Hello and welcome to the Djerriwarrh 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 by the webcast. If you'd like to ask a question at that time, please type your questions in the ask a question box at the bottom of the webcast window. I would now like to hand the presentation over to Mr. Mark Freeman, CEO and Managing Director, Djerriwarrh Investments.
Thank you. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon everyone. I'm Mark Freeman, the CEO and Managing Director of Djerriwarrh Investments and welcome to this full year result briefing. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians from all the lands we are gathered on today, and to pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. I have joining me today on the webinar Brett McNeill, the Portfolio Manager for Djerriwarrh, Olga Kosciuczyk, Assistant Portfolio Manager, Andrew Porter, our CFO, Matthew Rowe, Secretary, Geoffrey Driver, our General Manager of Business Development, and Suzanne Harding, Business Development Manager. 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.
I'll now turn to slide two, which is a disclaimer just to say we're here to talk about the company. We're not here to give any advice. Onto the agenda, I'll just give a brief overview of the company. Brett will talk through some of the recent results and then I'll touch on the premium discounts to NTA. Andrew Porter will then give a summary of the full year result. Back to Brett and Olga to talk through the results in more detail, including a portfolio update and outlook. Then we'll go to questions. Just starting with slide five, which is the overview. Just to remind everyone that Djerriwarrh is one of the largest income focused listed investment companies on the market.
It was established in 1989, listed in 1995, so shareholders get the benefits and transparency associated with being a Listed Investment Company, or an LIC as we call them, as well as the governance standards delivered by our independent Board of Directors. Importantly, Djerriwarrh shareholders own the management rights to the company, so there's no fee leakage to third parties and there's no additional fees or performance fees attached to that. Djerriwarrh is also part of the broader group of listed investment companies which include the Australian Foundation Investment Company or AFIC, AMCIL and Mirrabooka. This supports a broader research approach and scale of operations. In summary, Djerriwarrh is focused on producing higher income and higher yields than you achieve on the market. Our target is to produce a yield of at least 1.2% greater than the market. We use call options primarily to achieve this.
We do some limited put writing activities. Just remind everyone, selling call options does bring in additional income, but it can sell the blue sky on the stock, particularly when you've got a sustained period of strong markets which we've had over the last few years. We give away some of the upside to produce much stronger fully franked dividends today. We think this product has a unique positioning in the market, particularly in superannuation funds and pension funds which have zero tax paying status and can get all their cash back on franking credits received. With that, I'll just pass over to Brett for a couple of slides on yield and performance and then I'll talk about the share price.
Thanks Mark and good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining our presentation today. On slide six we address Djerriwarrh's primary objective, which is to deliver an enhanced yield. What we mean by this is essentially providing an enhanced level of fully franked income that is higher than what is available from the broader share market, being the S&P/ASX 200 Index. We look to deliver this at.
A low cost to shareholders.
What do we mean by enhanced yield? We're taking the last 12 months' worth of dividends, grossing them up for franking credits and calculating that as a percentage yield on 30 June 2025 valuations for both the Djerriwarrh portfolio and the broader share market. This is what we show in the chart on the left-hand side of slide 6. As we can see in the dark blue bar, Djerriwarrh's dividend yield was 6.5% as at 30 June 2025. This compared to the broader share market dividend yield of 4.2% as we can see in the orange bar there. The enhanced yield that we aim to deliver was 2.3%, being the difference between our 6.5% and the market's 4.2%. We think an enhanced yield of 2.3% is a very attractive level.
If we measure the yield on the Djerriwarrh share price, given that it's trading at a discount to the NTA, the yield's even higher at 7.3% for Djerriwarrh, still versus the market at 4.2%. On the right-hand side of slide six, we show how our enhanced yield has tracked over the last five financial years. It shows that we've produced what we think is a very healthy, attractive, and sustainable level of enhanced yield for each.
Of these last five financial years.
Turning to slide seven, which covers the secondary objective of Djerriwarrh, which is on top of delivering an enhanced yield to also deliver some capital growth through an attractive total return. We show this measure over various time frames. On the left-hand side, the last 12 months was certainly disappointing for Djerriwarrh in terms of the capital growth given our total return of 7.8% lagged the market's return of 15.1%. Both of those metrics being grossed up for the value of franking credits, and the five-year numbers on the same basis being Djerriwarrh, a total return of 11.1% and the market at 13.3%. The right-hand side here shows how Djerriwarrh's total return has tracked the market over the five-year period. We think it's useful because it illustrates how the underperformance over the five-year period has really occurred over the last 12 and a bit months.
