Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Frontier Digital Ventures' half-year financial results conference call. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Shaun Di Gregorio, Founder and CEO. Please go ahead.
Morning, everyone. Welcome to another FDV call. This is our half-year results that were released to the market this morning. As many of you who might follow us would know, we release our quarterly also back in July. Most of the financial data is in the market today. We hope to use this as an opportunity to talk a little bit more about our operational update, our strategy update, and what's happening moreover in the markets. Also worth noting that we actually listed on the ASX on August 26th, I think, in 2016. This serves as our fourth anniversary of being a listed company.
It's been quite a journey, and we'd like to thank those who are on the call who may have been shareholders throughout that period or been very supportive of FDV over that four years, and we look forward to the next four years as well. Getting into the document, I'm going to walk through the first couple of sections. There are four sections. One deals with a bit of an operational update. Another just references our strategy. In section three, there are the results that I've mentioned, most of which are in the market already. Section four, we've provided an appendix with a bit more information about each of the operating companies that are in our portfolio. At the moment, given the state of the world, we're very much of the view that more information is better than less.
We've tried to give our readers as much information as possible as you can plausibly put into one of these documents, and hopefully, that gives people a good sense of where we're at. As the host mentioned, there is certainly time for Q&A toward the end of the presentation. In terms of our operational update, which is section one, some highlights. I'm going to walk through the slides. I'm going to move on to slide number four, which just looks at our profitability. When we look at the half year, one goal that we've had certainly through our existence was, on the one hand, to really send a clear message to the market about what we're doing and how we're doing it and be very consistent in delivering on that commitment.
I think in the half year to June, we maintained our trajectory and our progress toward profitability. This was really achieved back in March when we looked at very clear signs that COVID was approaching, and you've got one of two choices. You can act swiftly, or you can bury your head in the sand. We were very cognizant of what had happened in Hong Kong with SARS and what had happened in Wuhan through December and January into February. We worked really closely with our partners at addressing the cost base. We knew that with lockdowns, that typically, revenue starts to ebb away.
We were really effective in being able to work with our partners at a local level and identify that there was going to be a bit of a choppy few months, and the best thing you can do is to look at your cost base and really just prepare yourself for a choppy few months and the uncertainty that came with that. One important thing that we've noted over the last number of months in the first half is if you get in and you recognize the environment around you and you make quick decisions and you make them fast and you apply them quickly to your business, you then really allow yourself to focus on what you can achieve versus what you can't achieve in lockdowns and things like COVID.
For us, we made some really fast decisions early that enabled our operators, our businesses, to really focus on how they can extend their brand positioning through COVID, how they can improve their market leadership, and more particularly, how they can innovate their product set. Over the last couple of months, we've seen an extraordinary amount of innovation occur, particularly in digital businesses. More so when you look at our portfolio, there's been an awful lot of innovation that's occurred in terms of bringing consumers through the journey and helping them transact houses and cars and other items on online platforms. That's been a real feature of the last number of months. Also, the market leadership of businesses through COVID. If you're a market leader in this period, you're going to come out of this period an even stronger market leader.
We've seen a real flight to safety. The sum of that is we were able to continue to deliver on the signal that we'd provided to the market around our trajectory toward profitability, and we think that that was a real feature of our management over the last number of months. You can read the EBITDA numbers for yourself. Pleasingly, what we've seen, and I'm just going to go over the page now onto slide five, is some real clear signs of a recovery now. We always had a view that we would get to about now, and we'd see economic activity return, lockdowns being released. If you've done the hard work through March, April, and May, you position yourself really well about now to make the most of the recovery.
We've seen some pretty stunning returns to commercial activity in our markets, and that's been evidenced by revenue in the back half of June and certainly July, starting to bounce back really strongly. That's been right across the portfolio. Our view was always do the tough work in March and April, reduce your cost base, which should endure post-COVID, and that was evidenced in the EBITDA performance of the portfolio. Then as economic activity returns, as the lockdowns are released, you can position yourself really, really well to accelerate your revenue. We saw that in July. Our plan that we'd set out a number of months ago is proving to be pretty astute in what we thought would occur. We're starting to see the revenue recovery, which has been certainly terrific in July.
In terms of right across the board, Pakistan's a really important market for us, and we've seen some significant improvement in June and July in that market as well. They went into the lockdown a bit later in that particular region. They've certainly come out of it with a real bounce over the last six weeks, and all of the indicators we look toward support those businesses really improving in the second half. As I mentioned, a big feature of the last number of months was taking the opportunity to look at your cost base and look at things like your marketing and your employment costs, and really determining whether they were fully optimized. You had a bit of clear air to do that.
