Thank you, Marlize, and welcome to everybody. Thank you for joining us for this online presentation.

Appreciate your interest in Cashbuild. As per usual, I'll start off with a few high-level slides, then I'll hand over to Hanré, who will cover some of the financial information, and then over to Shane, who will cover the products information, and I'll end up with some store development and some closing comments.

Overall, a solid set of results for Cashbuild for this half year that management is pleased about. On that basis, if we go into the nature of our business, nothing's changed, still a mass retailer of building materials and related products in the home improvement space.

We offer a quality range of products, and I must reiterate the quality products at competitive prices. We're very proud of our quality offering.

We're still selling predominantly for cash, although, as I mentioned previously, the definition of cash has changed over years, but we unashamedly sell for cash. 322 stores at half-year end, and I'll deal with a bit more detail on that at the end.

If we then look at the highlights of the results for the six months, just a few graphs from my side. First up is sales, R6.3 billion, up 3%, decent trend following from HY '23 for the two-year period, a 4% compound growth, and on the five-year basis, 1% down for that five-year comparative basis.

Operating profit, R191 million, 10% up. I must just point out here we've excluded the R35 million loss that was made on the Malawi subsidiary in this graph just for comparable purposes, therefore, for a two-year basis, 1% up, and for a five-year, on the back of that post-COVID half year, 20% down.

Then over to headline earnings per share, 675 cents, 18% up. Again, a decent trend for the three last three years, 11% up on a two-year comparable basis, and again, on that post-COVID exceptional year, 15% down if you look at the five-year compound growth basis.

Then last but not least, the net asset value per share at 79.25, flat on the prior year, and this is mostly due to a future liability that we had to create on the put and call option that was part of the Allbuild transaction, but Hanré will probably deal with that a bit later as well. At this stage, that's it from my side, and I will now hand over to Hanré.

Thank you, Werner, and good morning, everyone. Starting off with the income statement, and as Werner mentioned, the R6.3 billion turnover number, that increased year-on-year by 3%.

This yielded an increase at gross profit level of 7% at a gross profit percentage of 25%. Operating expenses at just under R1.4 billion increased by 6%, yielding a 10% increase at operating profit level.

Operating profit, as Werner mentioned, excluded the loss on disposal of subsidiary that we've disclosed separately for purposes of this presentation. Cashbuild has decided to exit Malawi due to exchange control limitations as well as other onerous trading conditions that is in Malawi.

To highlight, as part of our operating income, is R10 million of other income that relates to refundable customer accounts. Cashbuild started to recognise income on this category towards the end of last year.

This relates to accounts that customers hold with Cashbuild that is not expected to be utilised with future purchases. At every reporting period, we will re-evaluate the trends and we will update our numbers accordingly.

Our net financing cost increased slightly to R16 million, affected by the reducing profile of our IFRS 16 leases as well as reduction in interest income in the lower interest environment. Our profit for the period and earnings per share negatively affected by the loss on disposal of our Malawi subsidiary, but at headline earnings level, as Werner mentioned, we've been able to grow by 18% to 675 cents.

Dividend per share is up 21% at 393 cents. Looking at our gross profit and operating profit margins, we are pleased to show an increase in our gross margin from 24.3% to 25% in the current period.

The 24.3% base was affected by one less set-and-discount run in that period and also included some of our P&L closure stores that at low margins and that we closed during the previous financial year towards the end of that financial year. The current year was impacted by P&L conversions that was converted into Cashbuild, and we've seen a pleasing increase in both rand rand margin as well as percentage margin in these 14 converted stores.

We further embarked on a number of margin improvement initiatives that's worked well, and we've also seen a slight change in the mix towards higher margin product. Amper Alles, that was consolidated for one month in this period, also had a marginal effect on the gross margin.

Our operating profit margin at 3% at similar levels to the prior two years, and it's getting the appropriate attention from us as executives. Our focus is to improve as well as our operating profit margin on the back of strong revenue growth, and strong, but also responsible revenue growth.

Our operating expenses at just under R1.4 billion increased by 6%, and on an existing store basis by 4%. We are comfortable with the increase in our operating expenses for the reasons that I will mention just now and is within our defined parameters.

Our people costs, being our largest cost item, increased by 5%, and 3% on existing store basis. We provide increases to our staff that's above inflationary, and the increase provided to staff was 4.5% for the past year.

Executives received a 3.7% increase. To note, if you exclude the Amper Alles and Malawi transactions, we had a slight reduction in our head count that has been affected by new stores as well as our P&L closures.

