Hello and welcome to AMCIL's full-year financial results briefing. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. All questions will be taken via the webcast. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please enter your questions in the ask questions box at the bottom of the webcast window. I would like to hand the presentation over to Mr. Mark Freeman, Managing Director of AMCIL. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mark Freeman, the CEO and Managing Director of AMCIL Ltd. I'm also the Portfolio Manager for AMCIL, having taken over that role about 2.5 years ago. Welcome to this full-year result briefing. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians from all the lands we're gathered on today and pay my respects to the elders past, present, and emerging. Joining me today on the webinar, we have Andrew Porter, our CFO, Matthew Rowe, our Company Secretary, and Geoffrey Driver, our General Manager of Business Development. This briefing is based on the material available on the company's website. Presentation slides will change automatically via the webcast. Please note following the presentation, there will be time for questions and answers. You can ask a question via the webcast using the tab at the bottom of the screen.
Now we'll turn to the slides. Slide two, there's a disclaimer just to say we're here to talk about the company. We're not giving any advice as such. At this point, we'll move into the results, and I'll pass over to Andrew Porter, our CFO, to talk through those.
Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. For those of you that are seeing the presentation on screen, which actually is all of you, there are four boxes up there. The profit for the year is $6.7 million. That's the top left-hand box, down from $7.5 million in 2023. There was a reduction in the dividends that we received, part of that through the sale of some of the higher yielding stocks and purchasing of stocks that have different growth profiles. In some cases, like our larger stocks, BHP, etc., they reduced their dividends over the year. That was that our revenue from cash deposits went up, of course, as one would expect in what had been an increasing interest rate environment. We had slightly fewer gains on the trading portfolio this year. That was the profit.
However, what's not included in that profit are the realized gains for the year. After tax, AMCIL had about $13.7 million of realized gains. AMCIL has had a history of paying out a portion of those as part of its total dividends. This year is no exception, the exception perhaps being that it's slightly larger than it has been in more recent years. The normal final dividend of $0.025 has been accompanied by a $0.03 special dividend. That brings the total dividends for the year up to $0.065 as opposed to $0.04 last year. The portfolio return is 6.4%. That is below the market of 15.1%, but Mark will be coming on to that later on. The management expense ratio, that's the cost of running the business at 56 basis points, so that's the same as last year. That's $0.56 for every $100 that you have invested in AMCIL.
Regularly, the board does a check against comparative investment type vehicles to make sure that those costs are within the parameters that the board would like to see. They again did that exercise this year and are comfortable that we still continue to be a relatively low-cost investment vehicle. Moving on to slide five, this year you'll be aware that AMCIL is trading at a discount to its net tangible asset. This is an issue that is faced by the vast majority of listed investment companies at the moment. It's not just an AMCIL issue. It is a listed investment company issue. The board is very conscious of this. Two things have eventuated this year as part of those efforts to look at what we can do to reduce the discount.
First of all, the company did do a share buyback during the year, so neutralized shares issued under the DRP and the DSSP during the year. The AICS, which provides staff for AMCIL and the other LICs, has engaged a Business Development Manager who has been talking to various investors and investor groups about the benefits of investing in a vehicle like AMCIL. Ultimately, though, although we can take those steps, we can't control the share price, but the Board and management are very aware of it. Obviously, happy to take any questions in the Q&A afterwards, but in the meantime, I'll hand over back to Mark.
Thanks, Andrew. Now we'll get on to the portfolio performance and the activities. We'll start with the performance, and these are the 1, 3, 5-year, 10-year numbers. AMCIL's performance is shown after expenses, but also after tax. Obviously, to this point, we hadn't paid out a lot of franking credits we'd been accumulating. We have obviously announced a special dividend of $0.03, so we don't include the franking until we've actually paid it out. That crimps the performance. Having said that, these are not the sort of returns we're looking for from AMCIL. I'll come to it shortly. We do have a slide on what the last 2.5 years have looked like to put it into perspective. In that 2.5- year period, the first couple of years were very strong. That performance has slowed. There's been some rotation in the market.