We were able to do that with all of our partners. Consequently, we've actually had Q2 in our business at a sum of the parts level with an improved EBITDA performance from Q1. We think we've really used the COVID period studiously by focusing on analyzing our costs, by really spending some time on innovating around our product set so that, as people prefer a more digital experience, we're really well set from an IT and innovation perspective. Obviously, that allows us to bounce out of this period with really strong revenue rebounding and maintaining profitability, which we think has been a real bonus, if you like, of the last little while. I'd also point to the fact that, I think the last number of months has been somewhat fortuitous in validating our strategy around our business model.
Our business model has probably two key features to it. One is that it's obviously digitizing the process by which people buy houses and cars. I think we've seen clearly that there's been an acceleration in the preference for digital platforms around purchases and expect that to continue. We always had a view that people would prefer digital platforms to buy houses and cars, we think that that's been accelerated by COVID and the innovation that's happened now in the market around digitizing purchases is really important. Secondly, just our structure of investing in these businesses with local partners where we were able to act really quickly. We think that that's been a feature of our model as well. For all of the doom and gloom in COVID, we actually saw it as an opportunity.
We saw it as an opportunity to reflect on our cost base. We saw it as an opportunity to innovate. We saw it as an opportunity to really consolidate market leadership. If you go over to slide six, you'll see that this is just a sum of the traffic to our sites right across our network. You can see that in March and April, consumers in the lockdown stopped searching for houses and cars. What we've seen in June, and it's accelerated in July, is that there's actually more people in the month of July using our network of sites than there was before COVID. It's actually the highest traffic numbers we've had. We've not only seen a rebound in consumers coming to our network of sites to look at buying houses and cars and other goods.
We've actually seen an increased number in the month of July, that's continued in August. There are more people than ever now wanting to access digital platforms to look at buying houses and cars. When we went into COVID, if you go back to February, the first thing to disappear when the restrictions came in was consumers going to the websites, which meant you had fewer leads, which meant you had less commercial activity. That's rebounded really strongly. It's not just in a few markets. If you go over the page onto slide seven, I think all but a couple of the businesses now have more traffic than they had pre-COVID. This has been a really interesting evolution in the model where we've always prophesied that not only are these businesses online classified businesses, but they've morphed into marketplaces, and they're now becoming full transaction centers.
It wasn't that long ago that consumers would go to one of our sites and just look at an ad and click and go. Of course, marketplaces opened up where consumers could do so much more. Then, of course, we've seen this push toward consumers wanting to do the whole transaction via these digital platforms. Interestingly, post-COVID, that's accelerated. Innovation and consumer preference that we thought would probably take a couple of years has been accelerated into a couple of months. As we come out of this, I think digital-based businesses are really well positioned. I think digital businesses promoting the transaction of houses and cars have actually had the future come toward them at quite a rapid rate, thanks to the change in people's preferences.
If you go over to slide eight, just to give you a sense of how the regions are recovering. Obviously, different countries have had different lockdowns and different strategies, but most of which are now reducing restrictions, and that's when economic activity returns. You've just got a bit of a flavor there. I'm not going to go through this in detail. What we have seen is all of the markets now return to commercial activity. The best predictor, the best indicator of that is the data on the previous slide, which is about consumers. As we see consumers return, we're seeing more traffic than ever coming to these websites, which means that the post-COVID world is going to suit this kind of business really nicely. It's all about now accelerating into that opportunity in the back half of this year, and obviously into next year.
Just moving on to the next slide, which is number nine. If you wanted to think about what's the silver lining out of this? How do you make the most of this situation? Maybe aside from people in Victoria, I think most of the rest of the markets we're in certainly are now accelerating out of the restrictions. We've really been able to achieve a few things in the last number of months. I think our reputation globally has been enhanced by the performance of our portfolio, by the strategies we took back in March and April to reduce costs and really focus on consolidating market leadership, really focus on the innovation that you can achieve through that period, and being able to accelerate out of the period with a really solid balance sheet, with a really solid EBITDA perspective.
Most businesses over the last six months have had revenue reductions, but have seen their EBITDA numbers blow out. We've managed to mitigate that, and I think that's been a real feature of our model, which is being able to have strategic oversight into our operating companies and then the local management teams being able to execute really quickly. We have seen this flight to safety around brands, particularly in emerging markets. In emerging markets, these online classified brands have always been a trusted intermediary, and that's been accelerated through this period as well. We've got ourselves in a position where we're coming out of this in a real position of strength.