That's mostly been due to our defensive positioning in what turned out to be a very strong market. We'll go into some further detail on some of the stock positions behind this later in the presentation.
Okay, thanks Brett. If you just move on to the next slide, I'll just make an additional comment on the previous one. We are seeing markets at very high valuations and as I said, the call options do cap our upside, particularly when markets are very strong. We do have that cautious view on valuations, particularly when you look at the price- to- sales, price- to- book of the Australian market as well as the U.S. market at this point in time. Onto that slide, it just shows you where the share price is in relation to the NTA. At the 30th of June the NTA was $3.40. At that point the share price was $3.03. As we sit here today, the discount is around 7%. The share price is around 7% below the NTA and we've been experiencing those sort of discounts now for a couple of years.
This is an issue that seems to cover most of the LIC market. In fact, there are a number of LICs trading at discounts much greater than that. It's a bit of a trend.
We're going through.
There's a number of reasons why this may occur. Obviously, there's continued growth in ETFs in the marketplace. We think higher interest rates have put some retirees in a position where they're happy to put more money into fixed interest and term deposits. We think there are a number of LICs that have entered the market in our view that have sort of clouded the picture where new LICs with external managers are charging high fees. There seems to be disappointment with those models. Just to remind everyone, we see ourselves as a traditional LIC where there is no external manager, there's no performance fees, it's simply cost recovery and the shareholders own the company. That is a very different model to some of the new LICs.
It's been a hot market and we've seen in the past when markets are really red hot, we do tend to lag a bit. We did see that discount quite close quite substantially when there was the sell-off a few months ago. In a way, it's almost like people looking at their traditional LIC like ours, not quite believing where the current market sits at this point in time. You're basically paying $0.93 for a dollar's worth of assets. There's a dividend coming up which is quite significant. Against where the NTA is at the moment, there appears to be some value. With that, I'll pass over to Andrew Porter, our CFO, to talk through the results.
Thank you, Mark.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. The summary of full year results is there on the screen for those of you who are watching. The net operating result: $40.8 million this year, up from $40.3 million. Just to remind shareholders, the net operating result excludes the results of the open options position. We don't know what the final position of those is going to be yet. It is a normal measure that the Board uses when determining the dividend. That's a pleasing result, particularly as there was a decline in dividends from key dividend players such as the resources stocks during the year. As we'll come on to later, there was also a reduction as part of the defensive posture on London bank stocks, which also led to a notable decline in dividends. Interestingly enough, the amount of money that we got from deposits was up to $1.5 million.
That was $1 million more than normal because Djerriwarrh was relatively ungeared during this period compared to what it has been in the past. $40.8 million has led to the Board declaring a dividend of $0.0825. Total dividends for the year: $0.155, up from $0.1525. Brett has been through some of the key objectives there in terms of that enhanced yield. It's a question that we're often asked: when you paid that out, what is the franking credit balance left in the company for future downturns? After paying for that dividend, it's roughly equivalent to $0.23. About a year and a half worth of dividends which we've got in store, which we think is an adequate reserve in total portfolio return. Brett's touched on that. We'll go into that in more detail later on. Management Expense Ratio, Mark has also touched on: 0.47%, up from 0.42% last year.
There was a small increase in the costs themselves, but the MER was perhaps higher than it would otherwise have been because, as we said, we are relatively ungeared. If we'd been more fully geared, that would have come down. With that, I'll hand back to Mark.
Okay, I think we might be passing the bread, actually.
No, thank you. Thank you. To pick up on some of the financial highlights that Andrew just gave, we give a bit more detail on the next few slides. Beginning on slide 12, we give a summarized version of our profit and loss statement. This is to really illustrate in a bit more detail the key drivers of how the net operating result has been made up and how it flows through to the dividend. Again, just to be clear, we're focusing here on the net operating result given, as Andrew mentioned, it's a better measure, we believe, of Djerriwarrh's profit and hence is the basis for the dividend that we declare. The overall picture from slide 12 for this financial year was that our defensive positioning for the majority of the year resulted in a smaller investment portfolio, given the net cash position, as we mentioned.