Now the market's had a bit of a run, but it's interesting to go back and say, how have we gone over the last 2.5 years? I'll come to that shortly. If we go back to what we're doing in AMCIL, it is a focused portfolio, and we've been consistent against our process over that timeframe. It is a comparatively low-cost product. There's no performance fees. There's strong equity ownership by the directors and staff. We try to keep the portfolio relatively low turnover, and we want to stay in a portfolio of what I call quality stocks. We want to be in businesses that are moving forward. Ultimately, in the long run, share prices follow profit growth. You want to be in stocks that are growing profits over time, and our frameworks have been set up to do that.
If you move on to the next slide, just to go over our investment frameworks here, these have been set up to find companies that can grow profits over time. The attributes of businesses that have that are usually companies that have a unique set of assets or an industry leadership position. Companies that dominate an industry have a strong propensity to produce high returns and grow profits. Businesses that have a sustainable competitive advantage. We're wary of companies that have external risk factors. Unfortunately, we've caught one of those in the portfolio over this timeframe, and it just shows you that these issues that I'm talking through are how important they are, but I'll come to that shortly. Balance sheets are critical. Many companies blown up through poor balance sheets. We prefer companies that have annuity-type revenue streams, and we want businesses that have effective management.
All those factors together usually drive a sustainable competitive advantage. These generally lead to high return on capital. Businesses that produce high return on equity generally perform well over time. When you're doing that, it gives you lots of cash to reinvest to continue to drive growth, continue to capture market share, build on your leadership position, and all those usually result in profit growth and therefore shareholder value creation over time. Do we want to buy these types of companies when we see value? The best time to do that is to be early to an emerging quality growth stock or wait for a significant price dislocation in a more established or strongly growing business and make sure you capture those opportunities. We're set up to try and capture opportunities. That's the key to funds management.
If you move on to some of the activity and putting that lens through that, we will exit stocks if we think they are completely overvalued. We thought Commonwealth Bank was in that position, and I've got charts on that shortly. We did have Mineral Resources at this point during this year, Pexa, Domino’s. We exited all those because we thought they had issues against our framework, so we got out. PSC, we were running for a short time, but then we had a takeover in that, which was good. PWR Holdings, we had some short-term concerns, so we got out. Costco, you can see it is in the buy and sells. We participated in the IPO. It was a very small trading position. We traded it out. Some of our trimming, again, I've got slides on some of these further in the presentation, being Wesfarmers and the banks.
We've just taken a little bit off the top and some of the stocks that had run hard at that point, such as Goodman, Breville, Netwealth. I'm not sure this is good or bad, but we trimmed quite a bit of our recent high prices. Looking back, we probably should have got out of the lot, but we still think that's a good business going forward. We did reduce the position substantially. We've added to just some of our existing holdings through the period in WiseTech, ARB, Block, and NEXTDC. There was a nice pullback in Cochlear that gave us a chance to add to our holding there. The rest of the acquisitions on the right, we'll pick up on the slides further through the presentation. Just moving to the next slide, I guess trying to understand what happened to our portfolio over the last 2.5 years.
As I said, we really haven't substantially turned over the portfolio in that period. It's just that in the first two years, some of the stocks listed here had incredible runs like Macquarie Technology, ARB, Reece got to incredibly high prices. Over the last six months, some of those have fallen back to what I'd call probably fairer value. That's why we sort of say, what does it look like over that 2.5 years? Our most disappointing investment over that period has been IDP Education. It was a business that did have issues against a couple of elements in our frameworks, particularly outside influence, being governments. It's fair to say government influence has had a much greater impact on that stock than we had thought at the time. It does have a strong leadership position. It's a very fragmented market.
They continue to grow share, but the sector has been, it's fair to say, it's been brutal on the business. We're probably going to continue to hold the stock from here, but we're not looking to add to that position. As I said, Commonwealth Bank, exceptional growth. We've exited that. If you move on to the next slide then to pick up, I guess the point that I've been trying to make is that over the last 2.5 years, the portfolio has done well. The first two years were very strong, and we've just given back some of those gains over the last six months. We test the quality of the transactions in the last financial year. Even though the portfolio wanted to perform, the transactions we did were still adding value to the portfolio, which is pleasing following our process.
