I would like to introduce Mr. Patrick Tuttle, the Chair of COG Financial Services Limited.
Thanks, David. Good morning, everyone. My name is Patrick Tuttle. I'm the Non-Executive Chair of the company and will chair today's annual general meeting. On behalf of the board, I'd like to welcome you all to the 2024 annual general meeting for COG Financial Services Limited. It's now 10:00 A.M. There being a quorum present, I declare the meeting open for business. I confirm that the meeting has been properly constituted. In opening this 2024 AGM, I'd like to introduce the board and management team of COG Financial Services, who are present in person or on the webinar: Cameron McCullough, Executive Director, who joins us virtually, Mark Crane, Executive Director, who also joins us virtually, Peter Rawlinson, Non-Executive Director, Stephen White, Non-Executive Director, Andrew Bennett, Chief Executive Officer, who's joining us virtually, Richard Bowser, Chief Financial Officer, Phil McLeod, General Counsel, and obviously David Franks, Company Secretary.
Also present, Amy Wong from the Automic Group. Amy will be the returning officer for today's meeting. Tim Aman, partner from BDO, the company's auditor, and Matthew Beacom, director from BDO, the company's auditor. We do not have any apologies. As this meeting is being conducted as a hybrid meeting, I'd like to welcome those shareholders that are joining us via Automic's online meeting platform. This platform enables shareholders and proxy holders to participate in this live webcast of the meeting, as well as ask questions and submit votes. For those shareholders attending virtually who wish to ask a question, instructions on how to do so are now shown on the screen. If you'd like to ask your question verbally, please type your SRN or HIN and then type "I'd like to speak." Please also state your name and the organization that you are representing.
Please note that while you can submit questions from now on, I will not address them until the relevant time in the meeting. Voting on all resolutions will be conducted by poll. Shareholders attending virtually and wishing to vote on the resolutions can do so through Automic's Investor Portal. If you are not already logged into the portal, please see the instructions shown on the screen. If you have any problem registering your shareholding with Automic, please call the support number shown on the screen. To allow shareholders time to log in, I now declare the poll open. Online voting will remain open until I declare the poll closed at the end of the formal business. Votes must be submitted prior to the poll being declared closed to be counted. Just running through the agenda for today's meeting will be as follows.
Firstly, I'll provide a Chair's address, which will then be followed by an address from Andrew Bennett, our CEO. We'll then proceed to the formal matters to be considered at today's AGM. We will then close the formal part of the meeting, and finally, there will be an opportunity for questions and discussion. So to kick things off, good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to report that your company delivered an increase in underlying NPAT to shareholders of 2% on the previous year to AUD 24.2 million. This represents an increase of 12% on the prior corresponding period after allowing for the diminished contribution of COG's TL Commercial lease business, in run-off. EPSA of AUD 0.1256 per share was flat on the prior year, and the company declared and paid a fully franked final dividend of AUD 0.440 per share.
Total FY 2024 dividends of AUD 0.840 per share were consistent with the prior year, providing shareholders with an annualized dividend of 7.5%, up 1.4% on FY 2023. The FY 2024 results evidence the ongoing successful implementation of our strategy to build Australia's leading SME finance broking and aggregation service provider, while also delivering profitable and low-risk growth in our asset management and lending business, and further expanding our lending products distributed through our proprietary finance broking network. Total underlying revenue in FY 2024 increased by 36% over the previous year to AUD 495.6 million. This was primarily driven by organic and acquisitive growth in commission and fee income from our core finance broking and aggregation business and the ongoing growth trajectory in the novated leasing business. Net assets financed through COG's aggregation businesses grew to a record AUD 8.9 billion in FY 2024, an increase of 15% on the previous year.
COG's estimated market share of Australia-wide broker-originated NAF is now 21%. Assets under management in our asset management and lending business grew to AUD 936 million, an increase of 19% on the prior year. The growth in AUM reflects growth primarily in Westlawn and subsidiary Equity- One Mortgage Fund Management Limited. Consistent with our strategy, COG made several acquisitions during this past year, including the acquisition of a 100% interest in the car and lifestyle aggregation group's National Finance Choice and United Financial Services through COG subsidiary COG Aggregation, which was effective 31 July 2023. We also acquired a 20% interest in Centrepoint Alliance, the ASX-listed wealth manager, effective 30 November 2023. And finally, we acquired a salary packaging business known as Community Salary Packaging through COG subsidiary Paywise, effective 11 July 2024.
