COVID pandemic. But again, if we recognize the KZN disruption, that number, and by simply excluding KZN without trying to do any adjustments, if we just look at the balance of the South African business, our liquor business grew by + 4%. There clearly is a lot of pressure in the liquor trade at the moment. There's a lot of competitive activity taking place. It is not a number that we are comfortable with, but it is a number that is a lot more understandable against the backdrop of our markets. If we combined the two, which gives you at least a sense of liquor and groceries combined, +6%. And again, in the box at the bottom, if we were to notionally recognize the disruption to the business, that would have been in excess of 8%. Build It, a disappointing year in black and white, but in truth, a strong performance against a sector that is incredibly impacted at the moment by consumer spending pressure and also load shedding, which is affecting the entire building sector. The South African business growing by 4.9%. We need to call out to our pharmaceutical subsidiary S Buys, an incredibly strong number at 19%, great growth in wholesale and their specialized business, Scriptwise, really strong, taking the Southern African business to 5.1%. The Irish, in ZAR terms, just under 22%, and Leo, I take back the Webb Ellis comment because that is a fantastic turnover growth, and in Euro terms, 8.1%, a very strong number. We've seen a strong recovery in the hospitality sector, the consolidation of acquisitions, and all of the brands in Ireland performing strongly. Switzerland, in ZAR, 13.6%, declined in Swiss francs by just over 3%, and quite a significant part of that was the transfer out of a number of the remaining corporate stores into the hands of independents. In fact, if we exclude the impact of the retail adjustment, the Swiss business would have been just marginally negative. Poland growing by just under 20% in złoty terms by 5%, and quite positively seeing an improvement in loyalty just under 60%. We are getting that number up towards the levels that we expected. I think that also speaks to what the team in Poland have done, particularly in the south, to improve the range, the assortment, and the pricing to our retailers. A very busy slide, lots of information into it. I think the overarching comment is some very strong performances in a number of our territories. The next slide, and again, I don't profess to be an economist, and really this is just by way of guidance. We've previously just given you a sense of what inflation levels look like in the various territories. I know a lot of you don't cover the European markets, so inflation might be relevant in your view of those performances. But I think what you can see, if we start with Ireland, incredibly strong inflation numbers that business is experiencing. In fact, the country has experienced over the last year, food and non-alcoholic beverages at double digits, just under 13. Again, I speak to Switzerland. And in a territory that inflation has been historically zero to one, I think when you start seeing anything between three and a half and seven, you start understanding how that economy is being disrupted at the moment. Poland also experiencing very high double-digit numbers. I think what is positive in all of the geographies is that, as you can see, the estimates for the year ahead, we are seeing significant tailwinds on inflation. So as much as there are a number of macro factors impacting Europe at the moment, they are expecting inflation to start reversing and start trajectory more towards a more normal level. South Africa is still experiencing some very high numbers. The projection for the year ahead of just under 5%, maybe Stats SA are a little optimistic because we're still seeing some very strong numbers in food and liquor. On the right-hand side, those are our internally measured numbers. Food for the year, 9.7%, and liquor slightly down on a year ago at 6.4%. But we are definitely seeing a cool-off of inflation in South Africa just by way of guidance. In the month of November, food inflation in our business had reduced all the way to 7.5% and liquor to under 3%. So we are seeing a slowdown. If we just touch on gross margins very quickly, and again, lots of information on the slide, the South African business declined by 49 basis points to 9.5%. There was an impact on sales mix as a result of the SAP implementation challenges. What we were forced to do was move a number of the product categories onto drop shipment, which is direct supply delivery, where we only earn a smaller commission just to ensure that we were able to get product to our retailers. And that sales mix change probably impacted the KZN Distribution Centre alone by some 1.5%-1.8%. If you track that through, you get very close to what the South African business lost overall. Ireland, an exceptionally strong performance. And this is also impacted by mix, interesting enough. We've spoken previously around how particularly the tobacco business in Ireland has been impacted by the Brexit legislative changes, but as our CFO keeps reminding me, where we are seeing strong growth in that business is in categories of higher margin, so particularly convenience food, drinks, and confectionery, all of which carry higher margin, so the decline in the tobacco volumes, albeit impacting revenue, is actually having an inverted dilutionary effect, if I can use that expression. Switzerland, negative, and again, the impact on the retail stores moving out, the wholesale business was actually quite positive, and then Poland showing a very strong improvement in their margin, significantly improved supplier terms, and also the corporate stores showing a strong recovery, so lots of moving parts in the group's gross margin, and as I said, almost incredible to consider that we got to exactly the same decimal point overall of 12.02%. I'm going to move into operating expenses next. Yes, it is a significant driver of the performance of the business. So at a category level, and this is very much as you would have seen it on the face of the income statement, just to get a sense of where those big moves were. In our core warehouse and distribution business across the group, some 13.3% increase impacted by volumes in Ireland and Poland, but significantly impacted by fuel costs and energy costs in all of the regions, double-digit increases, 13% and 16%. Fortunately, we are seeing, particularly in Europe, a slowdown in those, and a lot of the energy costs are reverting back to more normalized levels, but still a