We've had some good buying last financial year from Block, Life360, EVT, Hub, and Sigma Healthcare. We keep focusing on quality opportunities to add to the portfolio. The two charts below, the chart on the left shows how the portfolio performance has gone over the last 2.5 years. This first slide is on a pre-tax basis. After management expense ratio, but pre-tax, portfolio is up 14.2%, index up 12.2%, and then after tax, up 14.1% against 13.6%, but with a lot of franking credits sitting there. I'll sort of check those numbers. Over that period, the index is up about 36%, the portfolio pre-tax, but after cost is up 43%. I'm still comfortable with, very comfortable with what's going on in the portfolio. I'm never happy with our performance, and the key is we've got to continue that performance going forward, which is sticking to our process.
I'm confident if we continue to do that, we'll continue to do well against our benchmark. I guess digging into those, a couple of those transactions over the last year, as I said, we continue to find opportunities that align with our frameworks. The key is to act on those. Sigma has been a good investment for us. We bought into the stock at about $1.56. This is a founder-led company. It's got a significant market position, a leadership position in the category killer in that segment. Strong balance sheet, great track record, plenty of opportunities for growth, good return on capital, fits everything we look for. We bought that one, and it's done well. Life360, which is the app on your phone that can track where you are or where your family are, also where your luggage is, if you'd like to do that.
I do that on my phone. Again, these had many of the attributes we look for. It was a founder-led company, growing its business substantially. It's a global business. The opportunity is still significant. Strong balance sheet. Again, it ticked all our boxes, so we took a position there at around $18.90. I think it's up to $40 today. EVT, again, we're happy to look across the market. This was more what we call a cyclical or an asset play. Founder-led business again, strong balance sheet, and we felt a couple of their businesses were right at the bottom of the cycle. If you're buying into cyclical companies, the key is to buy at the bottom of the cycle. We did that, and I think we bought at about $10.90, and it's performed very well for us.
I just thought I'd add in there the one we bought at the end of last year, Technology One, which again was originally a founder-led business, annuity income streams, strong balance sheet, high return on equity, massive market position, customer churn is less than 1%, fits our process perfectly, and that's been a good investment for us as well. We're sticking with the process, and our transactions have continued to add value. As I said, the disappointing one was IDP. On to the next slide, just again, it doesn't have to be all about growth stocks. We've taken a position in Amcor really around the value we think they can create from the recent acquisition of Berry. We've seen in the past where this company makes an acquisition, they do quite well in extracting synergies. It usually gives a period of 2-3 years of good earnings growth.
The PE is very low. The yield is about 5.5%. That is still yet to come through. I think we're sort of around break even on that stock when you include the dividends we've received. Hopefully, we do get those synergies and the stock does start to creep up. We did buy some Region Group. The yield is around 6.5% when we bought it. I think the market's expecting 3%- 4%. I think it might be like 2% - 3%. Those sort of returns, we think that's an attractive opportunity to add to the portfolio. We are happy to look for value in income stocks as long as we think there's growth in cyclical stock, as long as we think that's at the bottom, as well as good quality emerging growth stocks that fit our frameworks.
We'll just move to the next slide just to give a bit of color around perhaps why we've exited Commonwealth Bank and why we've held on to CSL through this period. It's an interesting chart this because if you look at the yellow bars for Commonwealth Bank, that's the earnings per share. It's been pretty flat over time, but the black line shows the share price. Despite quite a flat EPS profile, the share price is up probably around 70% with very minimal earnings growth. On the right, if you look at CSL, the EPS growth, I'm sorry, the last two bars are what the market's forecasting. CSL, they've had strong EPS growth with forecast for that growth to continue, but the black line shows the share price has been in decline. That's why we've held on to CSL, but we've got out of Commonwealth Bank.
If you go to the next slide, just to complete the picture, as a result, this shows the PE, the PE ratio of Commonwealth Bank over time. You can see it's been most of its time trading in at a PE, or the average of this period is 20 times. If you go back further than this, it's probably more like 15 times. The PE has gone up to nearly 30 times despite flat earnings growth. CSL, despite having still good solid earnings outlook, the PE has actually declined to 23 times. The way I describe that is CSL is exhibiting good value at these prices, whereas Commonwealth Bank looks very overpriced to us. We've held CSL and exited Commonwealth Bank. We are conscious that CSL is a reasonably big position.
If we get what I think is full of value or fair value for our stock, it's probably one that we could probably have a little bit less on over time. Similar story with Wesfarmers. We've taken quite a bit out of Wesfarmers. Like CBA, a fantastic company, well run, great market position. We really like the companies. It's just the price. Again, Wesfarmers on the left, if you look at that PE over the long term, it's fair to say the PE, the best way to describe this would be extreme. The yield on the right tells a similar picture, is to get a yield of close to 4%. Fully franked, it's now down to 2.7%. With those sort of extreme pricing, even though it's a great company, we've substantially reduced the stock. Westpac is the next one just to round out. On the banks, we still have Westpac.