As a result, we had slightly lower dividend income. It was down 4% to $34.7 million. This was offset by a small increase in the option income, up 1% to $16.7 million. Other income, that bank deposit revenue being up, and also lower finance costs, which were down to $2 million. At the bottom line, dollar terms, the net operating result up 1% to $40.8 million, which equates to $0.155 on a per share basis. The dividends declared for the full year up 2% to $0.155. A couple of points to make here. Firstly, we think a very pleasing result that we're able to increase the profit and the dividend per share in a year when dividends are actually down on the S&P/ASX 200 Index.
We maintained a defensive portfolio, but also pointing out that we think the dividend per share is set at a very sustainable level, being fully covered by net operating profit per share. On slide 13, we just give a bit more detail on the key driver of Djerriwarrh's profit being the dividend income that we received from the companies that we own in the investment portfolio. We show the five-year trend for this metric. The FY 2025 result was down. As we've mentioned, in yield terms, which is shown on the right-hand side, the portfolio dividend yield was well above the market yield. This was mostly because of a couple of reasons. Firstly, we received some special dividends during the last 12 months, in particular from Woolworths, which boosted our portfolio dividend income and yield.
But secondly, some of the timing of a lot of our significant purchases, which Olga will touch on, was largely done before those stocks went ex dividend. We were able to capture the full period's worth of dividends for only a part year's worth of investment. Both of those factors really increased the portfolio's dividend yield versus the market in a year when market dividends were down. From here, I think we expect the portfolio's dividend yield to be at or slightly above the market level. Obviously there's a lot of factors that can influence that. On slide 14, similar analysis, but for the option income, which is the other key driver of Djerriwarrh's profit, and as a reminder, this is the income that we receive from our option writing activities and that involves us writing options, predominantly call options, sometimes puts, purely to generate extra income.
We don't use options at all for any hedging or speculative purposes. It's purely to generate extra income, and because of that, that's why it's a key source of the enhanced yield that we produce. Here, the five-year trend in option income has been very positive and it was very pleasing that this year was an increase on the previous year, which was also a strong year. In yield terms, quite high, with the portfolio's option income yield getting to 2%. There's a lot of factors that will influence the portfolio's option income yield from here, such as the amount of call option coverage we have across the portfolio, whether we write any puts selectively, but also market conditions like volatility levels.
The mix would suggest that we'd expect the portfolio's option income yield to be around the range of probably 1.6%- 2% from here in a normal type of year. Hopefully that gives a bit more detail on how we generated the increase in profit and dividend this year and the five-year trends in dividend and option income. With that, I'll pass to Olga who's going to give an update on the portfolio.
Thank you Brett and good afternoon everyone. Our main investment objective is to pay our shareholders an enhanced dividend yield. To achieve that goal, we generate income by writing call options against select portfolio holdings. On this slide we show the performance of the market as defined by our benchmark, the S&P/ASX 200 Index, overlaid with a top down view of our portfolio's call option coverage. We started the financial year 2025 with call option coverage of 29%, just below the bottom end of our normal range of 30%- 40%. This worked well as the market rose over the next two months. In response, we significantly increased call coverage in September and then maintained it above 40% over the next few months. In hindsight, we positioned our portfolio defensively too early as the S&P/ASX 200 Index continued to rise until the significant correction we saw in March and April.
Following the sell off, the market quickly rebounded and we increased our call option coverage to 45%. We finished the year with call option coverage at 32% following significant option exercises we had in May and June. On slide 17 we show our key recent transactions. In the financial year 2025, we had significant option exercises across banks CBA, NAB, Westpac and Macquarie Bank as well as Telstra and Transurban. We were also active sellers of our small remaining holdings in Ramsay Health Care and FINEOS, both of which have been disappointing investments for us. Finally, during the period we sold out of Mineral Resources. We were extremely disappointed in the company's corporate governance practices which saw us lose confidence in this investment and as a result we decided to exit the position.