very significant pressure point in all of our businesses. Marketing and selling costs up 13.4%, a significant contribution coming from South Africa, where that number grew by 27%. There were a number of impacts in that in the South African business, ranging from the support that we provided and the marketing that we extended to the KZN region to try and support those retailers over the last eight months, but also some investment in building operational growth structures for the business. We are expanding into areas like omnichannel and value-added services, and we are putting resources and investing in operational spend to secure those and to drive those new opportunities for the business going forward. So yes, there are what you might refer to as one-off or more extraordinary costs as we set those new departments and bases in play, but the revenue streams and the growth opportunities come in the future, and they are critical for the growth of the business. Admin and IT, just under 50% significant costs coming through in the IT spend, and not just localized to South Africa. South Africa was up some 53%. A big portion of that was the SAP and the consultant support that had to be provided to the KZN region. Obviously, once we realized that there was a serious issue with the implementation of KZN, the accounting rules unfortunately kick in, and all of the support costs provided thereafter become operational expenditure. There's no longer a capitalization because effectively what your resources and what your consultants are doing is supporting the business as opposed to building the new system. So a large impact of that cost coming through, and in our European business, particularly in Ireland, we've also started investing in IT spend as we look to secure and grow those businesses. Then we look at the start of, or at least the big ticket item, the impairment of assets, ZAR 632 million. On the right-hand side, just a quick note. So the Polish goodwill and other assets, effectively the bulk of that is the intangibles. So in performing the assessment of the economic value of that business, there was a great deal of discussion around growth trajectories, forecasts, and obviously expectations for the business going forward. We've had to take a, I wouldn't say a cautious view, let's call it a realistic view on what that business will achieve going forward. And as a consequence of that, we felt it only necessary to expense all of the carrying goodwill, so ZAR 210 million. The intangibles, which largely relate to the investment that was made in acquiring the license rights for Poland and also certain other IT investments, we expensed or impaired ZAR 172 million. And then the exercise also gave us a carrying value of the business, which was then still less than the reported book values. We then identified right-of-use assets and certain PPE of some ZAR 59 million. And in total, some ZAR 442 million of the Polish assets were impaired in this result. The balance of the ZAR 632 million relates specifically to the Irish business. Two years ago, we acquired a business called Heaney Meats. It's since been rebranded Williams Gate. And the strategy around that business was to implement and expand into meat processing. There has been a change in that strategy. There's a belief that that business will be more focused on wholesaling. And the investment that has been made and the carrying value of that business was reassessed. And we expensed in this period some of the production capacity that was invested in, some ZAR 54 million. We also wrote down the carrying value of the investment and goodwill by ZAR 67 million, so significant impact on the result of ZAR 630 million worth of impairments, but we are comfortable that those are the necessary one-offs that needed to be taken in ensuring the assets of the business were fairly valued. The second line simply refers to the movement in the credit loss allowance, so this is the provision. We have seen a reversal, particularly coming out of Poland on that number, but overarchingly, the group's credit management is still a hard focus for us. We are well aware of the fact that a number of our retailers across geographies are facing extreme challenges at this time, and it is an area that we are applying much attention to going forward. The slide that follows just basically pivots this information and looks at it by geography. Again, I'm not going to effectively rehash a lot of the explanation provided, but just to give you a sense of how the various geographies have increased cost. If I just start from the bottom, the Polish number does look excessive. But again, I remind you that included in the ZAR 1.3 billion is ZAR 442 million worth of impairments. If we exclude that, the Polish in zloty terms actually saw a decline in their operating expenditure of 16.1%. There's been great focus on reducing costs and efficiencies and optimizing, particularly the logistics system in Poland. We've seen that reduce. But offset against that, it is a country that has seen energy and gas costs increase by more than 16%. The Swiss number, and again, perhaps it's more relevant to look to their local currency. In Swiss francs, the net expenses actually declined by 0.1%. I'll remind you that that's on the back of a turnover decline of 3.3%. So there was a significant impact as a result of us transferring out some of the retail stores. We no longer had those costs, but there is great deal of pressure on that number as well. In Ireland, costs growing by 16% in euro terms. If we exclude the impairments that the Irish business took, some 13.9%. It's a lot more realistic number, but still against the top-line turnover growth of 8.1%, we are aware that there is pressure on costs, labor in particular, both volumes and as a result of living wage adjustments increasing in that business by 15%. Energy costs up by 9%. And again, I've touched on some of the IT spend that that business has made. And that leaves the South African business growing or Southern African business growing by 16%. I've touched on some of the strategic imperatives that are driving costs, particularly around new people coming into the business. Fuel and distribution costs up nearly 13%, and again, I've touched on the increased marketing costs incurred over the year, so if we move into another significant impact on the income statement, we haven't touched on it in the earlier salient features, but clearly finance costs have increased in the period. Finance income has been largely flat, and I realize this might look a little constructed because