We still have some NAB where we've got some call options against both those stocks, but we have reduced the positions substantially for the same reason. The pricing looks extreme. We do get some questions about why that, what's going on in the market. It's hard to determine it, but it just feels like there's more buyers than sellers, but it feels like money's chasing assets in certain segments, which is always, I find, concerning. I think when you really feel like there's a lot of money chasing a particular stock or a sector of the market, it's often a good idea to go the other way. We do have the entire portfolio here. I'm not planning on going through these stocks, but for completeness, we've shown just how we think about our positions.
We like, in the growth segment, there are a lot of names there, but the way we think about it, it's important if we find a stock that fits our frameworks and processes, the best thing you can do is own it. The worst thing you can do is not own it because we don't want to try and cherry pick which are going to be the winners. You want to have a spread of stocks to try and make sure you capture the best growth opportunities as long as they fit our frameworks. We have made our biggest mistake since I've been running AMCIL over 2.5 years, hasn't been holding IDP because that's fallen a lot, which has been terrible. The worst mistake is actually not owning Prometheus, which actually passes our frameworks.
We're looking to buy it and we're trying to get a bit cute on price. That's a bigger miss for us than owning IDP. We really learned our lesson on that, that we've got to make sure we own the good stocks. We've learned our lesson from that, hence why we purchased Life360, Sigma, Technology One, for example, and they've done well for us. The stalwarts, we're happy to be in larger companies if they have strong market positions and they have the ability to grow. We're happy to have some income stocks if we can buy them well, if they can get some growth. As I touched on earlier, we can use call options to improve the yield we can have on some of the slower growth businesses. As I touched on earlier, some cyclical asset plays like Amcor and EVT, we're happy to look at those.
We look for value across the market in the range of segments. We've got our top holdings just to show that we do continue to be a longer-term investor, which is what we want to be. Many of these companies have been in the portfolio for a very long period of time. The general reason we will look to exit stocks is if the model is starting to crack, and we touched on some of those earlier. If something's getting too extreme, like a CBA, we're probably more likely to exit if we think the earnings will struggle to catch up to the valuation. A strongly growing company that's overpriced, we might assume, but we probably won't exit because we tend to find that eventually the earnings will catch up. We want to stay on board the businesses that can give us growth into the long term.
On to the outlook at this point, we just start with a chart. We've generally got a more cautious stance on markets. This is the PE of the ASX 200. It goes back 20 years, but if you took this chart back further, it'd still tell you the same picture. The PE is very high on not just the Australian market. You could do this on the U.S. market as well. The other indicators you can look at, which sometimes can be more instructive, something like price to sales or even price to book, it'll tell you the same story. The valuations are very high. Another one to look at is dividend yield. We are really at extremes. It feels like, again, money's chasing assets. People are not worried about risk. When I see these charts, it does make me nervous.
We're holding a little bit of cash at the moment. We've got some more call options against some of our positions than we normally have. We're probably more in a mode of trimming unless something exceptional comes along. More broadly, there's obviously a number of issues out there that I think the market really isn't factoring in. We're back into tariffs again, and that discussion, the market seems to be looking over that. We've got reporting season coming up when we're getting a bit of a sense that corporates are a little bit more nervous about the future, elevated valuations. As I said, we're trying to take a more defensive position. At the end of the day, we want to make sure in companies that are financially strong and have the opportunity to grow profits over the long term. We'll continue to go down that path.
That's the end of the formal presentation. Now we're happy to take some questions, and I'll pass over to Geoff.
Thanks, Mark. Just to remind everyone, you can ask questions via the bottom of the screen, and I'll answer the question box there. I've got a few questions here, Mark, and a couple of them are associated. I'll put these ones together. Given that AMCIL has not achieved its goals over 1, 3, 5, and 10 years, what steps have been implemented to improve the performance of the portfolio? The persistent discount to NTA, is that reflecting poor investment performance over the number of years? What will be done to improve investment performance?