Looking forward to the new financial year, FY 2025, we will continue to execute on our strategic plan of acquiring finance brokers that are complementary to our existing national network, growing our in-house SME lending volumes and related asset management capabilities, and driving further novated leasing and insurance broking growth. In closing, I'd like to personally thank you, all of our shareholders, for your continuing support and encouragement. Finally, I'd like to thank Andrew Bennett and his senior management team, along with my fellow directors, for their tireless efforts and support over the past year. I'll now hand you over to Andrew, who will take you through some of the key areas of strategic focus as we move our attention to the year ahead.
Thanks, Patrick.
Good morning, everyone. Today, I'm going to provide a review of COG's operations, as well as some discussion around the tailwinds that will push our business along into the future. COG overview. COG is a large national diversified business. In our asset finance broking and aggregation, we have a market share of 21%, making us the largest specialty asset aggregator. We have over 500 people across 30 locations around Australia. We have 795 broker firms, 1,767 individual brokers in our broking side of the business, 8,637 novated lease customers, and 38,584 salary package customers.
We seek to be diverse, diverse by location, which this map demonstrates, diverse by industry type, and diverse by asset type, so that we're not overly exposed to any particular industry, sector, or geography. Key financial results Patrick's called out, but revenue: AUD 495 million. EBITDA to shareholders: AUD 37.1 million. Net profit after tax and before amortization: AUD 24.2 million.
Earnings per share before amortization: AUD 12.56 per share. This slide, in broad terms, COG's activities fall within two broad categories: distribution and product. Distribution: this is effectively a sales process where we make a commission on every dollar of value that we transact through our various platforms, but we take no underlying risk on the underlying product that we sell. This includes finance broking, novated leasing, insurance broking, and our interest in Centrepoint Alliance. Novated leasing is effectively a sales function. We sell new cars with finance attached, and we make a brokerage margin. We don't take credit risk, and we don't take end-of-term lease risk on the vehicles. The product side of the business: this is where we raise investment funds primarily from retail investors to make loans to SMEs that are secured against either real property or equipment.
We only capture a small, in fact tiny proportion of the AUD 9 billion of flow that our aggregation platform generates each year. You can see from this chart on the right-hand side that 76% of our net profit after tax and before amortization comes from the distribution side of the business. So asset finance and broking and aggregation: we have borrowers that want funds for a variety of purposes across transport, engineering, construction, heavy industry. We have brokers who are the people that own those relationships with the borrowers. And then we have an aggregator, which is the layer between the brokers and the funders. COG's operations in this sector encompass both brokers and aggregators. Essentially, we are an aggregator of small businesses.
In broad terms, the idea is that we provide a standard set of back-office processes allowing the individual businesses to focus on what they're good at, rather than getting bogged down on the admin of accounting and all the other pieces involved in running a small business. We provide core IT, cyber, accounting, proprietary software needed, and administrative services for our businesses. What we have achieved so far: I call this slide the bottom left to top right slides. You can see across all the metrics, the key metrics that we manage the business across, they've all gone well over the last six, seven years. Revenue, EBITDA to shareholders, net profit after tax and before amortization, earnings per share, dividends per share, and unrestricted cash have all grown in a roughly linear fashion over that time horizon. So what are the tailwinds for COG's businesses?
There are a few, and they're all driving in a positive way. We've got population growth, infrastructure investment off the back of decarbonization and electrification, continued technological adoption, changing the banking infrastructure, and the shift to electric vehicles. And I'm going to talk about all these in a little bit more detail. First one is population growth. You can see this graph picks up forecasts from the federal government's population statement they publish periodically. This first one here dates back to the 2022 year, and you can see it rising from down here, and it goes up on this trajectory. A year later, the next forecast came out, and it lifted that population growth line up again.