Property costs only increased by 1%, and negative 2% on existing store basis. There's an anomaly in the prior year in that there were 14 14 refits that was carried out compared to the current year, 8 refits.

We've also been able to contain our costs regarding repairs and maintenance and rates and taxes. The impact of our P&L closure stores are also in the property line.

Advertising increased by 4%, and on existing store basis by 1%. We've been able to reduce our costs significantly by using more digital platforms.

We've also had more focused and localized approach to our marketing in our new stores as well as our strategic stores. IT costs increased by the expected 19%.

This is due to the migration from our current SAP ECC6 platform onto a new SAP S/4HANA platform. This result was necessitated by the discontinuation of the old SAP ECC6 instance.

We look forward to complete this migration in 2027. Our delivery costs increased by 3% at similar levels to our sales increases.

What contributed further to our 6% increase in operating expenses was our transaction costs and once-off costs to do with the Amper Alles and Malawi transactions as well as foreign exchange losses incurred in Botswana due to the liquidity crisis experienced in that country. Looking at our customer transactions, that increased by 4%, slightly higher than our sales increase, and this is on the back of various marketing activities to attract new customers as well as our aggressive pricing strategy.

Our average basket size has remained at similar levels to the prior year at R742. Turning to our segmental disclosures, we are pleased to show an increase in all segments of our gross profit value increase, but also GP percentage increases.

Cashbuild South Africa showed a respectable result with operating profit at similar levels to the prior year. The all other South Africa segment now includes Amper Alles, although that's only a result for one month yielding a R1 million profit for this transaction.

P&L, that contributed the majority to this segment, had a pleasing turnaround at gross profit and gross profit percentage level, although one can see the reduction in revenue due to the closure of the 11 stores. The operating profit for P&L at R1 million also includes some closure costs as well as impairment costs, which would have created normalized operating profit of R6 million.

A very pleasing result indeed. Cashbuild in the other African countries, specifically Namibia, Lesotho, and Eswatini, showed a respectable result, but unfortunately went backwards on the operating profit level, albeit very slightly.

Cashbuild in Botswana showed a slight reduction in revenue and operating profit, whilst Malawi showed a large turnaround, mostly due to a prior year foreign exchange loss that was included in the prior year base. We've also seen a significant increase in revenue and cost mostly driven by inflationary pressures.

What further drove up revenue is shortfall or shortcoming in product and the availability in product in Malawi. We still decided to exit Malawi for the various reasons that we mentioned earlier.

Capital expenditure at R139 million, up 28%, showing Cashbuild's intention to grow our store base. If we turn now to headline earnings per share and dividend per share, our headline earnings per share increased by 18% at 675 cents, whilst dividend per share increased by 21% at 393 cents.

We are pleased to show the last two years of continuous improvement, and we just short of our 2023 results. We've been able to maintain our dividend cover at 1.5 times and have paid to date R378 million to our Cashbuild Empowerment Trust.

Looking at our statement of financial position, we've got a strong balance sheet with cash and short-term funds at just under R2.1 billion. Included in this number is refundable customer accounts of just under R1.3 billion.

Inventories, to highlight, increased by 8%, mostly due to the Amper Alles transaction that contributed just under 4%. We've also had increase in new stores and slight inflationary increases.

We're also pleased with the use of our new inventory modeling tool that is starting to yield good results. Our shareholders' equity at R1.9 billion at similar levels to the prior year as well as our net asset value per share at R79.25, also at similar levels.

Our cash flow shows cash generated from operations at R413 million. This is excluding working capital adjustments and an increase of 4%.

Working capital inflow of R179 million shows good working capital management. To note, this also includes amounts from refundable customer accounts.

To highlight in the rest of the cash flow items depicted on the slide is fixed asset investments of R279 million, which includes the capex mentioned in the segmental disclosures, showing our store growth as well as the Amper Alles acquisition of R96 million. We've funded the acquisition with a R100 million term debt facility.

That's a R100 million depicted on the cash flow. Taking all these cash flow items into account, we ended up at a healthy cash balance of just under R2.1 billion.

This also includes any short-term funds that we have in money market accounts. I now hand over to Shane Thoresson, our Chief Operating Officer, that will take you through the product categories.

Thank you, Shane.

Thank you, Hanré. As Werner mentioned, I'm going to take you through some slides indicating the performance of some of our major categories, but starting firstly with the group sales per week, and we can see pleasing or reasonable growth in the first quarter of 6%, a disappointing 1% growth in the second quarter, albeit on the back of some reasonable growth in the prior year for the same period, and also selling price inflation of only 0.8% year-on-year.

