Phew! I thought I wasn't nervous.

I'm really nervous now. Now I know what impostor syndrome feels like, just in case you were wondering.

It's really, really unbelievable. Done.

Thanks for taking the time. Good luck for your exams starting Friday, I think you I I think you said.

Also to the Altron team, Colin, you and your team who are really involved in walking this journey with many bursars through Protec, the Digital Learning Centres. It's actually amazing and it's really fantastic that we can reward our shareholders and also make a difference in people's lives and society.

That's a really, really rewarding thing. Thank you, thank you very much.

Welcome to all of you to our results presentation for FY FY 2026. Thank you very much to Investec, as always, for hosting us, our interpreters, and The Bastion and The Bastion team.

Welcome to members of my executive team, shareholders, the analyst community. I see we've got a couple of board members here as well.

To everybody who's online and dialing in, thank you very much for taking the time this morning. I'm going to take you through just some of the key takeaways.

We're 2.5 months into what we call our transformative growth strategy now, but I think it's also an opportunity myself and the team have also reflected on where we've come from, kind of what we've achieved, what do we have to change, what worked, what doesn't. I want to I want to take you through some of that.

We're then going to go straight into the results, recap a little bit on the strategy, go into the operating performance of the different units. Carel then going to go going to take you through the details of the numbers, and then we're going to have a bit of a look forward and then go into your question and answers.

About I think it was about 3 years ago as a team, we really set out our stall to become the leading platform and IT services business in our chosen markets. As a team, we're really proud that, I think, very focused, disciplined execution in that in the strategy has resulted in 3 years of significant value creation.

As you can see there, we've grown operating profit compound by about 34% over the during this period, headline earnings per share up 48%. Very importantly, 3.5 years ago return on invested capital was below our weighted average cost of capital.

Today, it sits at about twice our weighted average cost of capital at 23%. Ultimately, what that has allowed us to do is to really reward our shareholders.

Our dividend pay and this is our ordinary dividend, not the special dividend that we declared this morning, is up by about 51%. This strategy has really delivered this pivot into higher-quality earnings for us, of which 90% is driven by our platform businesses and over 90% of the business within our platform business is annuity, repeatable business.

We've managed to achieve north of R2 billion EBITDA, R1.2 billion operating profit, and almost R2 billion worth of cash generated during this period with a streamlined portfolio that's clean, embedded operational discipline, and an ungeared balance sheet. This has resulted in a track record over the last 3 years of execution and delivering sustainable growth.

I'm not going to repeat the numbers behind me, just maybe worth pointing out that the 51% growth, as I said, is excluding the special dividend. We're delighted for those of you that have seen the SENS early this morning that our board last week approved that we payout on top of the 120 cents, which is in line with our policy of paying at least 50% of HEPS out as dividend, a special dividend as we close off this first period of of growth of 120 cents per share, which brings to total, I think, just about R1 billion worth of cash, which we are returning to our shareholders in FY 2026 and cumulatively about R1.8 billion worth of cash during this 3-year period.

We're now 2.5 months into what we call our transformative growth era, which I'll touch on a little bit later. Altron has really transformed into a multi-platform business that we believe is very well positioned for sustainable growth in South Africa's digital economy.

We have an ungeared balance sheet, higher-quality earnings, and a strong annuity base to support us as we go forward. Let's go into the highlights of the of the results.

Really delighted. I think this is a remarkable achievement, considering still very tough trading conditions in our market and the South African economy in general.

Revenue growth of 1% really driven by 12% revenue growth in our platform segment, which, by the way, has had about 11% compound annual revenue growth over the last 3-year period. EBITDA is up by 10%, operating profit 25%, headline earnings per share 34%, our earnings per share by 35%, and importantly our cash generated from operations up by 3% close to about R2 billion.

I really want to take this opportunity to thank our board of directors for their support during the last 3 years, our shareholders, my executive team, and probably most importantly, the over 4,000 people at Altron who are out there every day who who who really live our leadership principles of being purpose-driven, customer-obsessed, and growth-focused. They're out there.

They are the people, when you listen to these case studies, they are the people making it happen for our customers and putting our technology to use to really drive the business of our customers forward. If I just sort of take a little bit of a step back as I always do, just looking at our our our strategy, this digital revolution continues unabated, and we're seeing a lot of that particularly, and I'll speak about that a little bit later, within the South African context.

You would have followed a lot of changes in the South African industry, the Mzansi portal, which is really government's attempt to digitize and improve its services to to us as citizens, the national identity that's been put together by the Department of Home Affairs, the digitization of the deeds office. We're seeing the deregulation and the opening of payment rails in the fintech space.

Really that and all the challenges and opportunities that face all of our bigger and smaller customers really results in this growing need for our customers that we believe that Altron, through our unique combination of platform and IT services businesses, are really ideally positioned to be able to to be able to address. If we kind of go through where results presentation is always backward-looking.

For us as a team, this is fantastic, but we're already we're already here. As I said, we're almost 3 months into that.

The team and I, we speak a lot and you may recall one of our key enablers is a high-performance culture. We speak a lot about our leadership principles, our values, and behaviors, what's quite important to us, and we unpack the concept of trust in a lot of detail.

Somebody then said to me, "Listen, Werner, succinctly in one sentence, what is your definition of trust?" I said trust for me is doing what you said you would do by when you said you would do it.

Which in business is difficult sometimes. You get a lot of curveballs.