it does include the lease IFRS 16 consequences of financing, but even with those numbers, you will see that the finance income is largely flat over the two years. The significant costs have come through in the area of loans and debt, particularly in the European business, where we've seen interest rates rising quite substantially over the last year. Those of you that do track the Euribor, for example, in January of 2023, that number was 1.8, and we finished the year at nearly four, and significant increases coming through. Likewise, in the Swiss business, we've also seen increases in their debt. The bank overdraft increase is largely the South African business, and as I've alluded to, a ZAR 2.6 billion working capital disruption as a result of the turnover. Yes, if you net it out at 1.6, all of that significantly impacted the South African business over the last eight months. We were carrying at increased levels of stock for large periods of time. We were increased accounts receivable, particularly in KZN, as we were required to support those retailers. And those all had a large impact on our cash flows, our working capital, and the related interest. A lot of that information we did share at the interim because we were already starting to see it. And at the interim, you will also be reminded that we saw the covenant breaches. On the right-hand side, just to give you a sense of the average interest rates across the period, the South African interest rate is a blended rate. We do appreciate that prime is a lot higher than that. In Ireland, that dramatic increase. And likewise in Poland. And then just below that, for information, just the impact from a sensitivity point of view, if there were to be a 50 basis point increase in interest rates in the various geographies, what that would do from a swing perspective on the cost of debt. It's obviously going to be very necessary to do an effective tax rate recon. I mean, critically, if you look at the tax rate, it suggests that our effective tax rate is some 54%, and fundamentally, that has been impacted by, again, a lot of what I've spoken to earlier, impairments, one-off write-offs, and some of those SAP under construction assets, so what we've done is a detail for those of you that like the detail. This is the full recon. The big ticket items are the impairments, so if we start with those, understanding the South African tax rates reduced to 27%, it's inflated by the impairments, nearly 12%. The write-off is another one included in the write-offs were also, and the next two line items relate specifically to Poland, where we don't recognize the tax losses, quite simply because there's no basis to do that, so there's a consequence of that business being loss-making. Secondly, the assessment of the business's forecast over the next couple of years also caused us to reverse a deferred tax asset that we'd raised in Poland. And that also had the consequence of driving up the tax cost. All of those percentages around tax losses and the impact of tax assets are exaggerated by the fact that the underlying profit is so much lower than normal by almost a third. And if you take those into account, you will reconcile. I think the most important number is still that second or third from the bottom in the fact that the tax differential in the European geographies should cause our effective tax rate to be at least 4% lower, excluding the likes of timing and permanent differences. So if you're still looking for a projection on our tax rates, I've previously guided 26%-27%. And I still believe that number in a normalized environment is what we should be targeting in any of your projections. Just to illustrate currency moves, we're all aware of the fact that the rand has weakened significantly over probably the last two to two and a half years. But in the last 12 months, we've seen on the left-hand side, this is a Swiss franc and a euro overlay graph, almost tracking exactly, but starting the year at just over 17.8 and the rand weakening all the way to some 20 rand a day. At a closing spot rate, we've seen a 12.5% weakening in the currency, but we've seen a similar move in the average rate. So you would suggest that at least we are seeing a comparative move in the translation of currencies. The point being, however, that significant parts of the South African debt is in Europe where we don't earn a matched large income component. On the right-hand side, a similar trend from the Polish złoty, and again, seeing the rand devalue against the złoty by more than 18%. I think this slide, particularly the right-hand side of this slide, is going to be of interest to a number of you, particularly those of you that were making projections on our H2 performance, and the first two horizontal charts being Poland and South Africa, no doubt are the most significant causes of potentially how your projections and our actual numbers are going to be out of sync. Firstly, Poland, 642, a significant part of that was the impairments. If we adjust for the impairments, Poland would have been effectively - 200. So yes, it was still significantly down in the second half. The South African business contracting or declining substantially, and I'll just remind that the first half we had effectively gone live in KZN on the 1st of February, so there's a two-month effect in H1, but that really covered almost entirely the second six months. There were significant improvements towards the end of the financial year into the months of July, August, and September, but the SAP impact was really a six-month impact in H2 versus a two-month impact in H1 and fundamentally impacting on the South African business quite substantially. The left-hand side, just the turnover performance, again, seeing the majority of the European businesses contributing quite strongly in H2. That is very much expected, but the South African business contracting and, as I mentioned, the SAP impact coming through very strongly there. Looking at the European businesses, for those of you that just want to get a sense of the discounted foreign exchange effect, so if we just look at their currencies in local measured euros and Swiss francs, and again, a similar trend, very strong performances in turnover coming through from the Swiss and the Irish in particular, and Poland being impacted by the write-offs that they suffered. The balance sheets of the geographies, again, I don't intend unpacking them in a lot of detail. I think a lot of you have studied these. But just to highlight from the top, the business does have significant lease obligations