Now, it hasn't been a population update forecast now for nearly two years, but from the current data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we are currently at 27.5 million, and this growth line is going to continue out here. So what does that mean for COG? It means that there's roughly 2.5-3 million people going to be added to Australia's population in the next five-six years. That's a population roughly the size of Brisbane and the greater Gold Coast area. So just think of all the schools, roads, hospitals, houses that are going to have to be built over that time horizon to cope with this rising population. And that's all work for Australia's SMEs. And so off the back of that, they're going to need trucks, vans, excavators, backhoes, all that sort of equipment that is the bedrock of our business.
This next one that's going to, along a similar vein, is the transition of the electricity grid to green. This is the current integrated system plan from the Australian Energy Market Operator, AEMO, and you can see this is just the East Coast of Australia. You can see all the transmission lines that need to be built. The yellow are solar farms. The blue are wind farms onshore and offshore, but even if you just think about transmission alone and the amount of work that's required to build a transmission line, you have to clear the pathway, you have to build access roads, you have to build labor camps, then you have to build the pads for the power line, for the power poles. It's just an enormous amount of work that needs to be done over the next 10 years or so to deliver that.
And again, that's just going to be an enormous amount of work for Australia's SMEs. And we are already starting to see this type of activity flow through our broker network. The next thing is the change in the makeup of the banking sector. If you go back to pre-1990, 100% of all bank loans and assets, bank assets, were originated through the branch network. This has grown to, in 2004, it was 25% of loans came through brokers, and now 73% of bank loans are coming through brokers. So this fundamental shift from banks using branches with bricks and mortars and large headcounts is not changing. And my forecast is in another 10 or 15 years, perhaps, there won't be any bank branches at all. All bank originations will come via brokers.
So again, just to recap, we've had very, this is another bottom left, top right growth metric through our asset finance broking, and we see no reason that this trend is going to slow down given all the things I've talked about. novated leasing, this is a very fast-growing sector for us. What is novated leasing? They are a tripartite agreement between an employer, an employee, and a finance company. It's generally seen as an employee benefit with a novated leasing provider like us primarily securing the vehicle and arranging finance. It's essentially a broking operation. COG has made several small acquisitions in this sector over the last few years. And in a slightly different fashion, what we've done is we've put all the businesses together, and it now operates as a single business called Paywise. The fourth bullet here is a critical point to understand.
Not only are we trying to win more and more big government and corporate tenders, we are working hard to increase the take-up rate of existing employer portfolios. Currently, we are achieving about a 4% take-up rate in our portfolios. We think it's reasonable to achieve a 10% take-up over time. So that's a two and a half times increase in business coming out of our existing employer base. To do this, we are investing heavily in things like mobile application, video explainers, calculators, and other online tools to enhance employee engagement. There has been some significant investment in this area over the last two years, and there will continue to be some in the future. But this is merely laying down the foundations for future growth from existing clients. The other thing of interest on this page is the chart showing the take-up in EVs.
That has certainly been a tailwind and has delivered us some growth. But interestingly, we've also had growth in the outright number of internal combustion engine vehicles as well. This slide here really just talks to the relative size of our novated business to give you a sense of how much room we've got to compete. The big two players are McMillan and Smartg roup. And roughly, McMillan, if you look here, they've got roughly 80,000 novated leases under management. We've got 8,000. So order of magnitude, they're circa 10 times bigger than us. And the same with salary packaging. The chart on the right-hand side just shows the growth that we've achieved in our novated business over the last two years, which has been very pleasing. Asset management lending. Pat called out previously. The top layer on this bar chart is the contributions from the TL commercial business.
That business we put into run-off in April 2020 after COVID arrived, and there's just a tail of the profit that comes through the way the accounting work. But that's pretty much off our books. What you can see there in this bottom layer is our private lending or asset management business has been growing well. But we have had some compression on the balance sheet lending that we do. But we expect as the older, cheaper assets that are written at a lower margin run-off and get replaced, that that margin will return. You can see here that COG captures a small percentage of the assets originates through its broker network and fuels our asset management sector. Currently, we have AUD 936 million under management, and this number will continue to grow. The investment opportunity. The elephant in the room is that our share prices decline materially over recent months.