I think I've pretty much, I have covered the first question pretty clearly in the presentation that, you know, we're not happy with the 1, 3, 5, and 10 , and that we, since taking over AMCIL, we're following a pretty disciplined approach, which has been going for 2.5 years, and we're outperforming over that period. We're just going to continue to do that. Hopefully, over time, you'll start to see that in the three-year numbers and hopefully the five-year numbers. In terms of the NTA discount, look at it, it doesn't help underperformance, absolutely. We think better performance will help with that. We do see these sort of discounts across the market in many LICs, not just ours. We obviously, we run four LICs. Three of them are trading at discounts. This one's bigger, but there are a number of other LICs in the market.
I think the whole sector is out of favor. I think AMCIL, being a smaller fund, gets that bigger discount as well. If you look back 3-4 years ago, many of these LICs were trading at premiums. It's interesting when we look at what happened about three months ago when there was a big sell-off in the market. The LICs' share prices held up pretty well and the market fell quite substantially. The discounts closed a lot. It's a hot market and we've seen that in the past when you get a hot market, people shy away from products like LICs. We are trying to educate the market more on we're not like a lot of the LICs in the market. There's no external manager, there's no performance fees, relatively low management expense ratio across our groups.
I think probably that piece has been lost a little bit on the market. We are doing more marketing. We've employed another resource within the group to, I guess, discover new buyers of the stock. They are out there, but they're a little bit more fragmented. We are looking for financial planners that can take, I guess, decisions rather than following some model portfolio. We're getting some traction there already. At the end of the day, the first step is just to continue the performance.
Also note, Mark, of course, that six months ago when AMCIL was shown as outperforming the market, you're still trading at a significant discount. It is an industry-wide issue.
We're trying to do our bit, but I still probably keep thinking that to me it's just another sign of how extreme the market is at these levels. In one way, I think people are probably being more rational around the LICs and they're probably cautious about chasing the market at these prices. We just need to do what we can to do, and that's probably to focus a bit more on, you know, who are the potential buyers, who are the financial planning groups that can make their own decisions and approach those people.
A question about CSL. I think you've covered this market by example, so whether to CSL, obviously it's been impacting performance.
Yeah, obviously we just covered that in the presentation. We were shown why we like it, which is that EPS growth it's achieving and what we think it can achieve going forward. I think it certainly moved out of favor when Trump became president. I think there was a lot of fear for what was going to happen to pharmaceutical products. You probably had a position where a lot of Australian institutions already had a lot of stock, but it kept a lot of international buyers out of it. As things, at least on that front, have settled down a bit, it feels like there's some buying coming back in the market. The stock was only a few weeks ago down around $255. It's already bounced back to $270 odd. We've got the result coming up. If that's okay, it feels like it's starting to recover a bit.
If we think there's value there, we're happy to hold it. It's all about earnings growth. The company had been pretty open about wanting to get double-digit EPS growth for the next few years. That's pretty good growth to me. That's the reason why we're still there.
Will you continue to hold IDP?
Yeah, look, probably at this point, we will because it's still got that leadership position. You've got to take a view. Looking back, it was probably at the top of the cycle. Are we at the bottom of the cycle now in terms of is this the worst it's going to get for student placements? If it is, you don't want to sell at the bottom. I think it's going to take a bit of patience to get there. I guess an interesting example of this was on reflection, we did have some PEX about a year ago. We sold out of PEX because we sort of wanted to see a few changes in management and a lot was relying on the U.K., but there were no indications that it was going to improve. The thesis on that eventually started to play it.
I've actually bought back into it because they've actually picked up their first contract in the U.K. and there's been some changes at management. It does take a while. I think at the moment we'll stay there, but it's one we need to watch pretty closely. If we do see any pickup in student volumes again, because universities have relied heavily on international students to fund the business, and if you take that away, they're in an interesting position. There's a bit to work through there, but we'll hold it in the short term anyway.
Question about the buyback. I guess we did stop the buyback after having had a buyback in place earlier in the financial year. Will we look to buy back more shares, and will we look to buy back the DRP shares on market?
Yeah, so that's, you know, we were buying back stock and I think, I mean, this is really up to the board, but the way it presented it to us, to them, was particularly around the first step is around that DRP because when you have such a big discount, if you're seeing new stock at a discount, if you don't go in it, it's diluting. To me, that makes sense to have an intent at least of buying back that stock. Whether you do more than that, look, we have done a bit more and it didn't really close the gap, but it does add value if the market continues to go up. I think that neutralizing the DRP kind of makes sense, but we'll make that decision, but it's potentially something we can do.