We did not immediately reinvest the capital realized from this sale, carrying a net cash balance sheet until we saw a significant sell off in the S&P/ASX 200 Index which occurred in March and April. During this period we invested over $123 million into the market as we saw opportunities to buy quality companies at attractive valuations with prices 15%- 30% cheaper than the recent high. Our biggest purchases were across the banks NAB, Westpac and Macquarie Bank which, pleasingly, we bought before their ex dividend date. We also added to our ARB Holding as it underperformed the index significantly, mostly on concerns about the impact of the U.S. tariff on their business and a cyclically weak new vehicle market in Australia. We rate ARB's management highly and back them to navigate through these what we consider short-term challenges. We see no impact on the company's long-term growth outlook.
As such, we saw the price weakness as an opportunity to increase our holding at a very attractive price. We also added to our CSL holding and two large diversified miners, Rio Tinto and BHP. Finally, we added one new holding during the period, Ampol, which was formerly known as Caltex. Ampol is Australia's leading vertically integrated energy company. It operates businesses across convenience retail in Australia and New Zealand as well as the refining, supply, and marketing of fuel. We believe that Ampol is a better business today compared to five years ago. The earnings mix is better as the quality of the network has improved dramatically. Management have demonstrated good capital allocation and discipline. Ampol primarily offers our portfolio an attractive level of dividend income, especially if trading conditions in the refining business improve from the current cyclically low levels.
Djerriwarrh's portfolio underperformed the S&P/ASX 200 Index last financial year, which was a disappointing result. On the next two slides, we look at what worked and what did not work in the portfolio, starting with the two key drivers of our underperformance. On slide 18, we were underweight CBA while its share price was up 47% and overweight in CSL, which share price was down 18%. In the long term, we anticipate share price to follow earnings growth. However, for both companies, this was not the case last financial year as the key driver for both companies was the multiple the market was willing to pay for their earnings, as we show on the two charts on this slide. As you can see on the chart on the left side, CBA's price- to- earnings ratio has expanded to extreme levels, 29 x price- to- earnings.
It is the highest multiple it has ever traded on despite delivering very little earnings growth over the past decade, and the expected earnings growth for the next three years is also minimal. CBA's dividend yield of 2.7% is now below the index's, making it an unattractive investment. As such, following significant amount of call option exercises, we decided to actively sell our small remaining holding, exiting the stock completely at a share price of $187. On the other hand, CSL continues to trade at the lowest price- to- earnings multiple in over a decade. The significant derating reflects the market's loss of confidence in management's ability to continue to grow earnings at historical levels. We think that the correction in the price multiple is too extreme, especially in the context of CSL's future earnings potential and their leadership position in growing markets.
We believe that CSL is well positioned to deliver double digit earnings growth over the medium term. This, in conjunction with very limited risk of further derating, makes it a very attractive investment for our portfolio and as such CSL remains one of our biggest absolute and relative portfolio positions. We remain positive that these two headwinds will reverse at some point in the future as their share prices align with their earnings growth potential. Our portfolio is well positioned for that. On slide 19, we show our two key positive contributors to our performance in FY 2025: Telstra and Newmont. We took the view two years ago that Telstra was a very different investment proposition to what it had been previously. The company had faced a huge disruption to their business from the creation of the NBN and had to restructure the business.
This included major cuts to the dividend, but by 2023 we felt confident that the worst was behind Telstra and made it our top active position in the portfolio. We saw a market leading mobile business in a world where people seem to be consuming more and more data, a strong management team, a solid balance sheet, and the likelihood that earnings and the dividend could start to grow again. Pleasingly, the company has delivered well. It is now reflected in its share price, which was up 35% last financial year as you can see on the chart on the left side of the slide. Our portfolio also benefited from our Newmont Holdings. Newmont is a diversified gold and copper mining company that owns high quality assets in attractive jurisdictions.
We think Newmont offers a good mix of income and growth along with some extra diversification for our portfolio given its gold exposure, especially at a time of heightened geopolitical risk. Both companies performed very well during the year as you can see on the chart, and we continue to hold them both in our portfolio.