What has triggered this recent selling is major shareholder NAOS rebalancing its portfolio and disposing of 26.5 million shares, and another shareholder, First Sentier , closing down its fund and selling all of its shares. While this has caused some short-term pain, overall, it's a positive because it's increased liquidity. You can see here we've had a 383% increase in our average weekly liquidity since this has occurred. Over time, institutional investors have reduced the average time that they hold particular stocks and are now more focused on short-term dynamic momentum trading strategies. Liquidity is a much more important factor in the business than it has previously been. These changes, while putting pressure, have increased liquidity. What's important to remember there is that COG has delivered significant achievements over the last seven years, as evidenced by my earlier bottom left, top right page of charts.
It has further demonstrated a strong dividend yield to this point, with COG paying AUD 0.084 a year, fully franked. Additionally, significant capital has rotated out of small caps into larger, more liquid stocks over the last couple of years. But hopefully, this trend is reversing on the back of stable monetary policy and the U.S. interest in easing interest rates. We believe COG is well placed to benefit from the momentum in the small cap market. In summary, we think the combination of the tailwinds supporting the business growth and the changing market conditions will be positive, and our share price should recover. Capital management. This slide is pretty self-explanatory. We are currently undertaking a review of our capital position, and we may potentially sell some non-core assets.
Similarly, we are looking at a dividend payout ratio compared to undertaking a share buyback, with no decisions on any of these issues having yet been made. This is more of just to signal our thinking. Thank you very much, and I now pass back to the chair.
Thanks, Andrew. As noted earlier, there'll be an opportunity for questions and discussion after the close of the formal meeting. We'll now move to prior minutes. So the minutes of the previous shareholder meetings are available for inspection from the company secretary, being firstly the extraordinary meeting of COG held on 22 July 2024, and the annual general meeting of COG held on 27 November 2023. We'll now move to the formal businesses set out in the notice of meeting.
The notice of annual general meeting was mailed to all registered members on 15 October 2024 and is to be taken as read. For the purposes of the poll, I appoint Amy Wong of Automic Registry Services as the company share registry who have examined and prepared summaries of the proxy forms received, to act as returning officer to conduct the poll. Those shareholders in attendance physically that are entitled to vote on the poll are all shareholders, representatives, and attorneys of shareholders and proxy holders who hold yellow voting cards. If anyone believes they're entitled to vote on this poll in any capacity and does not have a yellow voting card in respect thereof, please raise your hand now, and a member of our share registry team will assist you.
If you're a shareholder and wish to cast all of your votes for a resolution, please place a mark in either the for, against, or abstain box next to that resolution. If you wish to split your votes, please write the number of the portion of votes you wish to cast in the corresponding for, against, or abstain boxes. Please note that the sum of the split votes must not exceed your total holding. After all resolutions have been read and voted upon, please place it in one of the ballot boxes that will be circulating the room. The results of the poll will be announced to the ASX once they are available. Are there any questions in relation to the voting process?
We don't have any questions online.
Proxies have been inspected, and all those validly lodged have been accepted.
Proxies have been received representing 106,345,443 shares, or 53.4% of the issued capital of the company. All undirected proxies or open votes that have nominated the chairman of the meeting as their proxy will be cast in favor of each resolution in the notice of annual general meeting. As noted, we have taken the notice of meeting as read, and unless any shareholder has an objection, I will take the resolutions as read and for each resolution, read the header or summary of the proposed resolution, show the full wording of the resolution on the screen in the physical room and on the virtual meeting platform. Does any shareholder object?
Nothing online.
We'll now proceed to the formal business of the meeting as noted in the notice of meeting, including the financial statements and reports.
So the first item of business is to receive the company's annual financial report for the year ended 30 June 2024. The financial report and the reports of the directors and the auditors are now laid before the meeting. There will be no vote on this item, and it is a discussion item only. The company's auditor for the 2024 financial year, Tim Aman, partner of BDO Audit Pty Limited, is present to take questions relevant to the conduct of the audit and the preparation and content of the independent auditor's report. Are there any questions or comments, firstly on the financial report or the reports of the directors and auditors, on the management of the company, or relevant to the conduct of the audit and the preparation and content of the auditor's report to be put to the auditor?
Yes. Yeah. Any mic or anything or everyone can?
Yep.
Sure. Thank you, Margaret. Anyway, Charlie Kingston from K Capital. Thank you for the presentation. And apologies for my ignorance. I'm relatively new to the COG story, but really just trying to get up to speed. And so I'd like to make some comments first and then ask a question at the end. But notwithstanding all those bottom left to top right charts, which all look very good.