Thanks, Mark. Question about Transurban, I should say. Holding at 4.4% in the portfolio. Considering its ongoing core metrics, ROE, sort of debt, and modest insider ownership, does it appear a high-quality company on all those four metrics?
Yeah, look, this is a large company, so it's never going to have big insider ownership. The ROE is really a function. You've got to look at this stock slightly differently because, you know, this is a business where you put a huge amount of CapEx in at day one, and then over time, as the cash flows grow and grow, you eventually get the returns you want. We know the company, when they model out new investments, they want to get an appropriate return on capital or return on equity over time. I think that discipline is there. I think it ticks those boxes. It's got a leadership position, dominant market position. The yield's around 5% or so. We think that could grow at 4% or 5%, which should be a good sound investment.
Not every stock is going to shoot the lights out, but we expect the distribution growth to continue. As long as we can get distribution growth plus the dividend yield, it should be a solid investment. What we've been doing is that when it has little runs in share price, we get in and sell some call options against it, which then enhances the yield. We've been getting a yield well above that through the option activity. As long as we can keep doing that, it's okay. It's probably one that if we see better opportunities, we could take a bit out of. It's making sure we work the stock hard when we get the opportunities.
Thanks, Mark. Given our framework for investing in quality companies, what are the explanations of the shareholder in NEXTDC ? Given as they've always had negative earnings, predicted losses in the future years are even higher. What way can this company be described as growth, a growth stock, and why is it in the portfolio?
Yep, so that's another good question because it really follows on from Transurban. I've always viewed NEXTDC , it's actually similar to the Transurban model where it's infrastructure. You've got to invest all your capital upfront, you know, on the hope that the business comes later. If you look at the long-term returns from Transurban, it's actually been pretty good from where they listed. NEXTDC is the same. It's building out a leadership position in Australia. Certainly think it's now if you want a data center and you're a very large business, you're going to be speaking to NEXTDC . What you're starting to see now, when they build out a data center, you've got to put all the capital in front. You've got to build it out.
You don't sign up the contracts until the end, but they're only building out because they're discussing with groups like Microsoft and Google and Amazon and all these types of companies. They get a pretty good feel for what they want. Certainly I'm pretty confident when you speak to NEXTDC about modeling out, they want to get an appropriate return on capital. They price their data centers on that basis, but you don't get it until it's full. It's an interesting model. We believe they're in a position now where the stock started to tick up because they've started to announce some contract wins. I think the next couple of years you'll see a lot more of that. The market will start to recognize more of the infrastructure that they've built. What I look for is we keep probing on, are they making an appropriate return on capital?
Do they have the ability to keep growing over time? Infrastructure stocks, you have to look at them slightly differently.
Question here on Soul Pattinson . Why is AMCIL not investing in Soul Pattinson ? Stock is the only dividend aristocrat in the ASX. Furthermore, Sol offers exposure to private equity and private credit.
Yeah, we really like the people it's sold. Probably where I've been struggling is the valuation. It's an interesting model because they've had to grow out that piece into private equity and private credit. That's a different style of investing, but they seem to have done it pretty well. As a result of that, it's a stock that I like pretty closely. Probably where it is now, I struggle with the valuation. If the valuation became more appealing, it's certainly something I'd look at.
Thanks, Mark. Given we invest in large and small companies, do you divisionalize the portfolio and say compare the ASX 200 stocks with that index and the stocks outside the 200 with a more relevant index or similar practical divisionalization?
I think we're kind of in AMCIL because we want to try and, I mean, most people think about the ASX 200. If I go into a, if I was looking at a mid-cap or small-cap fund, I'd be doing it, not trying to beat the smaller mid-cap fund. I'd be going in it and trying to beat the 200. That's why what we're trying to do in AMCIL, and that's sort of our expectation is that we can beat the 200. Now we can use mid and small-cap stocks to do it. That's okay, but we're just trying to beat the 200 over time.
Has AMCIL examined some of the retirement stocks such as Lifestyle Communities and GemLife?