You get a lot of things that go wrong, some tailwinds, some headwinds. I'm really delighted when I look at this to see that by and large, we have managed to do what we said we would do by when we said we would do it.

By driving a significant profit improvement strategy in Netstar and ASI, some of the results which I'll take you through soon. We've reduced our group costs about I think period-of-period over 3 years, our group costs are down by about R75 million.

Most importantly, I think we've improved the the sort of governance and capital allocation functions of our group, and we've reinvested that money in the growth capabilities of our people, our brand, and our sales execution, our customer operations. Netstar is a business transformed today: over 2 million subscribers and over R1 billion EBITDA.

Altron Fintech has more than doubled its operating profit over the last 3 years, and Altron Document Solutions have gone from a loss to a significant profit, and that's about a R300 million swing in operating profit during this period. We have successfully exited our Nexus business, which we deemed to be non-core to our strategy.

Now we're really looking forward to continue to execute on this strategy of transformative growth, which for us is really to continue to grow our multi-platform ecosystem, to leverage the Altron group data and AI for growth, and and continue the deliberate deployment of our capital into high-margin annuity revenue growth opportunities. All right, let's get into it.

Starting first with our platform segment. Netstar, as I said, I think is a business transformed.

A journey from 1.3 million subscribers to over 2.2 million subscribers in in 3 years. Operating profit from R192 million to R453 million, and 20% compound CAGR growth in EBITDA during this period.

I think the most important part of this business is that if we've really transformed it, and we often speak about transformative growth being not an event for us. It's not something that's going to start now.

It's something that we've been doing for the last 3.5 years, and sometimes going back longer than that. First and foremost, for us is always protect and grow your core, and really expand and transform from there.

This business has gone from a traditional SVR business. We made very conscious decisions into our enterprise business, and today, really, this is a business that doesn't just track.

It manages, predicts, and monetizes, which is a data fly flywheel that we believe is not easy to replicate. Netstar South Africa really underpins a very strong FY 2026 performance for us, as you can see there: 11% revenue growth, 17% EBITDA.

EBITDA now almost EBITDA margin almost 50% in this business. Again, a 3-year track record, 23% growth and 3-year EBITDA compound annual growth in in that business.

Subscribers are up by 9% really driven 19% of that is our enterprise business. Again, something which we've done very intentionally.

9% of it in our consumer business. The good news, particularly when it comes to churn, you may recall churn was quite a challenge for us ending FY 2025, I think first half of FY 2026, Grant, if I remember correctly.

Touch wood, we seem to have that under control and all of our other key operational ratios are on track. The Australian business, unfortunately, remains a challenge for us.

Having said that, I think that team has done an incredible job to restore it back. I think we're on about 70,000 subscribers now, and the team is working day and night to make sure that we get that business back to its rightful place.

Overall, as you can see there, a fantastic performance by the Netstar business in FY 2026: 9% revenue growth, very important as always for us, 92% of that business is annuity and a 16% improvement in EBITDA margin. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Grant Fraser, our outgoing In fact, Grant, bittersweet couple of days left.

We've got your farewell, we got your farewell coming up this weekend. For those of you, you may or may not know, Grant was actually on his way to Australia.

It's a it's an ambition that the family had when we stopped him and said, "Please, can you come and run our Netstar business for us?" I think he's done an astonishing job, and I think the numbers behind his testimony to that.

Grant, to you, Tessie, and the family, best of luck. Thanks for an amazing sort of 3, 3.5 years and best of luck to you and the family for your future in Australia.

Then sitting next to him, Warren, our incoming MD. Warren will be well known to you.

He's been in the group for over 20 over 20 years. He's filled a variety of roles.

Most recently, he really led the amazing turnaround in the Document Solutions business, a leader who's known for people and culture. He's known for not just operational turnarounds, but also has a significant track record in growth and sales.

Warren, best of luck to you as as Grant hands over the baton. Altron Fintech, just an incredible just an incredible story.

This is really a business that delivers enterprise payment solutions to South Africa's township township economy. I think a shining example of both accelerated growth and transformative growth.

I think these kind of slides probably doesn't even need me to stand here and spoil the and spoil the narrative for you. They speak it speaks for itself: 14% compound annual growth in revenue, 30% growth in EBITDA, 34% growth in operating profit really, really driven by particularly our payments and collection payments and collection business.

Superb FY 2026 performance: 20% revenue growth, 34% growth in customers. This is a business now, Johan must help me with the with the numbers, but in FY 2026, we processed 40 million debit orders.

Our customers in our SME business, about R50 billion worth of value that went through that business. In our enterprise business, we had a record we had a record month in December where R20 billion worth of transactions was processed through that business, obviously in the sort of peak season for retailers going into into Christmas.

I bore my team to tears. There's nowhere I go where I don't take a photo of the of the payment payment terminals which are supported by Altron.

Unfortunately for them, it seems that every single restaurant and coffee shop I went to in the local shopping center Well, actually it's not unfortunate, it's very fortunate for us that that's the case. Really, this is a fantastic performance by this business.

Just a reminder, and again, this slide for me is the perfect example of transformative growth. We We always, by the way, take our core businesses very seriously.

Our personalization and issue business and our integrated transaction solutions business, because that's really the base and the core of where we've been able to transform this business. Particularly, as you can see on my right, I think it's your left, the payment and collection business now 75% contributed to this business.