and right-of-use assets, particularly in the European geographies, Ireland and Switzerland, some ZAR 3 million worth of capitalized leases in Ireland and just under ZAR 5 million in Switzerland. South Africa largely owns the corporate investments. And then lease receivables, which in the South African context is largely matched against the lease liability right down at the bottom in the red box because we do have a number of matched head and sublease arrangements as we support our retailers to secure sites. Goodwill and intangibles, that number has obviously declined in the period in Poland, but fairly significant investment in Switzerland, a very large investment in Ireland through the acquisitions that business has made over the years. But all of that is once again being tested and very, very adequately valued. So we are comfortable with the carrying value of our goodwill and intangibles in all of our geographies. Current assets and liabilities, again, just for illustration. And then just setting out the group's long-term borrowings, specifically in Ireland and Switzerland. And there is a portion of both long and short-term borrowings in Poland. The group's debt has been a focus, and just to share with you the makeup of the debt, so on the left-hand side, starting at the top, bank overdrafts fairly flat against a year ago, largely in the Polish business. Borrowings are up ever so slightly. There were minor increases in borrowings. That's largely an FX effect, and bank balances did improve quite substantially, albeit that's a figure in brackets. That's cash holdings, so some ZAR 560 million increase in the closing cash at the end of the year, and we recognize the Irish and the South African business that did a lot of good working capital management over the last quarter to deliver that. Below that, just setting out in local currency to give you a sense of where that ZAR 8.2 billion rands worth of debt is placed. I do just want to make one point. I think our Irish and our Swiss teams are sometimes unfairly judged against the extent of their debt. If you consider that in Ireland, there's EUR 165.2 million of debt. Some EUR 104 million of that amount is effectively the debt that was raised to fund the minority buyouts in Ireland. We housed it in Ireland in a structured arrangement because of the interest saving and also because we had the accumulated cash headroom in that business. So that is not debt that has been raised specifically for return in Ireland, but it's group debt which is housed in that business. And likewise, the Swiss number of CHF 167 million includes some CHF 56 million for exactly the same reason. So there's some approximately 160 million Swiss and euro debt of the European debt that technically could or should be relocated to South Africa where those investments would have been funded from. We just used the stronger retained cash flows of those two geographies and also managed to save substantial financing costs by doing that. On the right-hand side, just to give you a sense of age to maturity. So the South African debt is largely the mortgage of the Knowles property, the investment we made adjacent to our head office. Some of our subsidiaries have got small amounts of debt. The Irish debt has still got three and a quarter years to revolve. And as I say, revolve, the intention would be to refinance and roll that debt over. Switzerland, again, just under three years on a refinancing arrangement. Then as a result of the decision in Poland, we are already in discussions with bankers around the refinancing of the debt in Poland, which effectively was to be refinanced at the end of the financial year 2024. Down on the bottom side, we do acknowledge that some of the European debt has got fixed rates. I must just point out that this is a measurement at the 30th of September. We actually do fix a far larger portion of the debt. We have the ability on some of the revolving credit facilities to fix that debt. And that number is generally a lot higher than only 1.5% of the debt. The other matter, which again was topical at half year, quite simply because the group had breached its covenants. We provided the explanations at the half. Particularly, the covenant that was relevant was the leverage ratio, which is the relationship of debt to EBITDA. EBITDA being, as I'm sure you're all aware, the most indicative number of your cash flow profit, so the intention of the measurement is just to track how your cash flow profits would be able to cover your debt, and the target that we had was 2.75x. As you can see, in 2022, we would have comfortably been under that number, albeit with reducing headroom, but at the end of the year, we were actually over the 2.75x. However, we were able to renegotiate or get consent from all of our bankers to give a short-term exemption on that. We've increased that cover to 3.5x until March of next year. We will remain in contact with our bankers as we are regularly doing should there be any risk that by the end of March, that number wouldn't be tracking back towards the 2.75x. As we reported, the group was not in breach of any covenants at year-end, albeit against an increased measurement. Our bankers are all very, very comfortable to continue to engage with us on that basis. An extract of the cash flow statement. I think the number I really want to target is about a third of the way from the top, the cash generated by operations. Over ZAR 6 billion worth of cash generated. There were some strong reversals in working capital management, particularly from what we reported at H1. We did see a reversal in both South Africa and Ireland and in the stock levels. And a specific call out to the Irish team on managing their stock both in Ireland and in the U.K. And then on all of the businesses, a very, very strong focus on debtors and creditors, and all of which have contributed to a strong reversal in working capital and underpinning that strong cash generation. Capital expenditure, ZAR 1.9 billion, largely included the SAP spend, but also the normal increase in assets as we replace and expand. There were some minor acquisitions, particularly in retail stores in both Ireland and in the U.K. The Irish also invested in two additional cash and carry businesses. And then grouped together, as we are required to do, are the leases. So that's the IFRS 16 lease receipts and payments being basically grouped. And then down at the bottom, just some treasury activity, some minor share repurchases. And then we settled the remaining balance of the pharmaceutical buyout, and we made the first