Yeah, we have. It's fair to say we've got a number of issues with those models. One of the biggest ones more lately is just the gearing they put into the portfolio. As I touched on, when these companies started to gear up, I got really worried because taking on too much gearing like that, you're putting too much financial risk going in the model. They wanted to build out very quickly to achieve that. Obviously, you get an adverse sort of tax ruling over the top of it, which we would classify as outside influence. It's not for us at this point.
With dividend growth slowing with AMCIL, the dividend growth, I guess, is talking about it in the market slowing. AMCIL ends up being like Mirrabooka, where the gains will be used to source dividends.
In this result, that's exactly what we've done. We've made quite a bit of gains, and we're paying out a lot of those as a special dividend.
Always has been for AMCIL.
Yeah, that's been the case. Our, what we're calling ordinary dividend, is above the earnings. We are saying there'll be a little bit of capital coming through to support that. If we make excess gains, then really, the board has made the decision that if there are significant excesses, we'll pay that as a special.
Thanks, Mark. A few more comments about the share price trade relative to NTA and how it may be linked with portfolio performance. I guess the question ultimately, if the discount to NTA persists, will the board consider selling holdings or returning cash to shareholders?
That's again for the board decision, but it's not what we're talking about at the moment. I mean, I think we want to, we see this as a little bit different in the way we go about it. We think there's other things we can potentially do around AMCIL. Last I heard back from the board, which was only recently, the intent was to keep it going. They are focused on that 2.5- year number. I think they're saying just keep that going.
Thanks, Mark. Question here about what do we really want to see Woolworths do to either maintain your conviction or would you consider exiting it?
It's getting back to some reasonable EPS growth, and we think they can from here over the next few years. We think it's still got the strongest footprint. I think Coles has done an excellent job. I think the CEO there has been great. Coles is one I actually looked at a couple of years ago when they changed CEO and thought that may have done well, and it has. We've held on to Woolworths. It's looking a little bit better for them in terms of getting EPS growth. I don't think it's ever going to be spectacular. I see it more of a stock that, you know, it is a good business if it gets too expensive. 2.5 years ago, the stock ran really hard and the PE was very high and we took a lot out of it.
We took it back to an index position. It sort of retraced a lot since then. While it's around these sort of levels, we're happy to hold it. Again, it could be another stock that you look at call options to work the stock a bit harder. That's something I'm thinking about at the moment.
Does AMCIL hold a Signature Financial within the portfolio? Do we think the buyout will go ahead?
No, we don't own it. It really hasn't aligned well with our frameworks anyway. I don't know how that's going to go. It hasn't been something I've been focused on yet.
Question about Woodside. Is it an income trap with all the expenses guarding your project commitments?
Yeah, that's the right question. That's the question I'm asking myself at this point: what is their ability to actually grow earnings? We think they can grow earnings from here given some of the projects that they're doing. With the yield and the franking, as long as they can do a bit of growth over time, then it's okay. That's the test I keep running on this stock. The sell-off was quite dramatic, and I think it was starting to look at pretty value. That's the test we keep running on that one: we need to get the yield and the franking and some earnings growth to keep it in the portfolio. At the moment, we do think we'll get some earnings growth, but that's the test for that one.
Yeah, do you feel the underperformance of Redox is temporary?
I hope so. I think that's one that I went into quickly. For those that don't know, they're a distribution company. It was a family-run, owner-led business that listed a couple of years ago. They distribute a range of chemicals and products that go into so many different things, it's not funny. For example, if you want to make shampoo, there's a whole lot of ingredients that go into that. If you read the back of the bottle, Redox will probably supply most of those. They source these ingredients from around the world and then distribute those to manufacturers of a whole range of agricultural products and pharmaceutical products. They've got a very strong market position in Australia. I'd call it kind of a leadership position in a fragmented market. They do regular acquisitions. The revenue growth track record over 20 years has been excellent.
They pay fully franked dividends, which is good. We took a smaller position, but I think we probably bought it at the wrong time. I'm not sure how good the next result would be, but at this point, I'm backing that 20-year track record and that they can continue to do what they've been doing. I haven't been buying anymore, so I think we'll probably just hold, but probably not expecting a lot in the short term. As I've said, if the family-run business, we think they know what they're doing, but there is a cycle through their business. We'll stay there for the moment.
Another question about holdings in the portfolio. What's most appealing about ReadyTech?