We have over 5,000 SMEs on our platform, and 88% of the business is from annuity business. Here I think what's really important and I gave you some of the numbers early on is is you can see this platform is really really scaling.

We are embedded in all the major banks in South Africa. We play in the enterprise and we play in the township economy.

We've been at this for over 20 20 years. A platform at scale and a significant distribution system.

This business is all about trust, and that's why I make the comment there about our always-on platform reliability: 20% revenue growth, 31% EBITDA growth, and our EBITDA margins have expanded, as you can see there, from 30% to 39% over a 3-year period. An outstanding job.

Done and thank you very much to the to the fintech team for a for a fantastic FY 2026. We turn to our HealthTech business.

This business, along with our Security business, I think is a fantastic example of why the blend of platform and IT services is so important for our businesses. Our platform service businesses are not just a growth engine, but also a defensive play during tough times.

The reason why I say that is, the majority of this business is a platform business, which is essentially, again, expanding from the core of our old private practice management business. We've built onto that with our clinical care solution, our oncology solution.

There is a part of this business that is in occupational health, and that is that same kind of sector as to where our our IT services find it. Very, very much under under pressure.

There's been a revenue revenue drop-off in that part. Despite that, the strength of the platform businesses and really look at that fantastic performance in our core business: double-digit growth in corporate and private practice network licenses.

This private practice management business where we've significantly deployed capital to really modernize that solution for our customers, I think we were struggling to get lower single-digit growth in this business, and now in FY 2026, we got higher single-digit growth in in that business. As you can see, we've acquired over 2,000 net new practices in FY 2026.

Very important for us is that 1.5 acquisition-to-churn ratio, which means that we're, we're acquiring 1 and 1/2 times more customers than we are churning. Ultimately, that has led to a very good performance in FY 2026 with 2% growth in revenue and a 22% growth in EBITDA with our EBITDA margin expanding to 37% and 96% of this business is annuity revenue.

Leslie, well done. Thank you very much to you and your team for a superb performance in FY 2026.

If we then turn towards our IT Services segment, this is a segment that's really very much unlike platforms, the GDP growth and customer spending does have a big impact on this business, and I'll take you through what's happened in this segment. ADB, as you may recall, a really, really tough and disappointing H1.

I think credit to the many their management team for doing what, I'd like to think our team always does. They took corrective action.

They really rolled their sleeves up, took costs out of the business. You may recall in H1, I think we had a a really, really bad Q1 order intake.

We've taken costs out of the business, and I think credit to the team what they've really done exceptionally well is continuing to focus on the front end of this business. Our new sales operating model is now embedded.

We've got very strong sales leadership, and our annuity contracts have all been stabilized and and renewed. As you can see there, this has led to a significant that's about a R90 million swing.

From a loss of 38 million R32 million in H1, R58 million EBITDA, and overall R26 million EBITDA for the financial year. This, I must caution, this continues to be quite constrained spending.

We think we've built a team, and I think I'm really delighted my engagement with all of our big customers, which is really all the key segments in South Africa, mobile operators, financial services, retailers, they're really, really delighted with our solutions and with our services. This is a sector that continues to be tough, and I think our team has done a fantastic job to position us well there.

Because of the low annuity, it is still a business that is quite vulnerable. You sort of have 2 or 3 months worth of bad order intake, it does impact the business.

Again, credit to you and the team, I think well done for a great turnaround in H2 and really positioning this business well for the future. Most importantly, making sure that we keep on delivering fantastic service to our customers.

Over the year, an 8% decline in revenue, also a decline in our EBITDA. EBITDA margins now sitting at about 1%, but as I said, significant change of fortunes in the business in H2 versus versus H1, and ultimately drove a profit improvement strategy that led to profitability in FY 2026.

Altron Security, yet another example of that split between platform and IT services. The identity and signature part of this business is a platform business.

The rest of the business is IT services. As you can see there, when you look at the color coding on these bars, particularly there, you can see that's where the you see the impact of the of professional services, which is that part of the business.

I think management has done a really, really good job here to keep EBITDA sort of more or less flat, a slight decline, 7% decline in EBITDA. 26% EBITDA margin, still very, very impressive EBITDA margin, and a slight uptick in revenue of about 4%.

This, as I said, really grown by our 83% annuity revenue contribution of our platform business, the identity identity and signature business. Operating profit up 5% to R90 million.

I really want to thank Andrew Whitaker and his leadership team for what I think is a really, really fantastic performance, despite some tough market conditions, and really a business that I think is increasingly relevant to the digitization efforts of particularly the South African government. Last but not least in IT services, Altron Document Solutions.

This is the turnaround story that I really spoke about that Warren has driven. Yolanda has now taken over from him.

By the way, I think both Warren's appointment and Yolanda's appointment also speaks to the high-performance culture that we talk about, the investments we make in our people and our leaders. It's a fantastic thing to be able to give new opportunities and have succession come from within the business both in Netstar and in Document Solutions.

We believe that this turnaround is now complete. Decisive leadership and disciplined execution, as you can see there, has led to this business turning from a R74 million EBITDA loss in FY 2026 to I think an absolute knockout performance: R123 million EBITDA at 9% EBITDA margin, which is a 46% increase in EBITDA in in FY 2026.

Really, really important there is our focus remains in the market, and what you'll see there is our sales mix shift has really shifted to entry-level A3, A4, which is kind of where the money is in that market. Also the team is doing some very, very exciting things in AI-enabled intelligent document solutions.