Sorry, is this relevant to the audit report? Because if it's not, we might move to the end of the financial accounts.
It's the financial accounts.
Okay. Okay.
And the performance of the company.
Okay. Yeah.
But again, I was just referring to those bottom left to top right. They all look good. But if we look over the 10-year history of the company, the stock has delivered zero capital gain. Now, again, there's been a nice dividend over the recent few years, but long-term, the stock is flat. So I'm just hoping to understand why you think that has been the case. And again, I'm no expert in the space, but sort of trying to get up to speed on the company this morning. And it's clearly done a lot of work. There's been a lot of happenings. There's been lots of takeovers with CML, Thorn, Diverger, got a stake in Earlypay, Centrepoint Alliance, etc.
We raised equity at AUD 1.35 in 2021 compared to the current price of around AUD 0.90. Had a major shareholder sell down at AUD 1, I believe the price was. And I appreciate that's increased the free float, but clearly we're 10% below that price today. So notwithstanding that sell down, it doesn't seem to have helped the company.
Maybe there's more to come from NAOS. But to be fair, most of our listed peers, there's a lot of them, given how many different sectors we're in, Smartgroup, AFG, Pepper, etc. Over the one year, they are all weak as well. But conversely, it does seem like the highly focused specialists around the financial sector, services sector, the Netwealths of the world, the HUBs, they've gone through the roof. They're very focused, single-minded. Same with the fund managers. We've got a funds management business, but the HomeCos , the Pinnacles, etc. Single-minded, they've shot the lights out. Conversely, other sort of diversified groups, similar to us, similar space, Sequoia, they've been a bit of a dog. Insignia, they're in everything. Also, they've been very poor. And again, I'm asking all this to understand what's holding us back in share price. Do you think we're too spread out?
Bit of a jack of all trades, but expert of none. And again, maybe we could be the next Macquarie. They're sort of in everything, a bit of a black box. And clearly, they've done very well. So there is hope for a diversified group. And I'd just like to finish with the larger shareholder in NAOS. They were pretty public in their recent quarterly. They thought the key reasons as to this holding back the stock is the complexity of the business. And they think we should be selling off some smaller non-synergistic positions that we're in. And clearly, based on that last slide, maybe you are taking their advice. But yeah, I'm really just hoping to get your thoughts as to what has led to this outcome. I think our shares on issue have gone up significantly since 2016, which has clearly been a drag.
But yeah, no, there's been a lot going on. We're in a lot of different divisions, but just appreciate your thoughts, maybe specific to those NAOS criticisms, given they are the larger shareholder and what has held us back from delivering zero capital gain over the past 10 years, please.
There's a lot in that and a lot of statements. So I'll just accept that as a statement. Andrew, I don't know if you want to take this now, or would you like to move it after the formal business? There's a lot of issues raised there that I think we should talk to. And not avoiding it, we'll come to it.
Thanks, Patrick. Maybe I'll have a first go at answering all of that. There's a number of factors. There's no, like most things in life, there's no one single thing that's clear and easy to identify. One issue that has, as I mentioned, liquidity is a key factor that institutional investors look at when they want to invest. Our register historically has been very, very tightly held. Prior to NAOS selling down, they had 33% of the register. Interest associated with Cameron McCullough had 21%. We had over 70% of the register locked up with four or five investors. So it was quite illiquid. The move, the period of time that institutional fund managers hold stocks has reduced. They're more focused on short-term momentum trading. The deep value investor, certainly in Aussie small caps, is a shrinking universe of investor. You've seen a number of small cap investors return capital.
First Sentier, for example, owned by KKR, had a total of 14 billion of funds, of which a billion of that was Aussie small caps that they returned. So they closed down and gave money back to the investors, of which they had quite a large holding in COG. So there has been a lack of willingness from the institutional market to come into our stock up until recently. The reweighting of NAOS has seen a number of smaller instos come into our register. Liquidity has improved. So that's one element. The other element is the whole sector. We're caught up in there's malaise in small cap financials.