investment into purchasing the Encore business, which we reported at the last year. And all of that, the performance of the year resulted in a net positive cash flow movement. Just graphically, exactly the same format. And I'm not going to dwell on this any longer. I know a lot of you take great interest in looking at the waterfall impact of the cash flows. A very, very strong contribution from operating profit before working capital, but also a strong contribution from working capital driving that generated number to over ZAR 6 billion. The capital expenditure incurred in the year of just over ZAR 2 billion. A large portion of that was obviously software. Across all of the geographies, there was ongoing focus on replacing and maintaining our core business, which is trucking, its equipment, and it's our vehicles. Down at the bottom on the left-hand side, we've just given an early stab. I must say, this number will no doubt be subject to a great deal of focus during the year because included in the South African number of ZAR 1.1 billion is some ZAR 228 million for the ongoing SAP project. As I'm sure you can well appreciate, there is a great deal of discussion going on around how that will continue, exactly what that will look like, and what the pace of that rollout will be. There might well be a quite significant change in that. I don't expect it to be necessarily largely upward, but I think it might be more conservatively downward as we assess that over the new year. The Irish and the Swiss businesses, Ireland in particular, and Swiss for that matter, largely underpinned by some of the investments in retail that they make, and the Polish business having a small adjustment coming through as we recognize that as well. Ladies and gentlemen, really, I've taken a lot of time to present the numbers. I know there's been a lot of significant issues in the numbers. We needed to focus on our OpEx. We needed to focus on some of those significant commitments. I'll leave you with the same slide. I'll start with the salient features. The group reported turnover increase of 10.1%. I'm taking the liberty of dropping in the ZAR 3.2 billion worth of notional operating profit had we excluded those numbers. Yes, the operating profit would have still been a slight negative, but it would have been far more palatable to a lot of you against the performance of this business. Before I hand back to our CEO and our Chairman, I would just like to take this opportunity to recognize our finance teams around the group. This was a difficult year. It was a pressured year with a lot of operational disruption. It was a year that we were forced to deal with a number of very technical issues, impairments, and valuations. If I may, I'd just like to specifically call out the head office team under Mike's leadership. I think you guys have done an incredible job posting these numbers today. My thanks and appreciation not only to the South African team, but to our teams around all our geographies. Thank you very much. And on that, I'm going to hand back to Angelo. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Mark, for that thorough analysis. Moving on to our key priorities. This slide lays out very nicely what our key priorities are going forward. The areas of focus are: one, the strategic sale of our interest in SPAR Poland must be our key priority in the immediate short term. Two, optimizing our capital structure through debt restructuring. Three, completing the much-needed modernization of our ERP system in South Africa to enable our strategic goal of reshaping our business and becoming future fit. Four, r ecovering of the EBIT margin in our home territory and the heart of our business is core to the long-term sustainability of our business, but needs to be delivered in the short to medium term. In respect of Poland, as you know, the board has decided to sell our interests in this market. As tough a decision as it was, it is one that I was involved in, and the board and management are completely aligned. The process is well underway. We are working towards managing this process as swiftly as possible. There are a lot of interested parties, and some parties were interested in keeping the SPAR brand, which we are delighted about. I'd like to stress that we will continue to support this business until we have found the most appropriate new home for it. We are seeking the best possible outcome for all stakeholders, and in particular, the many dedicated staff and retailers in Poland. Moving on to our balance sheet. Group net debt to EBITDA ratio is not where we want it to be. Finance costs from high levels of debt are placing a strain on SPAR's profitability. But I need to find the right balance between long-term and short-term debt and implement the most appropriate facility structures to enable the group the flexibility it needs to reduce costs while enabling growth. I'm in the process of considering the best possible debt structure for the group. Capital allocation. Sustainability is a key area of focus for us going forward, and we will be holding local management teams accountable to set targets. Working capital management requires greater attention across the group. In Southern Africa, our cash flow has been impacted by the issues in KZN. However, there are significant opportunities to reduce capital tied up in inventory, improve disciplines related to trade data collections, and to more deliberately manage our trade credit balances. In short, I believe there are opportunities in all three elements related to working capital management, which can significantly improve the group's free cash flows. All regions have been given a directive to preserve cash and reduce debt. We're aiming to get back to our previous government ratio of debt to EBITDA of 2.75x by 2025. The SAP implementation in Southern Africa has not gone to plan. We have decided to move away from a global template and to focus on local optimization and a best-of-breed strategy. The Swiss business is already using SAP, a more optimized version of the system they are currently using. Our Irish operations have commenced the development of their best-of-breed framework, which will save this business significant CapEx. In Southern Africa, the rollout has been paused until we are satisfied with the design of the system at our KZN Distribution Center. We have new leadership in this area of the business, and we are engaging with new independent assurance partners as well as implementation specialists to reduce the risks of future rollouts. The key result is to ultimately