We've modernized our service channels and really in along with our key partner in Xerox, we've deployed an agile, very fast operational delivery model. Again, Warren, for the contribution that you made, I know you exited this business kind of in the middle of the year to take up your role as COO to prepare you to take over from Grant, but well done to you and to Yolanda and the team for an exceptional performance in FY 2026.

Last but not least, before I hand you over to Grant, our Arrow business. We had guided, this is a business where we've got where we've got Did I say Grant?

Did you have a panic attack? Phew!

Grant loves public speaking, for those of you that don't Did I say Grant? Sorry, sorry.

It's just just a last I had to give you just a last hard time before you Jeez, I've never seen a guy turn red that that quickly before. Don't worry, we got we got you covered.

I've never seen a guy turn that red that quickly before. Arrow, as we we have quite a long sort of lead-time visibility on this business because of the global supply chains.

We had guided that we saw that cycle turning down. We do believe that that cycle has bottomed out now.

We see the order book recovering. Having said that, again, I think this is about as well a managed business in this segment that you can get.

If you look at a revenue decline of 13% in FY 2026 and the 3-year decline from 802 to 581, to still deliver R33 million EBITDA at 6% EBITDA margins, albeit that is a 52% decline year-on-year in EBITDA, I think that is a very, very good performance by by that leadership team in a very tough market. That that cycle has now bottomed out, and I think this business is well positioned to take advantage of that recovery.

It's also played a key role in us building out our AI factory through our partnership with in in Nvidia. As you can see there on the bottom, as we always do, we took the actions we had to take through a 20% reduction in our operating expenses, which has really limited the margin impact in this business.

Again, I'd like to thank, Renato and his leadership team for a really, really solid performance and how they've managed through this cycle, and how they've managed to continue to position this business and, as always, make sure that first and foremost we're delivering services to to our customers. With that, I'll hand you over to Carel for the financial overview.

Thank you. Thanks for listening.

Morning, everybody. Is this thing on?

Okay. Maybe just before I get into the numbers, I thought I just wanted to share a personal story with you of long pain, suffering, and joy.

My son is a Arsenal supporter. He's 20 years old, and the last time Arsenal won the Premier League was 22 years ago.

He has only suffered his whole life up to the stage where he is now, and I got to tell you the mood in our house is significantly different from what it's been in the last couple of years. Arsenal won the Premier League last night, and I was talking to him and it's interesting how the season for Arsenal started off.

By September last year, everybody was saying this is their year. They're on top of it.

Everything's going according to plan. Then all of a sudden, things changed: injuries come in, Man City launches an attack, the deficit in points come down to 3 points and I think with three matches left.

The interview they had with Mikel Arteta, the manager, he said, "We have a plan and we stick to the execution of the plan. We hear everything out there, but this is our plan and this is what we execute on."

I think when we stand here and look at results like this, it looks like a slam dunk. I can promise you, during the course of this year, Werner and I sat many times in his boardroom looking at this, saying, "We made this commitment 3 years ago.

Guys, it's going to be tough to get there, because things come at you unexpected. Business is not straight line."

For us to stand here today and to be able to present these numbers to you is a great privilege and a great joy. I do not take it for granted for a second and yeah, hopefully, we can repeat this.

Hopefully, Arsenal can repeat it. Otherwise, I'll be in the same boat next year.

I think let's start with the income statement. I think Werner has mentioned the revenue line to you.

It's a combination of the IT Services business having a tough year, but being offset by the 12% growth in the platform business. I think the benefit that we've had is the benefit of diversification.

If you were a single line of business and the market turns against you, that's really tough. We had the ability that some of our businesses could pick up where the other ones were having a tough time.

Overall, for us to be able to get to that revenue number, for me, I'm very happy with. What it has done you can see from the shape of the income statement the business has been transformed from a financial perspective.

Because to be able to grow EBITDA 10% and increase your margins off a 1% revenue line, that is the benefit of scaling and that's the benefit of what a platform business brings to you. That then translates to the 25% operating profit growth, the margin expansion.

I just want to pause on operating profit. We did mention this at the half-year.

We had two non-trading, non-cash events in this year. The one was the change in the depreciation policy at Netstar from 3 to 5 years average lifetime.

Just as a point of reference, our current lifetime value of a customer is significantly higher than the 5 years. We are still comfortable that the 5 years is not a measure that's going to get us in trouble in the future.

That was in the order of R136 million. Then we had a pension fund expense.

What we did last year, we've had a pension fund surplus for many years. The board took a decision last year that we can enhance our own pensioners' and our current members' benefits by allocating some of this surplus to their accounts.

Number was about R74 million. The accounting standards tell you to recognize this as an expense in the year.

It's non-cash, it's non-trading. If I strip out those two items and I normalize for it, on a like-for-like basis, operating profit would have grown 19%, which I still think is a very, very good performance and one that I'm quite proud of.

Then just working our way down, our finance expenses keep on coming down. As Werner mentioned, we have an ungeared balance sheet this stage and we have surplus cash.

This all then translated into headline earnings and earnings per share 34% and 35% up. I just want to pause on this again for a minute.

The difference between our operating profit and our headline earnings is because of our tax expense where we've had the benefit of assessed losses in the past years. This will normalize in FY 2027, but it's a 1-year normalization.

Thereafter, headline earnings moves in line with operating profit again, but I just want to make sure that it stays on everybody's radar. What all of this has then resulted in finally is us being able to pay out 50% of our earnings for the year as a ordinary dividend.