Yeah, we're probably similar. We took a small position in there. It's sort of fallen away a bit again. Those two we probably bought a bit too late in the cycle. ReadyTech is a founder-led business. They have essentially a software company. They sell products. They compete sort of at the lower end than Technology One. This is into TAFEs mainly that they sell products, TAFEs and universities, but smaller ones. It is annuity type revenue streams. Customers are generally sticky, though they did lose a customer recently, which we weren't happy with. There still seems to be plenty of opportunities for them. It was those characteristics around annuity revenue, founder-led. We had the sense that there was going to be lots of opportunities to grow, but it's probably been a little bit disappointing in the short term. Again, we're not adding to it, but we'll just hold from here.
I think they're each one's about 0.5%, one's about 0.7% of that order.
Thanks, Mark. I just noticed we're coming to the end of the questions that I've got here. NEXTDC and Goodman Group water supply, residential water quality might become an issue as a cooling operation requires lots of water. This is obviously for the data centers.
Yeah, they do require water and power. I'm not seeing any of those issues at the moment because they basically have to get development approvals from local councils. In those submissions, they've got to cover off all the power, water, all those issues have to be dealt with there. They're pretty strict. I'll take it away, but it's something we're probably not seeing at the moment.
Yeah, I think that question was asked to Africa and I've sent a response. Yep, question here, a very good one. How do you think about balancing a high growth portfolio at a time when many growth stocks in the market have run hard?
Yeah, that's a good question. I always prefer to be in a high-quality growth company that gets overpriced because, yeah, they might stagnate over time, but eventually the earnings can catch up. When I look across the market, it's easy if you just focus on quality growth and say, well, you know, they're too expensive. I'm not seeing those are more overpriced than the many other stocks in the market. I gave an example of the banks, over 20% of the market. I mean, they'd be just as overvalued as the growth stocks. Actually, when you dig into what is quality growth, we'd be saying, Macquarie Technology, that's probably more around fair value. We think ARB has been more around fair value, although it's had a bounce off its low point. CSL, we think it's fair value.
We think within that quality growth, there are a number of stocks that we think are fair value. Of course, there's always going to be some that look extreme, but you can't have every stock in. That's why we have a portfolio that's exactly the price the way you want to. It just doesn't work like that. Westfarmers is another one that looks more overpriced than any of those growth stocks. It's a mistake just to focus on one segment and say that's where things are overpriced. In fact, if you look at even our experience more recently, often it's not the high-quality ones that give you trouble. It's the ones that give you big downgrades. They can often be a cyclical stock that gives you a downgrade or a lesser quality stock that seems to have issues with something that makes it go down more. It's a portfolio approach.
Speaking of stocks that may be expensive, Wesfarmers, is it getting close to expensive currently in the market?
Yeah, we covered that in the presentation with the slide where you saw the PEs looking pretty extreme. We've halved our position and we've got call options against a fair chunk of what we've got left. There's always a question, you know, do you get out of it or not? We're making the position work harder than what we have, and it's much more than what we had.
We've got a question about the PE reviews for CSL and how that one's been calculated, given that it looks like we're using earnings based on, and that's a different calculation that the same NAB trade has got on their website.
It depends what earnings you look at because the earnings they report are in U.S. dollars. If you, the first thing you got to do is translate back to Australian dollars and then look at the Australian price against Australian dollars, and that's where you get that PE.
I don't think earnings are forecast to dip by 20% next year.
Earnings are rising. The forecast double-digit EPS from the market consensus over the next couple of years.
It is on the slide.
Yeah, it's what's on the slide.
Okay, Mark, I haven't got any further questions, so I think I'll leave it to you to close. It's going nearly an hour here, and the number of viewers is going down, so I think we'll close it there.
Yeah, just to summarize that, although the one-year number looks very low, it's really an outcome of having two really strong years, and then the last six months, some of our stocks have given back, but we really haven't, we're still happy with the stocks we've got. The activity we're doing is still adding value, and we certainly feel like we're following the process that we said we'd put in place 2.5 years ago. To me, it's just holding the line and making sure that we've got good quality stocks. A big part of what we do is making sure we capture opportunities as they come along. That's a critical part of running a successful portfolio. Hopefully you'll see those numbers start to translate over time into the numbers that we report to the market. We thank you all for participating in this call.
Thanks, Mark.
Thank you. That does conclude today's webinar. Thank you for your participation. Zooming out.