We look at the volumes, they're around R240 million a week, and very positive growth going into the first couple of weeks of the third quarter at 8%. Relative to the market, if we look at some of the retail numbers being reported recently, specifically in the hardware sector that Cashbuild obviously trades, the likes of Build it and Italtile, it's pleasing to note that we still appear to be growing some market share.

Moving on to the cement sales by pocket, and effectively what we're looking at over here is growth of 10% in the first quarter, which was very encouraging, 5% in the second quarter, mix of 23.3% and 20.8% in the second quarter, and this on the back of purchase inflation again a negative of 2.6%, and we've seen this for a number of reporting periods as the market remains volatile, very competitive, various suppliers trying to gain market share, and prices fluctuating weekly at this stage. Volumes around 600-odd thousand pockets a week, and going into the first couple of weeks of quarter three, a 6% growth.

Again relative to the market, our estimation is that the market is fairly flat at best, although I can say I recently as early as this week attended a budget review seminar with Dr. Roelof Botha from Econometrix, and his numbers indicate that the market has declined again further by 1.6% over the last 12 months.

Volumes are around 14-odd million tons in terms of demand, capacity at around 20-odd million tons, demand is at around 70-odd percent of capacity. Notwithstanding that, imports have again increased to record levels in excess of 1.5 million tons, I beg your pardon, and that's a 30% growth on the prior year.

Some positive feedback from him, however, is that he believes that for the 2026 financial year the cement industry should see growth of around 3.3%, and that's on the promise of some infrastructure development, which hasn't been forthcoming over the last couple of years, we'll have to wait and see what happens as far as that's concerned. If that development does happen, he believes that compound growth of 2.5% over the next three to five years should be achieved.

We haven't seen that for a number of years in the cement industry. This slide shows us the cement unit sales per supplier, or effectively each supplier's mix of the Cashbuild business, and again we've seen some significant change in this slide, specifically with regards to Mamba Cement, we've seen them grow their share of the Cashbuild business from 27% 12 months ago to 31% now, and firmly entrenched as our primary supplier of cement in the Cashbuild group, and that on the back of a steady decline over the period from PPC, 13% down to 11%, and more specifically Sephaku from 30% down to 23% in December '25.

We've seen AfriSam remain fairly consistent at 9% over the period, and then a steady growth from Afrimat, 2%, 3%, 4%, and the others remaining fairly consistent. Total timber sales, the first quarter at 8% growth, second quarter 4%, 7.6% and 7.1% mix in the two respective quarters, purchase inflation above average at 4.7%, and I can say this is the first time in a number of years that we've actually seen some positive inflation growth in the timber market, volumes around R18 million a week, and going into quarter three, very encouraging 14% growth.

The only market-related figures that we track here is reported by a company called Crickmay, and they report on the timber market specifically building lumber in terms of cubic meter growth, and we see they are reporting numbers of around 0.3% over the 12-month period, and then obviously a listed company like York, their last reporting figures indicated a 1% growth of timber volume. Total brick sales, the make-up here is both the cement and clay-related products, we've seen growth of 4% and 2% in quarters one and two, mix of 6.9% and 6.3% on the back of purchase inflation slightly above average at 2.1%, really driven by input costs related to transport and electricity, and specifically coming out of the clay products, volumes of around R16-odd million a week, and growth of 6% in the first couple of weeks of quarter three.

Moving on to total roofing sales, and really we looking at concrete roof tiles here as well as steel roof sheeting, Harvey tiles, etc., 6% growth in quarter one, a disappointing 2% decline in quarter two, 8.8% and 8.3% mix in the two respective quarters, and again purchase inflation decline of 1.2% driven largely by what's happening in the steel industry, volumes of around R22-odd million a week, and going into the third quarter, a positive growth of 9%. Total opening sales, and the make-up here is really the doors and window frames as well as the doors and windows themselves, sliding doors, etc., and performance here continues to be driven mainly by the aluminium category, 3% growth in quarter one, again 2% decline in quarter two, similar to the roofing products, fairly consistent mix over the two quarters at 7.3% and 7.4%, purchase inflation of only 0.8%, volumes around R17 million per week, and again 6% growth for the first couple of weeks of quarter three.