Once we've looked at our cash reserves, and I'll get to our capital allocation framework at the end, we determined that we could pay a special dividend because of surplus cash that we didn't have any immediate need to hang on to, and so we are very happy to be able to announce a special dividend. That brings the total payout for the year to 100% of our headline earnings per share.

I just want to spend a little bit of time on this slide, because I think this is the indication or the testament of a business that has changed from a financial perspective. If you look at this, we have our platform businesses and our IT services businesses.

Platform businesses, 12% growth, but the operating profit is up 45%. This is what you get out of a platform business.

If this doesn't happen, then it's not a platform business or you are not managing it properly. Because the benefits of scale starts to come through.

If you just pause on the fintech business for a second, the fintech business owns its own IP, it's developed in-house, you're not tied to expensive license agreements and royalty agreements. Adding an additional customer goes straight to the bottom line.

This is the strength of what we've seen coming through here. If you look at our Netstar business, Netstar contributed of operating profit R453 million, but if we normalize for the depreciation issue, Netstar operating profit grew 24%, which I think is a phenomenal performance coming out of that business.

Then Werner mentioned the fintech business was absolute blowout performance: R561 million of operating profit, that grew 33% and 4 percentage points margin expansion. Then HealthTech, R143 million at 19% margin.

Also margin expansion on the HealthTech side. IT services: tough year for IT services.

ADB in the beginning of the year really suffered because of a lack of order intakes and a lack of pipeline coming through. Once again, Werner has mentioned this, and I just want to thank the guys in the IT Services business.

When things went very wrong, they took immediate action and that to me is critical. From a financial perspective, I accept that things can go wrong at any time, but it's the speed of the action you take to rectify the situation that's important.

That is then translated to the business becoming profitable in the second half. Once again, for the ADB team, I just wanted to thank them for the hard work that they put into that business.

Altron Document Solutions was the star in the IT Services business. That turnaround has been nothing short of phenomenal.

Warren, Yolanda, and the team there, I'm very, very happy with that. Now, just a word of caution.

To report on 61% growth in ADS is wonderful, but we all know that that is not a sustainable number. What we do think is sustainable is the margin, the operating profit margin in the business.

This will normalize going forward, but I just want to caution because I don't want 61% to be taken into the future on a straight line. I think this shows just from that perspective, the focus for us is growing profitable revenue.

When you look at this now, the platform businesses contribute more than 95% of our group's profitability and I see no reason why this cannot continue. On this slide, I think it's always important for me that even when growth is good that we keep an eye on our expenses, because it happens all the time.

When the going is good, the discipline with regards to expenses starts to fall away, and then you only pick that up when growth slows down and all of a sudden your margins are gone. When we look at operating leverage in the business, gross margin expansion critical.

Werner always said to me, "This is the way you out-sell your competitors." This has been a great performance: 4 percentage points over the last 3 years, or last 2 years.

Then on the right-hand side, managing our operating expenses, managing our salary increases, our remuneration bills, everything we do, that is critical because that allows you to have an outsized profit performance from the revenue that you generate. This is something that we keep our eye on as for me, it's something that we need to be disciplined about.

If I shift over to working capital, I think this continues to tell the story of how the business has changed. When we look at working capital, the majority of it is behind our platform businesses, which is where the growth is.

The investment behind growth is important to us. We've had some marginal increases in IT services and distribution.

It's been a tough year for, as I said, ADB and Arrow, but we keep our eye on that to make sure that we collect our money when it's due to us. I'm going to spend a bit of time on the capex slide.

For us, we have the benefit of being able to fund all of our capex out of operating cash flows. We do not have to get into a debt situation to fund capex, which is testament to the ability of the businesses to generate operating cash flows.

It's a fortunate position to be in. It's not a lot of businesses that have that.

When we look at our capex bill of R800 million, which is 13% up on last year, R739 million is behind growth. We make very sure that we keep general capex and maintenance capex to the bare minimum.

We are bullish when it comes to growth opportunities to put capex behind it. These are businesses that we know.

These are businesses where we understand the market. That's what gives us the confidence to put capex behind it.

The biggest part of this is rental devices in Netstar, and then Fintech rental devices has also stepped up with the rollout of our rental devices to some of the financial institutions. All of those are backed by multi-year revenue contracts.

For me, that is a great allocation of capital where I have a multi-year revenue contract afterwards, and the payback of those capital devices happens fairly quickly. We are investing in systems and platforms to be able to sustain this growth.

We are putting R75 million into Netstar. It's critical for us to make sure that the system doesn't break down.

Warren and his team is going through quite a serious capital investment changing out their systems in Netstar, and we hope for that to be completed within the next 18 months. The last thing here, the investments we've made in HealthTech around the oncology platform, that's now done, that's in the system.

What we are now looking for HealthTech to do is to start delivering on those investments that were made. That's been the last 3 years, and the business is now set to actually benefit from those investments.

That is substantially done, the HealthTech investment. When we then look at our group cash flows, I have only two metrics that's important to me: top-line growth and cash flow.

In between, things will change, but if the top line's not growing, you can only do so much to get to profit. That is always reflected in your cash flows because there's a disconnect between the two.

When we look at this, the R1.9 billion of operating cash flows, tax paid increased to R88 million. I'll just mention it again: this is going to increase in the year ahead as our tax normalizes.

Then we have our lease payments for our buildings and the other leases we have. It gets us to about R2.5 billion of capital available.