In a post-COVID world, I think there are two types of companies, quality companies that have used the period to their advantage and made the most of it, and are now emerging out of COVID in a real position of strength where they've got good access to capital, they can improve their market positions, they've got strong balance sheets. I think we're very much in that category. I think there's a group of companies that come out of COVID with a really brittle business, whether that's a poor balance sheet or really heavy EBITDA losses or poor market positions. It's where you don't want to be.
I can assure you that we've been very focused on making sure that we're in the former category of companies that can now really look optimistically at the next six to 18 months and how they can grow their businesses, consolidate their market positions. I think we've got ourselves in a really strong position to do that. I think our model has been validated. It's proven to be extremely resilient, and that's given us a really strong foundation for what we consider to be a really exciting and opportunistic six to 18 months ahead of us. When we look forward, and I can tell you, if you spoke to people back in March and April, it was a pretty different world. When we look forward now, we're probably more optimistic than we've been in a long time. Ironically, we're probably more active.
I've just gone over to slide 10. I get to read my own quote, which is kind of weird. We're more optimistic about the opportunities that are out in the market. We've managed to do a deal with OLX over the last number of months, which has really enhanced our reputation with companies of that size and that ilk around the world. We look forward to the next six to 18 months. We think that the lessons out of the last number of months have been really valuable. If you've used the period well, you can just go back to that underlying EBIT, which is just got the long-term focus on shareholder value that we've always promoted in our business and we'll continue to do so. That's always been at the center of everything we do.
We think that we've got ourselves in a really strong position to continue to deliver on that commitment to our shareholders, which is always about creating long-term value in all of the decisions that we make. Just moving on to slide 11. Just quickly to recap some of the activity that's been going on in our business in the first half. There's been monetization events in Vietnam where we exited Propzy. We've had a number of increased shareholdings in our portfolio. We continue to look at opportunities to buy more of the companies in our portfolio that are performing well. That's something that is a constant. We will continue to look at our portfolio and try to improve our positions in the companies that we think have really good long-term value.
We've expanded into a couple more markets via the deal we did with OLX in Central America. We now basically cover from the border of Mexico down to the border with Colombia. That part of the world is now under the RE24 banner. We've also managed to strengthen our balance sheet over the last six months, albeit modestly. It's certainly strengthening our balance sheet with a new suite of investors in North America is really important to us. We think that that investor market can be really important to helping us grow over the next number of years. We've spent time in cultivating some really wonderful relationships in North America that we think will underpin a lot of our growth in the future and deliver as we've been able to do a really strong balance sheet for us.
It's been an extremely busy six months, as everyone would appreciate. We've been more active in the last six months, I think, than we've ever been, and we just have some really exciting stuff on the horizon. Just quickly, I'm conscious of time, is I'll just whip through the strategy section just to remind people of how we operate. On slide 13, you can see that our business model's been really consistent. Our ability to work with our local partners in helping them plan and run their businesses. Of course, as those businesses in our portfolio grow and mature and become more robust, we attempt to buy more of them, you end up with businesses that are pretty well self-sufficient, and market leaders. That's where we've pushed a lot of our portfolio over the last sort of 12-18 months.
We think that the model we pioneered back in 2014, which was a bit unique at the time, has really delivered for us over the last six months, particularly in that it's a very flexible model. We were able to adapt really quickly with the model we have. We think that that's delivered a real competitive advantage, and that's certainly been really relevant, certainly over the last six months in these interpositions as well. If you flip over to 14, it just gives you a bit of a sense of some of the things we focus on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, which all go back to building great businesses, delivering scale. That scale obviously then allows you to generate revenue and improve your EBITDA performance. Out of that, we want to deliver long-term shareholder value.
We think that there's an awful lot of upsides, not just in the markets we're in. We think that there's obviously upside in the markets we're in and markets that are adjacent to the markets we're in. We're also seeing a heck of a lot of opportunity come out of this. There's a lot of operators and businesses out there that are a bit stressed at the moment. If you can get yourself into a position such as ours, where you've got strong balance sheet, got a good solid EBITDA base, you've got market leaders, you've got good support, we think that there's certainly opportunities for growth. We do that already prepared, with a really good balance sheet. Over on 15, there's probably just a little bit of information if people are catching up to our story or are a bit new to the story.
We have three fundamental regions that we focus on. I don't expect us to be moving out of those regions anytime soon. They're three regions that we continue to look at. You'll see the split there of the types of businesses that we invest in and where they are. It's been pretty consistent over the length of our story. If you go over again onto page 16, just a bit of background again, perhaps for those that might be newer to the story than some others. Just gives you a bit of a background about who I am and what we've done in the past. Another slide further on, just a bit of a corporate view about our register and details of our board. Beyond that is the actual detail of the results. I'd certainly encourage everyone to go in and have a look.