Then the last slide is total decorative products, and the make-up here is the paint and related accessories, and then specifically the flooring products, ceramic and porcelain flooring, and we've seen growth here very similar to what we've seen for the total group, 6% in quarter one, only 1% in quarter two, sales mix of 13.1% in the first quarter, increasing over the second quarter, the peak trading period, to 16.7%, that's fairly normal in terms of our business, purchase inflation again slightly above average at 1.2%, volumes around R33 million a week, and the only real numbers that we track here from a market perspective is the paint market, and our estimation is that paint sales in terms of litres have increased by about 2% over the 12-month period. Then obviously in terms of ceramic floor tiles, we track the likes of the reporting of Italtile, more specifically their CTM and TopT business, which trades in similar markets to Cashbuild, and we saw earlier on this week that CTM reported negative 3% growth in their business, again an indication that we continue to grow some market share.

That's all the slides, and I'll be happy to take some questions at the end.

Thank you, Shane. I'll end up with some store developments and some summary at the end.

If we look at our sales by province, and again a quick reminder of this slide, the bubbles at the top is the percentage growth year-on-year in revenue, and then the numbers at the bottom of the bar charts is the number of stores in that area this year and the prior year on the grey bar chart. Most of the territories were trading positive for this half year, the best-performing one being KwaZulu-Natal at 8.2%, closely followed by the Eastern Cape at 7.8%, both of them having one extra store for this half year.

On the negative side, when we look at North West, the worst performer there, down 3.9%, mostly due to some big projects that came to an end that were in the base that were not repeated this year, and for similar reasons, in the Northern Cape, a slight decline there of 0.2%. If we then look at our stores by location, again the number of stores this year and last year, sales growth for the total area, and then the existing growth at the bottom of the numbers there.

A good performance from the metro stores and from the town stores. Metro stores coming off a low base of the prior year, good recovery on that side.

Country stores also performing solid at the 4.5%, and then maybe the exception this time round is rural stores growing at 8 1.8%, and on existing basis, actually down 1.5%. This is influenced mostly by, as Hanré been mentioning about the closure of the P&L stores, most of them were actually located in rural areas, hence the negative there on the existing growth.

On store development, overall a movement of four new stores net growth from 318 to 322. If we look at other projects other than new and closure stores, refits, relocations, or conversions, we did 17 this half year compared to the 20 of the previous half year, three less this year.

If I maybe spend a bit of time on actually what happened during the six months, there were as mentioned the four new stores: one Cashbuild store, two Cashbuild SMS stores, and one Cabifit. There were nine refits, relocations; five P&L hardware conversions into Cashbuild SMS format; and then three Cashbuild stores into Cashbuild Extra format.

We acquired the three Amper Alles stores, we closed another P&L hardware store in terms of our strategy, and then, albeit showed under closures, the disposal of the two Cashbuild Malawi stores have shown they're leaving us at the 322 stores at the end of the half year. If I then look at the store format representation shows you the evolution of the different formats.

Cashbuild, firstly, fairly stable over the years, as mentioned, finding it more and more difficult to open standard Cashbuild stores, albeit that there's quite a few that's been approved that's awaiting for the developments to start. The Cashbuild SMS stores growing nicely, both opening of new ones and then the conversions of the P&L stores.

On the P&L hardware side, the decline in line with our approach and a communicated strategy of reducing the number of P&L hardware stores by converting and closing them, strategy on track, and we're quite pleased with where we are at the moment. Then the three Amper Alles stores on the left there at bottom.

Then the Cashbuild Extra stores, five of them trading as at the end of this half year, currently some more in the process of being converted as we speak. Cabifit stores, four in total, two in-store format, and those two store-in-store formats are not calculated into the total number of the 322 stores, and again as we sit here, some more Cabifits being constructed at the moment.

This slide just shows you where those new stores or additional stores were opened and added. You can see there Eastern Cape, one; two in Limpopo; Cabifit there was in Gauteng; two Amper Alles stores in Gauteng; and the one in Groblersdal being in Limpopo where we added those new stores.

The competitive landscape slide, I'm always just leaving in for reference purposes, not too much to add for this at this stage. Then in summary, the DIY market's under pressure due to the weak consumer sentiment out there.

Shane mentioned some of the market stats, it is very fair to say that our industry remains under pressure at the moment. The growth for the first seven weeks at 8% was quite pleasing, showing that our top-line initiatives is working and that the temporary difficulty we had in Q3 with some external factors as well is hopefully something of the past.