We then go through our capex growth, end up with what's left over, and we look at the dividends, and we ended the year with R1.3 billion of cash. I think maybe just on this, this is the way we think about capital allocation and it hasn't changed.

For us, it's fairly straightforward, because I don't think capital allocation should be complicated. I think it should be straightforward, and what we've tried to do here is to shape our capital allocation to support the strategy that we want to achieve.

First things first, we want to generate healthy operating cash flows. It is the first sign of a healthy business is the cash flow that comes out of it.

This conversion of operating cash to EBITDA of more than 70%, that is the health of these predictable annuity-type businesses, provided you keep your eye on costs. Our preference is always to invest in our current businesses, and the ones that will give us the highest conviction of a return above our weighted cost of capital.

We have spent 92% of our growth capex. R708 of that goes to the platforms where we feel we have the highest return coming out of them.

We want to maintain a steady dividend policy to our shareholders. I think it is important for the relationship between us and our shareholders to be able to pay a steady dividend, and we have no plans to change that going forward.

We are in a unique situation this year where we have been able to pay a special dividend, but we have no plans to increase our ordinary payout ratio above 50%. We then end up with where are we post all of this.

We have R1.3 billion of cash, we've got R1 billion in short-term debt facilities, we've got further debt facilities available to us, and we are way below our debt covenants ratios that we have. Finally, we then say, "Okay, is there any inorganic opportunity that makes sense for us from a strategic point of view that we can add to our current businesses?"

We want to have some flexibility to be able to execute on those quickly if and when they come along. We have looked at four or five opportunities in the last year, and some of them went quite far down the line.

We have just not been able to find anything that we can deploy shareholders' money with a level of conviction that we believe we can make a return on it. It's for a variety of reasons, but we're very disciplined when it comes to dealing with shareholder money, and we don't plan to change that.

That has led us to the final where we are paying out the dividend this year. Once again, it's a pleasure for me to stand here and report on this, but there are people in the business that actually deliver this, and for them, I just wanted to thank them.

Werner?

You sure it's not Grant? Dude, how am I in trouble?

Do you want me to deliver these slides as well? Oh, I'm going back.

Sorry. Thank you very much, Carel.

Now, as we close off, I think as pleased as we are with these results, as delighted as we are to reward our shareholders, that's behind us now. Our focus is very much we've delivered 2 months of this financial year already, and then, of course, we're really looking forward to what does the next 3 years look like for Altron.

I sort of touched on this before. I think digitization in corporates and in the informal economy is continuing unabated.

If you look globally, you'll also see that particularly in developing economies, digitization presents a real, real opportunity to actually leapfrog businesses. We believe that we are uniquely positioned as a multi-platform company to be able to take advantage of those opportunities and to be able to drive our customers forward as a scaled multi-platform business.

Just to give you a bit of a sense of our scale, although you would have seen it through this presentation, we have about 2.7 million connected devices with 2.2 million subscribers within our Netstar business, over 5,000 SMEs in our fintech business. I think we must have about 20,000 private practitioners now in our healthcare business.

What that gives us is not just scale, but also gives us access to data, which we're using as a competitive moat both inside our business and to serve our customers inside those platform businesses and outside of them at an unprecedented level. I might get some of these numbers wrong, but I think we process north of 250 billion IoT messages per month.

I think we track about 170 million km per day in our Netstar business. You spoke a little bit about the sort of debit orders, the volumes of transactions and the amount of people going through our fintech business.

We switch, I think it's about just over 100 million healthcare transactions on an annual basis, and we have healthcare information through that private practice management and through that switch on about 15 million customers, 15 million people in South Africa. I speak under correction, but I think only about 9 million people in South Africa actually has access to private healthcare.

That level of scale and also the data that we can use to our advantage really, we believe, sets us up for sustainable growth. A lot of that business is driven for us by the value engine, for example, the AI factory, the work that ADB is doing internally and with our customers in data and AI.

I really, really look forward to telling you more about this on our Capital Markets Day on the 9th of on the 9th of June. Lastly, this helps us to reaffirm our medium-term guidance: still looking to achieve north of 26%, I think we've actually lifted that slightly from 25% to 26% in our platform businesses, where we will invest with the cycle if we think it's necessary.

Carel just mentioned in our Netstar business, we think it's time to modernize the platforms within that business to make sure that we can continue to drive sustainable growth, and we're driving north of 7% in operating profit margin in our IT Services business. We do expect the operating environment to remain constrained.

Our capital allocation will continue to be weighted towards investing in our platform segment, and we intend to maintain our dividend policy of paying out at least 50% of HEPS on continuing operations, and just remember the once-off normalization of our tax rate in FY 2027. Before I hand over to Bronwyn for you to grill myself and Carel, I just want to once again take this opportunity to thank our board, our shareholders, the Exco team, and the 4,000-odd people in Altron who have delivered these results.

Last, but certainly not least, to my family, my wife, and my kids, without their support, I wouldn't be able to do this, and it certainly wouldn't be worth it. Thank you very much, everybody, for your time.

[speaks isiZulu]

For me, it's giving clarity to a customer, knowing exactly what they have signed up for, knowing what the deliverables are from the company, and ensuring that we then supersede the expectations. It's always about making the promise, committing to that, and then ensuring that our team are able to deliver on that promise.

[speaks isiZulu]

The customer service from Altron has been phenomenal. It's a team.