There's a whole you mentioned some of them, but Pepper, Humm, people who are sort of operating and are users of our product and operate across similar lines, their share prices have, I mean, we may have traded sideways, but most of these have gone back significantly. There is a criticism that we operate across a number of different areas. But the point of the slide, the very first part of the slide was really two-thirds of our or 75% of our business, essentially finance broking and aggregation and novated leasing. They're all effectively the same style of business. They may appear slightly different, and they have different ways of gaining customers.
But the way we look at it, they just leverage our core skills, which is buying smaller businesses that probably wouldn't have had a pathway to a capital exit or like the ASX, putting them together on a standard set of operating platforms, IT, proprietary software systems, all that sort of stuff. And the top left to bottom right chart demonstrates that in terms of delivering revenue growth, profit growth, cash flow, our business has been by any measure successful over the last seven years. So that's sort of a high level. I don't want to talk for the rest of the day, but EPY, I'll touch on. We tried to take that over back in 2019. We've been left with a legacy stake. They have had their own challenges with the RevRoof exposures that's impacted that.
We think there's value to be had in that business, and it's growing. Will we keep it in the long term? Maybe. Maybe not. There is some crossover on their client base and our client base. So we are looking at these types of issues. And I do take the point that a potential negative is that the sheer number of investable stocks that your average fund manager has to cover, they might invest in two-three hundred, but they cover another hundred on top. So they're very, very busy. And the easier you make it for people to understand your financial statements, the more likely it is that they'll buy your stock. So we're aware of all these functions, and we're working to address them along with growing the underlying business.
We might leave that there, but thank you for the comments, and they're all taken as valid. So if there's any other follow-up, we can talk at the end of the meeting. So we'll keep moving. So we'll now proceed to the resolutions set out in the notice of annual general meeting. So Resolution 1 is as follows: to consider and, if thought fit, to pass with or without amendment, Resolution 1 , adoption of the remuneration report as an ordinary resolution. The resolution is now on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please raise your hand, or if you're attending virtually, submit your questions via the Q&A.
There's no questions online, Pat. Let's do it.
The proxies received in relation to this resolution are now on the screen. Are there any questions on the proxy information?
No questions online.
I'll now put the motion. Please either mark your voting instruction on your yellow voting card or vote via the online portal. Resolution 2 is as follows: to consider any thought fit to pass with or without amendment, Resolution 2, re-election of Mr. Peter Rawlinson as director as an ordinary resolution. The resolution is now on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please raise your hand, or if attending virtually, submit your questions via the Q&A. Sure.
Given we just touched on Earlypay, I was going to ask about that, but I think Peter's also on the board of Centrepoint. Maybe if he could give us his thoughts on that stake, why are we there? What's sort of the upside for us? Why do we buy it? Are we ahead or behind, etc.? Just appreciate Peter's thoughts on that position, please.
Well, I'll start that. I think we've made our strategic investment in CAF clear in terms of past public statements, in terms of moving into a complementary distribution channel. At the moment, we're holding about 20% of CAF, which is why Peter is on the board of CAF as a shareholder representative. I think it's difficult for Peter to talk publicly about CAF, given it's a public company. So I'm not sure whether there's much I can add to that at this point. Obviously, they will. I don't know whether you've had your AGM.
Yeah, the AGM for Centrepoint Alliance was last week. So it remains an investment, I think, that Andrew's touched on, subject to review, as is the EPY stake, and something we'll consider. As obviously Andrew's addressed in your previous question, so I wasn't proposing to add anything at this stage.
Yeah, it's all right. Again, I haven't done my homework.
I'm just trying to learn. When do we buy in? And
Andrew, do you know when I think we, when did we buy that stake? December. December. December last year. So we're now a year in.
December 2023. We're not quite 12 months through.
11 months.
Yeah. And we're obviously equity accounting for that, given our significant 20% stake. Thanks.
Okay.
So are there any questions, David? Other questions online?
No questions online.
So we'll now show the proxies received in relation to this resolution, which are now on the screen. Are there any questions on the proxy information?
There's no questions online.
Okay. I'll now put the motion. Please either mark your voting instruction on your yellow voting card or vote via the online portal. Moving to Resolution 3, which is as follows: to consider any thought fit to pass with or without amendment, Resolution 3, re-election of Mr. Stephen White as director as an ordinary resolution. The resolution is on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please raise your hand, or if attending virtually, submit your questions via the Q&A.