Further than that, the South African economy is expected to remain low-growth environment, modest growth in this year and for the years to come, also supported by much lower inflation going forward. Our new store formats are being very well received in the market, and we are continuing to investing in that, and we will focus on delivering more of them in the few six months that's left and then also for the next financial year.

Then last there but not least, Amper Alles acquisition was effective 1 December. We are very excited not only what this can deliver for the group from the current base, but also the growth opportunities that there are in terms of that format for the group.

Maybe then as a closing comment, we're focusing heavily on delivering our strategy. It's well under progress.

We're driving top line, growing profitable market share, and still continuously looking to improve efficiencies in the business. That's it from our side.

Thank you for attending the presentation, and I'll hand you back to Marlize.

Thanks, Marlize. We've been buying back shares this first half.

We've bought back 200,000-odd shares and cancelled them, and we'll continue now that the close period is finished, we'll continue with a controlled manner buying back shares at these levels.

The value proposition is, as we disclosed in our SENS announcements when we announced the transaction, it's really an opportunity for Cashbuild to participate in a business that's got more contact with contractors, building contractors, and then secondly, focusing on a bit of higher LSM than Cashbuild currently serves in the market. That's really the value proposition.

It's a new area for growth for the business. In terms of the substantial difference for the business, I don't think it's made any substantial difference yet.

About R24 million of turnover, as we disclosed, they were only in for one one month. Actually a small half a million loss for that month due to implementation costs and that, at the operating level, adding a R1 million profit.

For this period, really very insignificant impact.

The first one is fairly simple answer is that the first half's costs, the closures that we had to take or could take in terms of accounting has been taken. Since the half-year end, we've closed another four P&L stores, and those costs will come as and when we close it.

Our process, as we've mentioned, is that we will look at every single store as and when leases come up for renewal and then either close or convert into a Cashbuild small-model store, ending up with probably in the end about 15 P&L stores trading.

That's a very interesting question. We saw good performance all over throughout the country, I can't really say whether it was deferred.

There's a good possibility because Q2 was very low for us, only 1% growth, but we've also seen that the initiatives that we're working on, our new format stores and that, they're really well performance in the new or the second half of the financial year. The start was very good, nothing specific other than what we've done up to now.

Shane Thoresson, I don't know if you want, but let me maybe

because there's cement in,

maybe let's just talk about that. The 7%, I think Hanré explained it in the presentation that it was off a lower base, 24.3% last year, one must bear that in mind.

The 25% that we reached this half or this first half is the stated objective that we want to trade at. Do we believe it's sustainable?

Yes, there's nothing that indicates to us it's not at this stage, but as things change very quickly, and we need to react if things change, and so we won't be sitting and be fixated on that. For now, yes, we believe it's sustainable.

What mix is from cement? Sales mix is 22%, 23%, definitely not gross margin mix.

I unfortunately don't have a number for what percentage of our gross profit is made out of cement. I can just tell you very little, cuz cement is sold nearly at cost.

Thank you, David. It is 5.5% growth if we exclude all the Malawi, P&L closures, as well as Amper Alles.

Jan, the Malawi was sold to the other minority shareholders, and the operating profit impact for the year was R11 million, and in the prior year, R2 million. We can see a much improved result from them, but as I said, based on inflationary pressures.

Sayeed, yes, I don't know, Shane, if you want maybe talk about some of the initiatives we're busy with, that might be more appropriate.

There are a number of initiatives that have started, some probably 18 months, if not longer ago. I don't think it's one specific event that has improved the margin.

I think it's a number of small initiatives that are coming to fruition, as well as obviously better trading margins coming out of the P&L business, especially in those stores that have been converted to Cashbuild SMS stores. The likes of, for example, paint mixing, which we've implemented, and we have 45-odd stores now that offer a paint mixing facility, which we never offered before.

Not only are we seeing growth in revenue there, but we also seeing substantial growth in margin. That as well as the Cashbuild Extra stores, where we've included some extra categories of products, specifically on the more decorative lines, and margins out of those categories are much better than what we've seen on the structural products.

Shane, wil jy?

I think I've partly answered that question previously, but at the end of the day, it's a little bit of both. The existing P&L stores are seeing marginal improvements in the margin, but the biggest improvement is coming out of those that have been converted to Cashbuild SMS stores.

How many more P&L stores have been identified for closure? We'll look at each one of those stores individually as and when leases are up for renewal, etc.

Depending on performance, we will then make those decisions closer to the time. We do believe that ultimately there's probably going to be in the vicinity of around 15 or 16 P&L stores that will remain trading under that brand.