We're able to access anyone from billing, from training, and they are able to give us information at the click of a button.

In terms of how we trying to be and where we trying to go as a business, creating a one-stop shop where people are able to have financial solutions and be catered for them in order to make good financial decisions for them to live a better life. I think that has been our motto for the longest of time.

We have achieved it, but we just would like to take it beyond nationally and also to Africa where possible.

Right, that's your cue. Carel, you not coming today?

They like to take their time. I can't give you a hard time when your share price is almost up 9%.

The reality is that the results are being well absorbed at that moment. Of course it changes, it does change during the day.

Thank you very much for joining us for the Q&A. We have almost 100 people online and I see the questions are coming through fast and furious as well.

That's also going to deviate from my line of questioning. Of course, anybody in the room, please put up your hand.

We've got roving mics. We'll deploy those and you can address your question to either Werner or to Carel.

To warm you up, Carel said that he was happy with that 1% revenue growth. Are you happy?

You did explain, obviously, Altron digital business, the impact. I know not to ask you if you're happy, but are you satisfied at this juncture?

I'm happy, but never satisfied, which is something my chairman taught me. I think considering, as I said, the impact on IT services, considering the performance of the platform businesses, I'm happy, but not satisfied.

I ask you this every single time, but where are these acquisitions? We're talking about transformative growth.

Can people assume that that also means acquisitions?

Bronwyn, I think Werner mentioned that transformative growth for us is a process, and we've already started that. We are now switching full gear into it, but acquisitions is only one part of transformative growth.

For us, when we have businesses where we see significant growth in those businesses, once we know and understand and we've been around for a long time, it makes the most sense for us to invest behind those businesses. Having said that, if there is an opportunity, something out there that makes sense, firstly strategically, and that complements what we have We don't invest money to buy earnings.

If it complements what we have, we can get to the market quicker, then we will look at it. It's not the beginning and end of transformative growth for us.

We did, in the last year, spend quite a bit of time looking at acquisitions, but for a variety of reasons, we didn't execute on them because we did not have the same conviction that they could deliver the returns that our own investments in our own businesses could deliver.

Is there anything that doesn't belong in the portfolio when you look at all of the businesses within the fold?

I think if you look at the last 10 years, I think you followed the group for quite a while. We have a track record of transforming our portfolio in line with strategy.

I think 10 years ago we owned some industrial assets still. If you look at the last 3.5 years, we simplified that operating model.

I think we've gone from about 10 companies to 7 companies now. If it supports strategy, absolutely we'll look at it, but at the same breath, when we own businesses, we grow them, we service our customers, and we run them to the best of our ability.

From Tinashe Roffisee, that's from Standard Bank Group Securities: "We've seen software as a service companies in the US come under pressure due to AI disruption, risks and concerns. To what extent do you see AI as a risk or an enabler for Netstar telematics software as a service?"

Maybe if I can answer the question overall and then I can come back to Netstar specifically. AI is disruptive, there's no doubt about that.

We've seen some of that impact. When you talk about software, we saw some of that impact in the ADB business, right, where the subscription models changed, etc., which particularly impacted our earnings before.

What is the opportunity for us as a group? There's three ways we look at AI.

Firstly, just the general way we use AI, which I think most people in this room and corporates probably do, the way we use generative AI, which kind of scales your productivity. It's almost take you to hyperproductivity, and what it does is a lot of the sort of ordinary run-of-the-mill stuff you can do a heck of a lot quicker and more accurate.

What that does is frees people up to do other, more value-added stuff. AI is a big revenue driver for us.

Our data and our AI practice within, for example, ADB, where we help customers solve their problems with AI, and then we deploy AI internally within our business and there's multiple examples of that. In fact, a key part of our sort of transformative growth strategy is what we call AI Everywhere.

I think in Netstar specifically is actually quite a big opportunity for us. I think the opportunity that comes with embedded OEM telematics, I think the way AI will really drive managing fleets better, driver behavior.

I think it's a big part of our Netstar strategy going forward, and I think a big opportunity.

From Sven Thornsden from Anchor Stockbrokers: "Congrats on a great set of results, gentlemen. Could you comment on expansion of Netstar outside of South Africa?"

Yeah. Again, I think Carel touched on some of that.

We would do that where it makes sense for us. As that is one business where we do have significant presence outside of South Africa: Australia, Southeast Asia.

I think we've been there for about 10 years in a distribution model. We understand that market quite well.

Still an attractive market, but I think it's clear that for us, we must really, really feel that the growth prospects of the market, the partnership, and, of course, the price needs to be right.

No option to divest of Australia at this time?

No. Bronwyn, when we have businesses, and the same goes for, for example, if I take you back to ADS, when we have businesses that are under pressure, our first priority is to fix them.

Our first priority is to make sure that we get them to the level of profitability and growth that we want them to be in, and that is what we're busy with Australia at the moment.

Catherine Thompson from Edison: "For Altron Document Solutions, what do you see as a sustainable operating margin? Similar to FY 2026, or was that exceptional?"

I think ADS was we mentioned they had a phenomenal year. Their operating margin is around 9%.

I think that business has been transformed a lot away from hardware sales to more managed services, and with managed services, you get a bit of a better margin. There's, at this stage, no reason why it cannot continue to operate at that margin level.

Also

from Catherine: "You saw strong growth in devices rented in Altron Fintech with integrated transaction solutions. Could you talk about the trends you're seeing in that part of the business?