We've provided an awful lot of detail. In the appendix, you can see we've broken out each business and looked at its revenue and EBITDA performance over the last number of years. We've also given you, on a business-by-business basis, just a look at their traffic trends. The traffic that you're seeing when you go into those slides, that's all direct and organic traffic. That is free traffic to your website. None of that is paid traffic. We've gone back to the free traffic that you get, the direct traffic, the organic traffic, which is through search. If you look into each of those businesses, you'll see a very consistent trend whereby your traffic slowed in February into March, into April. You then saw the revenue impact in April, May and June.
You've seen a very consistent recovery, firstly by traffic in July and into August. We've obviously seen that present itself in revenue in July. Very consistent pattern across markets we're in. Traffic dives, revenue falls away, you cut your costs, you prepare to accelerate out of COVID. We're now accelerating out of COVID with more consumers than ever returning to our websites. Obviously July revenues were significantly up on the average of the preceding three months. That's FDV over the last little while. I will now hand back to the operator, who will, I think now open the call to questions from anyone that's wanting to get any clarity or detail on anything we've covered this morning.
Obviously, our full year results, our audited results were also released to the market this morning. People can comb through those if they want to dive into specifics around the financials or any other matters. Obviously happy to take questions now on anything we've covered this morning.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Anthony Porto from Morgan Financial. Please go ahead.
Hi, Shaun. How are you? Can you hear me?
Yes, mate, can.
Yep, excellent. Just quickly, so you mentioned OLX and the working relationship and now partner with Zameen and Encuentra24. Obviously, you're on a focus to break even or to get these businesses showing leverage. Are they on a similar path or are they more prepared, I guess, to reinvest back in the businesses and play the real long game, given the difference in representation of portfolio for you guys? Obviously, Zameen and Encuentra24 are a majority of your portfolio versus not much for OLX. That was the first question. I guess, the balance sheet's looking pretty good, close to AUD 21 million pro forma cash. Should we be thinking of new geographies, verticals within the geography? Or should we be thinking of potentially buying more stakes in what you already own? Thanks.
Yep. Just to answer the question on OLX, I can give you my opinion on OLX. I can't obviously quote their strategies it's for them to answer. Certainly, they're in it for the long haul. If you look at the landscape of large classifieds, global classifieds, conglomerates is the closest thing you could describe them, but they are absolutely in it for the long haul. They're prepared to invest. I think there is a caveat there that they're also a commercial concern, and they're listed, and they want businesses, of course, ultimately to be profitable. They do understand that there's a balance. I think in anything in that, Anthony, there's a balance there where you absolutely want to invest for the long haul, but you do have to run businesses for profit.
I think that that'll be increasingly important to them just from their perspective over the journey. They've invested in a number of emerging markets now and they understand how they work. They, like us, like our operators, want businesses to make money, and that's where you can really crystallize value for shareholders. I think it's early days also in our relationship with OLX, and to be honest, they're there. They kind of just want to further the management team get on and run the business. To answer your second question, yeah, we do have a good balance sheet, which is great. If you look back at our history, we spend money like it's our own, if that makes sense. We're very careful on that front. The natural thing to do when you're running these businesses is to consolidate the markets you're in, number one.
Number two, you might then look at adjacencies. What I mean adjacencies, that can either be different types of businesses in the markets you're in that's less common, or maybe there's the geography right beside you that makes sense to move into. I mean, InfoCasas, who are in LatAm, so they're based out of Uruguay. Over the years, they went into Paraguay and then Bolivia, and more recently they've moved into Peru, but they've done it on a real light touch. If you look at their traffic performance, they're now growing faster than anyone else in that market. There's ways and means of going to new markets. Certainly, if there is a compelling opportunity that came our way, and it was in a market we were already in where we thought it could consolidate our position or it was in an adjacent geography, that's easy to do.
You're probably not going to see us go into a random geography with a new business outside of the regions we've mentioned and outside of the types of businesses that we know really well. You like to keep your options open, but you've got to do the smart thing, and that's consolidating where you are or moving progressively into geographies that are very close to you. That's generally the easiest path.
Thanks for that, Shaun.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Adam Hunter from Bell Potter Securities. Please go ahead.
Oh, good day, Shaun.
Hello to you.
Can you hear me there? Yeah, good, thanks. Good.
That's okay.