Thanks, Olga. We'll turn to slide 20, which gives a summary of the portfolio as at the end of June. Some of the key metrics of the portfolio are shown on the left-hand side, and the stocks shown on the right-hand side are our top 20 holdings in order of value. An $835 million portfolio across 44 stocks, the four largest being BHP, CSL, Woolworths, and Rio Tinto. We still own Telstra, as you can see it's in the top 20, the sixth largest holding, but we own a lot less of it than we did 6 and 12 months ago given the option exercises that have occurred. Not only is CBA not in the top 20, but as Olga mentioned, we exited the stock completely after significant option exercises in the last few months.
In terms of the banks, we still own NAB and Westpac in the top 20, and you can see ANZ has reappeared in our top 20 after we stepped back in and started buying the stock in recent months. Wesfarmers is another core Djerriwarrh stock that's dropped out of the top 20 after significant option exercises. Similar to CBA with Wesfarmers, we'd love to own more given we believe it's such a high-quality company, but only at lower prices and hence we're positioned for that. We're overall defensively positioned with significant capacity to invest when we see more compelling buying opportunities, as occurred in March and April earlier this year, like Olga described. Moving to some outlook comments on slide 21 in terms of markets, we think the share market is back at a very high level.
It's had a huge rebound since that sell-off in March and April, and to us it looks expensive on some top-down fundamental valuation metrics, particularly forward-looking price- to- earnings ratios and dividend yields. For us, when we're looking through the market in a bottom-up perspective trying to add good quality stocks to give us the right mix of income and growth, we think it's hard to do that, to find good value, but we've still been able to do it selectively in small amounts recently. Overall, that view on the market feeds into our portfolio's defensive positioning. Just to reiterate, we do have significant capacity to invest when we see the right opportunities.
In terms of our two key profit drivers for our dividend income, we've got bigger holdings in the major miners, Rio and BHP, and we expect this will generate a solid level of fully franked dividend income over the next 12 months. Beyond that, our ability to maintain and grow our dividend income will be driven really by our ability to find the right buying opportunities, quality companies at the right prices. In terms of our option income, we think overall well positioned, we've got a good amount of option income already written for the next financial year with the ability to write more as well as maintaining the exposure to potential capital growth. To sum up, I think it was a good year for Djerriwarrh.
We had a good increase in the profit level and the dividend produced a very attractive enhanced yield level with less capital growth in the market and we think we've got a portfolio well positioned to start the next financial year. With that, I'll hand over to Geoff who will run the question and answer session.
Thank you, Brett. Just a reminder, if you want to ask a question, you can do so at the bottom of the website. We've got some questions here and please encourage you to ask them as we're going through these ones. I'm asking now, given that the post NTA, post tax NTA I should say, is $3.40 and the share price is $3.20, why can't a buyback be undertaken to buy the shares back at below the post tax NTA, which would be a benefit for all shareholders by reducing the discount to NTA and increasing the resultant NTA.
Yes.
We have been doing buybacks over the last couple of years when we felt that the price was attractive, and we take into consideration not just the discount but where the absolute level of the market is. We also take into consideration the DRP, and we've certainly had a view around if we're issuing new stock at discounts, it's a good idea to at least neutralize that. That has been the approach, and we'll consider that going forward as well. We tend to leave the DRP on because we certainly have had periods where the stock's traded at a premium. At the moment, we're going through a period where it trades at a discount, and we tend to find a lot of the same shareholders stay in it through those differing periods. Therefore, our preference is to keep it on.
However, we will consider neutralizing the dilution impact from offering stock at a discount. We will also consider if we saw a market sell-off and we were trading at a large discount, that might be another opportunity we consider. It's still on the table doing buybacks?
I guess station areas, Mark Freeman. The buybacks may close discounts slightly.
It hasn't had a major impact on. No, it hasn't discounted. If you're buying back at a really cheap price, you are adding value, you are improving the NTA and the total returns for those shareholders that stay in the stock. We are doing a lot more.
Work on marketing the fund as well in terms of trying to get that close that discount to.
Yeah, that's right. When we're sort of, you know, aware it's not something we like having and increased our resources. We've taken on Suzanne Harding who's helped us understand better, I guess where our true market is for Djerriwarrh because the landscape has changed a lot over the last 10 years. Some of our traditional supporters may be going to, I guess, programmed portfolio structures which may not suit us, but there's a whole lot of what we call them independent financial advisors that are actually looking at to do something a little bit different and want to find value in the market, particularly in the expensive market. We're finding lots of new avenues now to market Djerriwarrh and finding new potential investors who are finding this discount a very appealing opportunity to come into the stock.