You mentioned, obviously, operating profit, or profit has doubled over the last 3 years in fintech."

Yeah. Look, firstly, great performance by that business.

We see the trend in rentals continuing. Carel touched on the fact that that's supported by sort of multi-year contracts with customers, which I think is really driven by there's so much digitization and change in that space that it allows our customers to really be able to get the latest and greatest technology out.

We expect that to continue, and we look forward to sustainable growth in that business. I think like any given business, can you grow at those kind of rates from the base that we've come up with?

We don't know if that's the case, but we certainly continue to think that there's still a lot of runway in the fintech business.

Catherine had another one on the ADS transaction that happened post-year-end. She's just wanting a bit more of an explanation on it.

Yeah. What we did is we entered into a JV agreement with one of our biggest customers in the KZN area where Altron owns 51% of the business and the partner owns 49.

It's a non-cash transaction and we will consolidate that going forward, but it does allow us to get rid of a lot of costs and overheads in that area, which immediately brings a profit uplift. We've known this customer for many years and we're quite comfortable with the transaction.

From Miles Furie: "How will Altron achieve transformative growth if the platform segment's operating margin remains at 26%?"

I'm trying to understand the nature of the

How will Altron, the group, achieve transformational growth if the platform segment's operating margin remains at 26%? Perhaps just unpack transformational growth as you see it.

Okay.

I think maybe, Miles, maybe the nature of your question is you think those margins should be higher? Is that the yeah, is that the nature of the question?

Look at a couple of answers. Remember, we've guided that it'll be north, because our view is if, in a given period, we want to make investments in the business for the longer term, we'll make it.

Whether we think that's to be price-defensive, whether we think that we're going to put some more investments after big opportunities that we think may pay off 1 or 2 years from now. Transformative growth for us, as I said, is all over the business, continuing to invest in what we're doing in Netstar in terms of embedded OEM telematics, our data play there.

We spoke about the pivot there to mobility and becoming more of a data player. I think in fintech, it's quite clear.

We'll show you some of that at Capital Markets Day. We continue to invest behind our distribution channel, our Kasi squad.

We continue to invest in our platform. In HealthTech, a business, for example, where we see quite a lot of data monetization opportunities.

Transformative growth, as I said, for us is a process. It's something that happens all the time.

We'll always maximize margins to the extent that we can in the short-term period, but we never want to do that at the expense of what we think is sustainable long-term growth and being able to capitalize on opportunities that we see coming down the line.

Any questions from the room? We do have that roving mic ready to deploy.

I see we are You're doing a good job. As I say, every single time when we keep the audience stunned.

We have no more questions coming in from online. Just perhaps a couple of closing questions.

120 cents share per share in terms of special dividend, is this once-off?

Yes. No, Bronwyn, we're going into the next 3 years of our strategy, and Werner mentioned it, but we can't see 3 years forward.

We have a plan. Things will change.

Some things will work, some things won't work. What we want to do is have the flexibility to take advantage of opportunities when they come, and we want to have the flexibility to defend our businesses when we have to.

The special dividend is the end of a 3-year period, but now we're going into the next 3 years. I think investors should not expect that to

You did say cash generation is a sign of a healthy business. That R1.9 billion in cash generation is, in your book, something that perhaps given the environment we're going into, from a GDP perspective, South Africa, looking towards two interest rate hikes potentially.

You've always said that IT services is a barometer of GDP growth. To

GDP growth, yeah, 100%. I think that's what excites us so much about the business going forward, Bronwyn.

Look, firstly, I think our IT services businesses, as I said, constrained environment, sure. No doubt, interest rates will impact them because it will impact their customers.

I still think they're also quite well positioned to either take advantage of an uptick or gain some market share. What's really nice about platform businesses is that they're almost uncoupled from GDP growth, because the opportunities there are in the informal segment, and the opportunities there is because of digitization.

I think that's actually going to speed up more and more. That's why we're really excited about this sort of transformation of ourselves into this multi-platform player.

Of course, absolutely, having the balance sheet and the annuity business to back that up, really really excites us.

Little granularity to end things off: working capital at R203 million, under control, Carel?

I think where we want to spend the money is where we're seeing the growth and it ties into our capex and working capital, majority of that is in the platform businesses. The benefit of putting working capital into the platform business is the fact that it's annuity revenue and your working capital cycle is actually quite light.

We're always keeping an eye on working capital as we do with operating expenses, because we want to make sure that we don't start to lose the discipline there.

Just to warm you up for all the media interviews that you've got and also the investor meetings that you'll be facing later: Karooo trades on a multiple of 30 times, R25 billion in market cap. Where the question's going.

Do you want to give the answer? I have

no idea. No, no, no, Bron.

Look, I think I've said it many times before. Karooo, Cartrack in particular, fantastic business, very fierce competitor of ours, but we're all about focusing on what we can control.

If you look at the results that we've been privileged to deliver over the last 3 years and we're planning to take the business, if I look at Netstar, when Grant came to the business, those target operating models, they're all goals and targets that we set ourselves. Whilst you always want to scan the environment for opportunities, we don't want to get distracted by that.

We can only run our business to the best of our abilities. Touch wood, we're on track or have exceeded most of what we've tried to achieve, and really focus on doing that going forward.

Werner, thank you very much. Carel, as always, a pleasure.

Thank you to our live audience and thank you to the more than 100 people joining us for this live webcast. We'll be back in another 6 months.

Thank you. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.