modernize the business and drive the business to higher levels of efficiency. We want to minimize any further disruption to the business and our retailers and avoid more losses in doing so. We remain committed to the modernization of our entire value chain, and we see significant opportunities to be derived from the increasing efficiency of our operations, including improved overall profitability and reimagining what our supply chain is capable of. Our SA business has experienced a deterioration of its EBIT margins for a few years now. This is a key area of focus for us. I believe that we are at a strategic inflection point. We need to strike a balance between centralized control and decentralized decision-making. For a very long time now, one of our key strengths as a business has been our ability to make decisions at the right place through the strategic placement of our distribution centers. While we want to retain that flexibility, as the business has grown in scale and complexity, too often this has led to disparate decision-making. We're at a point in the life cycle of our business where the balance needs to lean towards a more centered approach. We believe this has the potential to unlock value and to reduce costs. A large part of the increasing costs has been necessary in terms of securing future revenue streams. It is critical in that we actively invest time and resources within areas that will help define the future shape of our business. Furthermore, improved retailer profitability will be key in supporting SPAR with its priority. SPAR's bad debts have worsened in recent years. Our retailers are under increasing financial pressure, with rising fuel and energy costs exacerbated by high levels of load shedding. Our retailers have done an incredible job in managing the challenges, especially the larger groups. However, many stores are struggling, and this means that we'll have to test this fundamental enabler of our business. There's been rapid growth in the costs in some areas of our business to the extent that some of these have become structural in nature. To the extent that some of these costs have not supported better margin outcomes for the group, they will be addressed, and we will have to be disciplined at removing any costs that do not add value. It's important to mention the Southern African team has changed considerably over the past few years. Max Oliva has been CEO since last August, and we have reduced the ambiguity between the Southern African and the group roles. This has created clarity of focus, and combined with the recruitment of some seasoned and highly experienced new executives, it's helping us to see things differently and laying the necessary foundations for an exceptionally bright future in our whole market. Thank you, everyone. We will now answer any questions you have. Good morning, everyone. Thanks, Angelo. Right, we have roughly 15 minutes for questions this morning, so we're going to move through them fairly quickly. The first question is, can you tell us how the handover has gone or the transition from the executive chairman to the new CEO? Okay, perfect. So Angelo took over from me on the 1st of October, and I must just say a very big well done to Angelo because he really put in an incredible amount of effort in the months leading up to him starting to get up to speed with everything. And of course, he knows the retail business way better than me. And so, as I've mentioned, I think it's been a pretty seamless transition, and it's been a pleasure to see him in action with the staff. And as I've mentioned many times, he's a very well-respected leader within the group and amongst our retailers and suppliers. So I actually think it could not have gone better. That's my view, and I'm happy to have a bit of my life back. Yeah, okay, it's been a busy few months, but most of all, I think the transition has been really smooth. Mike and I have spent quite a bit of time together in the weeks leading up to the handover, and since then, he's really let go of the reins and let me run the show, which I really appreciate, and he's always there, always available for the call. So I think it's been really great, actually. Great, thank you. Next question, your financial statements reference whistleblower reports. Please could you elaborate on this? Yes. During the course of this year, we've received a number of whistleblower reports. Some of those whistleblower reports actually referred to previous whistleblower reports. Obviously, also during the course of this year, I had access to whistleblower reports that we knew about from last year and before that. And so what we've done at the group is simply distilled all of the issues that are mentioned in those whistleblower reports, and we've just tackled them one by one. We take whistleblower reports extremely seriously. We are never dismissive of them. And as I say, we just prioritize what needs to be looked at. And we've also stopped dealing with whistleblower reports on a sequential basis. So what we've rather chosen to do is to pick a few service providers such as EY, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and others, and just allocated assignments to each of them to investigate and report back to us. And so we've really made great headway in dealing with many of those issues. Is there any legal recourse to recover funds from SAP or was it all own goals? Look, SAP is a highly respected international system, and as I've said before, we wouldn't have been implementing SAP here if we didn't think it was a terrific system. I think that there were a number of own goals, and I think the question of recourse is something that is still being discussed. Okay, next question, has the Giannacopoulos retailer issues been resolved? Yeah, I'll pick that one up, Kitty. I think in the main, the issues have been resolved. There were a number of smaller issues which have now contextually been resolved, which really leaves us with one big issue, which is the claim that they've put in against SPAR. Our agreement with that is that it will either go to court or to arbitration, and we're still busy discussing with them what the best route forward is in that space. Thank you, Angelo. What is the plan to reduce long-term debt, and how confident are you that you really won't need to do a rights issue? We're very confident at this stage that there's no prospect of a rights issue. As the investors will know, the majority of our long-term debt sits in Europe and is either Swiss franc denominated or euro denominated. Our plans in the short term are to