I think this would be a bit of a transition period and I guess we're hoping at some point that we trade closer to the NTA. Just to remind everyone that when the market did have a sell off a few months ago around the Trump tariffs, that gap closed quite substantially. As the market fell a lot, it fell a little bit. It goes back to that point that you almost feel like people who are watching our LICs are almost unwilling to buy into where the market is at the moment.
Thanks Mark. This is probably an interesting question in terms of that discussion. I mean have we considered paying monthly dividends given Djerriwarrh's primary income stock? There's some other LIC income offers in the market who pay monthly dividends and they're actually trading above pre-tax income.
Yeah, look, it's something we're discussing and we're aware of, fully aware of the structures that some other companies are taking. For us, to be more considering what our shareholders want, it's probably fair to say we're trying to get better sounding in the market in terms of, you know, the significant, will it be that significant? We're certainly happy to look at some of those things and we're doing the work at the moment.
T hanks Mark.
We've talked about having tweaked the Djerriwarrh strategy over the time, over your time.
Mark, particularly in Brett [oldest] time here.
Over the last six years or so, it may require the option strategy to be tweaked a little bit so not to lose so much of the highly probable capital growth optionality.
That's always the balance. The reset was really about we got to a point where we were kind of trying to sustain a level of dividends that were just way too high. The key part about the strategy reset was resetting that event to really be structured or based around the operating earnings per share, so you felt like this is some sustainability. Obviously, if the operating earnings per share falls substantially then you know, we have to look at the dividend. We've had a year. We've actually built up some reserves, so we do have some premium credits tucked away at this point. That's the balancing act between how many calls you write over which stocks when you write them, but still allowing some capital growth. At the moment the yield is very strong but probably just a little bit below where we want to be on capital growth.
I have a look at three and five year numbers and we're only a little bit below where we'd expect to be because when you have really, really strong markets, which the five year number has been, we will tend to lag the market a little bit. We're certainly conscious of that.
Thanks, Mark. Again, you're encouraged to put your questions through, please. Region Group is clearly your largest property exposure. What makes you so keen on this?
Yep, no.
It's been a good long term consistent holding in the portfolio. I think it's got a number of really attractive attributes. The headline, like the financial level, the dividend yield is very attractive, 6% without franking. That's equivalent to gross stock yields on other stocks in the portfolio. A starting point of a dividend yield of 6%, which we think is very sustainable, fully cash backed. We think they're in a position where they can deliver good growth off that now. The growth you're going to get from a high quality defensive portfolio that Djerriwarrh owns is going to be modest. It's not a high growth portfolio, but we think somewhere in the range of 3 %- 4%. If they allocate capital well and maintain a conservative balance sheet, that can compound over time to deliver a really good total return.
You've got.
We think the portfolio that they own is high quality, well located. Regional neighborhood shopping centers that are mostly tenanted by the big supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, are very reliable in delivering consistent sales and rental growth over time. They hold their values very well, particularly if they're well located, which means the land value will typically go up over time. We think [Region got] the best portfolio in that. It's wrapped up in a really attractive structure for investors that's internally managed. There's no fee leakage, there's no management or performance fee leakage to a third party fund manager, internally managed. We think the alignment and the value is well captured by shareholders and it continues to trade at a good valuation. It's something that we've been willing to step in and buy more of when we've seen good opportunities in the share price.
Core holding for us.
Thanks Brett. Observation here. With the proceeds of $33 million for CBA, was the average exit price on CBA about $142? I guess it's mentioned in the context. Why do we talk about the final.
Exit price of $180?
Yeah, no, good observation. Thanks for bringing it up. All we were doing there is trying to split out the fact that we were an active seller of some of our CBA as well. The majority of the reduction in our holdings has been through the option exercises, but we also made the decision to actively sell some of it, and that was just splitting out the final selling price of that active sale. The contrast is with the other major disposals in the investment portfolio, which all occurred as a result of call option exercises.
That's all that was.
Thanks, Brett. CSL question here about the full impact of Trump's proposed pharma tariff, or has it been priced into the stock?