Don't have any questions online?
Steve's on the board of Earlypay, is that right?
That's right. He's a nominee director, yeah.
That's our stake.
Our stake. Yeah.
What price do we buy Earlypay out?
We acquired that stake in 2019. Andrew, how's your memory?
There were a number of acquisitions, but I think on average, our entry price on average is AUD 0.55-AUD 0.57 cents, somewhere in there off the top of my head.
It's what, AUD 0.20?
Trading as, I think, yesterday, AUD 0.21 after close.
Okay. Thank you.
Okay. Where are we? I think we now have the proxies in relation to this resolution. It should be on the screen. Resolution 3. Are there any questions on this proxy information?
There's no questions online.
Okay. I'll now put the motion. Please either mark your voting instruction on your yellow voting card or vote via the online portal. Okay. Turning to Resolution 4, which is as follows: to consider any thought fit to pass with or without amendment, Resolution 4, ASX Listing Rules 7.1A, approval of future issue of securities as a special resolution. The resolution is now on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please raise your hand, or if attending virtually, submit your questions via the Q&A.
How do we balance this with a potential buyback to just purely for optionality, or?
Andrew, do you want to take that one?
The sort of M&A?
Yeah. It's just optionality. We were looking at a very, very attractive opportunity early in the year, and we were going to issue 15.1%. We were going to trip over it. And the delay, just the practicalities of going back to the shareholders for a tiny, tiny little increment, it just gives us a little bit of flexibility. We don't have any plans. There's nothing on the horizon at the moment that would cause us to trigger it. It just means that if we do come up with, we do find something that's attractive, that we've just got that little bit more flexibility. So it's completely just an optional feature that we'd like at the moment.
Just to follow up, I know it's all theoretical, but that potential acquisition, I mean, today, again, part of the interest in COG is that superficially, I think we're trading at around eight times PE or thereabouts.
It makes it very difficult when we're trading at such low multiples of our accretive businesses.
But that opportunity, were we buying something on four or five times? Could you just run us through that?
Well, we were looking at a business acquisition and accretion, etc. Yeah. Well, we were looking at a business that I was mentioning that we didn't progress with, but we were buying it at the time a highly accretive multiple. And even today, that deal would have been highly accretive in today's market.
Thank you.
Okay. So the proxies in relation to this resolution are now on the screen. Are there any questions on the proxy information?
There's no questions online, Pat.
I'll now put the motion. Please either mark your voting instruction on your yellow voting card or vote via the online portal. Now turning to Resolution 5, which is as follows: to consider and, if thought fit, to pass with or without amendment, Resolution 5, approval to issue securities under the company's long-term incentive plan as an ordinary resolution. The resolution is on the screen. If you wish to discuss this resolution, please raise your hand, or if attending virtually, submit your questions via the Q&A.
I don't have any questions online, Pat.
Okay. The proxies received in relation to this resolution are now on the screen. Are there any questions on the proxy information?
No questions online.
Okay. I'll now put the motion. Please either mark your voting instruction on your yellow voting card or vote via the online portal. So that concludes the resolutions to be voted on today. Can all shareholders voting online, please now ensure that they have submitted their votes. I'll allow another minute before the poll is closed. For those shareholders attending physically, I now invite Amy Wong to collect your voting cards.
Nobody has raised any queries online, Pat.
Okay. So there'd be no further questions in relation to the polling process. I declare the poll closed. The staff of Automic will now process the poll, and the results will be announced to the ASX as soon as they're available. So we now turn to other business. Is there any other business that can lawfully be brought forward?
We haven't had anything raised prior to the meeting or online today.
Okay. There being no further questions, I'd like to thank all shareholders for their attendance, and we'll now end the formal part of today's meeting. I declare the meeting closed. As mentioned, shareholders will now have an opportunity to ask general questions for the CEO. Please enter any questions into the Q&A portal or raise your hands if you have any questions. I'll now check with the company secretary if there are any questions from shareholders online.
Presently, no questions, Pat.
Okay. As there are no further questions, I thank you for your attendance. I'll now close the general question session in the virtual meeting system. Thanks again for your participation. I ask Automic to close the virtual meeting. Thanks again.