focus on cash generation in those territories and pay down debt in local currency and then we're also having a look with two of the local banks, really just analyzing our balance sheet so that we can shape it in the most appropriate manner going forward. We think there is a lot of room for us to optimize the shape of the balance sheet. Thank you, Angelo. Will Poland be held for sale going forward? Will it be loss-making in FY 2024, and should we assume a disposal by end of FY 2024? Okay, let me take the projections. The published budget for the full 12 months of FY 2024 has been prepared. There is a loss that the business is projected to make. There's no real significant improvement. So the loss will be fairly comparable to the current year at an operating profit point of view. As far as the process of disposing Poland, perhaps let me hand this over to our newly appointed Chief Operating Officer, Megan, who's managing the process. Megan, welcome to SPAR. Thanks, SPAR. So from a Poland perspective, we have already appointed advisors, and we've had a lot of inbound interest on the asset, and our expectations are that we would want to have disposed of it in the next 12 months. And then just further to add to the question in terms of what Mark was talking about, losses, we have also set aside funding of just over EUR 20 million to fund the Polish business over the course of the next 12 months. Thank you both. How confident are you that the last ZAR 720 million of operating profit in SA will be recouped in the current year? Surely there is further execution risk on ERP implementation. Kitty, right now, we've paused the rollout of the SAP program, which naturally reduces the short-term execution risk. We're relooking at the plan going forward to significantly reduce that. We've brought in an outside independent assurance partner as well as a specialist SAP implementation partner into the program, and so we're relatively confident going forward that we've minimized or mitigated execution risk. In the short term, we believe that we're going to bounce back quite strongly from the SAP issues that happened in the current year. There is going to be a little bit of a hangover, but not much, and as we stand, things are operating as normal, and we're really excited about where the SA business is headed in the next 24 months. Thanks, Angelo. Can I just add? Sorry, Kitty, just to interject. Your question was recoup, suggesting that we're going to get it back. I think it's fairly clear that the revenue has been lost. There's no opportunity to resell to those retailers. So the loss has been incurred. I think the question probably intended to say the 720 recovered as opposed to recouped. There's no opportunity to make it back. One thing that could be interesting, Angelo, for you to comment on is to what extent you've seen loyalty come back as a result of those. Yeah, I think we've been really, really encouraged by how loyalty has bounced back, particularly in KZN. Loyalty levels have recovered to pre-SAP levels, largely in KZN, which is really encouraging. Overall, across the business, again, if you exclude the SAP impact, loyalty levels have flat on the prior, which is also encouraging in the South African grocery business. Great. Thanks, Angelo. That was actually my next question. Okay, moving on. Have the online delivery businesses such as Sixty60 and Woolies Dash undermined the SPAR convenience offering, and how do you counter this threat? Look, I really don't want to comment on what our competitors are doing. Oddly enough, at this stage, our smaller formats across the group are probably the fastest growing formats, which indicates that there's a resiliency in that business. And bear in mind, we have also now gotten to scale on our SPAR2U offering, so we feel relatively confident in that space. Great. Are there any indications of post-period in trade in South Africa, Ireland, and Switzerland, and moreover, any insights you can share regarding consumers over Black Friday? So the last six weeks, across all geographies, we're seeing a similar trend to H2 performance. So no big deviations in any of the geographies right now. Black Friday was relatively successful for us. I think just based on what we see in the media, it doesn't seem as if Black Friday was that great outside of our trade, but for SPAR, Black Friday was really, really successful. Yeah, we're very happy with the performance. Thank you. Can you comment on the impact of the ports disaster on your business? The impact of the ports disaster has been relatively minor on our business. There are obviously indirect impacts by our suppliers, but in general, we supply the majority of our goods locally through South Africa. We had bits and pieces of our imported house brand range caught up at the ports, but nothing major. We expect normal performance. Thanks, Angelo. What is meant by SPAR2U on demand having reached scale? In terms of store numbers, we are now getting into a range where we are comparable to the number of stores offering the range to our competitors. We're really excited. I mean, we increased our SPARs by 270 SPARs in a year, which is really great. And really, that's what we refer to as scale. I think also, Kitty, it's important to mention that there are many parts of our network that will not necessarily be focusing on SPAR2U because in many of the places, the small towns and villages, for example, where we have SPARs, that is absolutely of no interest to the consumers there. Okay, thank you. Can you comment on how margin-enhancing private label is relative to other brands that you sell? I don't really want to go into the numbers, Kitty, but clearly, private label is margin-enhancing. The acquisition of Encore has also helped the South African business in terms of being margin-enhancing in total. Okay. Then with regards to the tiering of the private label between SaveMor, SPAR, and SPAR Signature, can you please provide the growth rates within this as well as the split between the 25% contribution? It's a bit early to comment on that. This tiering was launched towards the end of our financial year. In the next few months, we expect to see the bulk of the basket remain in the As Good As The Best For Less category, the core SPAR brand. We do see huge opportunity for growth at both the top end and at the bottom end of those tiers, but it's early days still. Okay. Is the strategy in pharmacy to open standalone stores? As we stand now, Kitty, we have a number of standalone pharmacies, and that definitely is on the cards. We're going to be looking at really