Yeah, to be famous, last word to say it's fully priced in like in this environment with changing policies and the like, it's very difficult to say something's definitely priced in. The way we've approached it is that we think the stock's derated enough, particularly over the last 12 months, but really the last three to five years when you take a longer term view, that the market valuation of it is conservative enough that yes, there is some allowance for negative sentiment and news flow in those areas and they are up against that definitely with some of the U.S. administration policies, but there is some compensation in there for it. We've been willing to add to it over the last 12 months and pleasingly it's actually had a little bit of a bounce over the last month. Of course, that is short term.
We'll see if it can deliver a good result next month and what any further news flow is. That's the tricky thing, I think, not just for CSL but for any company operating in that environment to make decisions when policies change so quickly. The confidence we've got in the company, market leading position, management of the company and their growth prospects, we think are sound overall. Of course, there'll be some blips here and there with policy changes and the like, but we think that they're very well positioned.
There's a question over how we've calculated the P/E for CSL and what was the source information there that we actually used. Given some other sources such as Macquarie have a slightly different census number.
Thank you for this question. CSL reports in U.S. dollars. If we convert U.S. dollars EPS into Australian dollars, then that's how we got the P/E because the share price is also in Australian dollars. It's purely the currency.
Question about.
How Mirrabooka fits into the portfolio. Is it a more tactical or trading position, or to hold them, or to provide diversification, diversified exposure to small mid cap sector of the market?
Yeah, it's more of the latter. Once you're dealing, Mirrabooka focuses on mid to small cap stocks and it often has about 70 companies in the portfolio, in 60- 70. I guess the way they think about it is you really have to, when you're dealing in that area of the market, you have lots of things on the go and out of that, if you can find some really good winners, it really drives the performance. You basically have to have lots of investments then to find some really high quality winners out of that. The other thing about Mirrabooka then is it's produced consistent strong performance not just against its own benchmark, which is the combined mid and small caps, but it's comfortably beaten the S&P/ASX 200 Index. The two total returns have been excellent. It adds value to the portfolio in that regard.
It's also been distributing a lot of those returns as fully franked dividends. With Mirrabooka you get the opportunity to get a portfolio that's been beating our benchmark and throwing off lots of high fully franked dividends as well. We think it rounds out the portfolio where really the team are focused on individual holdings, then the larger companies, where there's a strong derivative market and you can access that smaller end through Mirrabooka. Mirrabooka did a capital raising during the period at a price of $3.05. Djerriwarrh participated in that. We thought that was good value buying at that price, so went into it, and the current share price I think is around $3.35 at this point.
Thanks Mark. Again, just a reminder if you want to ask a question, please do so at the bottom of the webcast box. I'll get a question here about Santos and what's happening there, given the takeover offer that's been made for that particular company.
Thank you. Yes. Santos received a non-binding indicative proposal from a consortium led by XRG to acquire Santos for a cash offer of US$5.76. Santos' board intends to recommend Santos shareholders to vote in favor of that takeover. If we look at the current share price, it's around $1 lower than the bid price. That really shows that the market does not have a lot of faith that the takeover will proceed. I think there's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, the markets are concerned that the takeover will not receive required regulatory approval, especially given Santos' ownership of strategic assets that supply into the domestic market. Secondly, Santos actually has a history of failed takeover attempts. If you think about last year, most recently Woodside walked away during the due diligence process. There are some concerns that this might happen again.
For us, it's unclear at this point whether the takeover will proceed. However, we are not against it. We are looking forward to seeing a binding non-conditional bid to make our mind on the proposals. In terms of our portfolio action on the back of this, we haven't really made any adjustments to our portfolio. Holding is just above the index weight in our portfolio at this point.
Thanks Olga.
I don't have any more questions coming through here, Mark, so I will hand back to you to close the meeting.
Okay, thank you everyone for joining this meeting. Hope you found it informative. The next opportunity to get an update will be at the AGM in October and that'll be webcast again. There'll be a slide presentation and the opportunity for questions there. We will be doing another webinar in January for the half year result in a similar format. Thank you everyone again for joining and hopefully you can join us at the AGM. That does conclude today's webinar. Thank you for your participation. You will now disconnect your line.