expanding that business in the next couple of years and also expanding the ranges offered in those stores and to offer a bit more of a full-service personal care offering in those businesses. Okay. Thank you, Angelo. This was one for Mark. Can you please talk to the outlook for margins per region in FY 2024 and any specific drivers? So, Kitty, I think the big question is, and I don't think anybody's interested in Europe, the big question is, so when does South Africa get back to 3%? The forecasts and budgets that the South African management team have tabled to the board suggest that in FY 2024, they will make a significant move back towards 3%. They will not be at 3% in the next year. The intention is to get back to 3% by FY 2025, but I think in FY 2024, we should expect a range of between 2.5%- 2.7%. The real fundamental is twofold. One, we're expecting the KZN business to bounce back. That has been extremely damaging on the margin. As Angelo has already alluded to, it's not yet there. In fact, that budget takes into account that for at least the first six months, the business will slowly progress back to what they would regard as more normalized performance. Across the balance of the business, there are a lot of areas that we need to continue improving on, a lot of structural change that needs to be revisited. And there is opportunity to revisit a lot of costs in the business, which the South African CEO, Max Oliva, and his team are looking at. So the short-term answer is South Africa will bounce back. As far as the European businesses go, I think I'm going to stay with the ranges that I've historically given. I think the Swiss number is in the region of 1.5%-1.8%. I know that previously they've been exaggerated by the COVID number, but I'm still more in that space because of their size. I think the Irish business has surprised us. And I think to Leo and his team, they've outperformed any of the original projections. But Ireland, I would still put in the 2.5%-3% range. I think they're currently tracking at about 2.8%, and there's no reason we shouldn't expect it to maintain. And then obviously, the Polish business in the short term is going to be relatively flat on where it was. And I don't think it's necessary to speculate past that. I think we should also mention that Max Oliva, who's the CEO of SPAR South Africa, only got into his role in August 2022. And for most of this year, he wasn't even able to have control or oversight of all of his costs. So some of the restructuring that we've put in place, both earlier this year and more recently with Angelo, Max and his team are in a position to really drive that business and control it themselves. And I think they've done a really terrific job so far in examining the cost base. Okay, sorry. Next question. Apologies if I missed this, but why was the impact of SAP so much worse in the second half? What is the impact of this likely to be in FY 2024? Well, I mean, the SAP implementation program only started on the 1st of February. So it only had two months' impact in the first six months. And of course, it had six months' impact in the second half, although it obviously set about recovering quite quickly. Ange, I also want to comment because he's right there. Yeah, I think Mike hits the nail on the head. The majority of the impact was in the second half of the year, simply because the whole second half of the year was impacted by SAP, whereas H1 was only impacted by two months. And then naturally, I think some of the issues related to margin unfolded in the second half of the year rather than the first. And also a large move, particularly in KZN, as Mark alluded to earlier, as we turned on dropshipping arrangements with suppliers, which took some time. They really took hold in the second half of the year, which protected our sales position, but definitely sacrificed margin quite dramatically. Great. So just one closing question before we finish. Can you possibly unpack the implied 30% GP margin loss as a result of lost sales? The 30% GP margin, Kitty, I think if we're talking about the 553 on 16 billion, with all due respect, I think what we tried to do was highlight not just, and I tried to cover it under that slide specifically, was yes, we took into account the normal margins, but we also took into account the other lost opportunities like recoveries of rebates, like recoveries of other income. So it is not just exclusively the GP because it has a ripple effect into the greater business. And I think important to note there is also the fixed cost base just doesn't move. Yeah, correct. Which obviously has an outsized impact when you lose large volumes of sales. Okay, great. Thank you both. I'm afraid that's all we have time for today, but we will come back to you via email if your questions haven't been answered. Ange, do you have any closing remarks? No, I think just from us as a management team, firstly, to thank Mike for the last 10 months of his life. I don't think he's seen his family or his home very much in that time and really has dedicated his time to getting to understand this business. He often says, "I know the business better than he does." But in the time that he's been here, I really am amazed at how quickly he's gotten to know the business and understand the soul of our business. And just from the whole SPAR team, Mike, thank you for your leadership during this time. Really excited to have Megan on board. She is absolutely ready to go and really has picked up a lot in the last four weeks. And has also grasped the core, really the core, of our business very quickly. And we're really excited to have Megan on board. Mark, thank you for the work you've done and your team have done in terms of just preparing a set of numbers under some very difficult circumstances. We appreciate that so much. And then to our teams, well, around all our territories, thank you for the efforts you've put in. It's been a really tough year. And it would be remiss of me not to thank particularly the Irish team, who really had a stellar, stellar performance. And well done on being the biggest region by profit for the first time. Max assures me this might be one swallow in this particular. So yeah, from us as a management team, we really are excited about the year ahead and about the recovery we can put in place in a fairly quick time scale. And for many of the investors out there, we'll see some of you in the near future. We're looking forward to those engagements. And then to you, Kitty, thank you for everything you've done to hold us together. Thank you very much.