Well, on another good result there. I get that as the audience levels drop, so do revenues, which is what we saw in a few of these previous months. With the audience levels back up above where they were pre-COVID, does that make it easier for you now to monetize in some of your countries? Are you expecting an increase in these growth rates now as a result that they've actually gone back above the pre-COVID levels?
Yeah, it's a really interesting question because, number one, this is uncharted territory largely, isn't it? We can reflect on what happened in SARS, in Hong Kong, in Wuhan. There's probably not a bucketload of untold dividends to tell you what will happen. What we can say is that innovation around buying houses and cars on the internet was probably something that is spoken about. It's happening. A lot of the innovation was probably stuff, things we expected to see over the next couple of years. What we've seen in the last three to four months is that innovation rapidly come to today, and it's been accelerated. We've seen the preparedness of consumers to go 95% of the process on buying a car online, which, Pre-COVID, might have been closer to 50, half of the process. We're seeing that accelerate, number one.
Number two, we've seen if you're a market leader and you've got a really strong brand, you're probably going to come out of this as an even more dominant market leader and an even stronger brand because of this flight to safety around consumer choice. Those two dynamics are really fascinating. You add to that this rapid recovery in people going to the internet, going to digital platforms, houses and cars. You add to that, revenue in July bounced back up following the lockdowns being released. The sixty dollar question is, what's the trajectory of that over the next six to eight months?
If you add all of that up, you go, "Well, yeah, I think that this model accelerates." It's very difficult to know because it's uncharted, but all of the evidence would suggest that more consumers have more rapidly gone down the digital path. These platforms were down that path anyway. That's been accelerated from an innovation and product offering perspective. All of the early signs as the potential out of this are really positive. I'd be reserved in suggesting that you can monetize even more than you thought before. I think you can, but it's something that we'll have a much clearer view of toward the end of this year. We're really encouraged and almost pleasantly surprised at the pace at which consumers have returned to use these platforms to look at houses and cars. We thought it would take a bit longer. It's happened faster.
We'll see what the rest of the year looks like. I just think one thing it does, Adam, is it further confirms that buying houses and cars online was something that was spoken about. Some people did, some portals offered. The reality is that that's just been accelerated and brought forward. We think that there'll be opportunity out of that. The other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of businesses got really stressed through this period. You sort of come out the other end, as we are now, with less competition. There's going to be less players in each of these markets. It's not going to be an environment where you can launch a business, burn a bit of money, and someone will throw you a check to keep you going. That's just gone away.
The strong businesses survive, and the strong will thrive. There's been a real reduction in activity by those that were perhaps number three or number four in market. Fascinating set of circumstances, and one that we think just by a bit of good luck and a bit of good management sort of plays to what we've been doing anyway. We hope we can make the most of it.
Yeah, right. Have you seen an explosion in online shopping as well, like we have in Australia with Temple & Webster and Kogan.com and all that? Has that gone through the roof also?
Yeah. I can't comment more generally on e-commerce, but certainly it's increased. That's just a function of fact, isn't it? Where people have turned to online more than they have before. As I said, the indicator for us has just been the volume of people going back to the websites really quickly. Keep in mind, when we went through March and April, one of the things we trimmed was marketing, because, one, it was kind of pointless if people weren't looking at your site. Two, marketing, when you're spending marketing dollars online, it's a bit like a drug. Websites get on the drug, and they can't get off it, and they keep spending. It's only when you've had an opportunity like this to strip back a lot of that paid marketing. Just go back to the organic and the direct traffic coming to your site.
Sometimes, Adam, if you actually reduce the marketing spend, it allows more organic results to come up on search engines and more direct traffic to go to your site anyway. We've just found that it's been a really interesting period to see through a lot of the assumptions that how you get people to your website, which is you've got to spend on marketing. We've just seen this terrific increase in direct and organic traffic back to higher than pre-COVID levels. If you'd asked me would I be sitting here in August saying that there's more people looking at the sites now than there was pre-COVID, I probably wouldn't have believed you. It's been a real dynamic shift really quickly in these markets.
Yeah. It actually leads me on to my next question. I'll be quick so I can let someone else have a go. The cost reductions you touched on quite a few times, and also the organic growth in visits to your site, is that contributing to a big part of your cost reductions? The fact that you're not spending marketing dollars and SEO money and all that sort of stuff?-
Well.
-a reduction in staffing levels or?
It's a bit of everything. It's clearly a reduction in marketing, and it's a bit of a reduction in looking at your staff costs in each of these businesses. You know, in emerging markets, a lot of companies will solve problems with people. You sort of add people to do things. What it enabled us to do on a country-by-country basis was look and say, "Well, are all of the people you've got in the business fully deployed, number one? And are you getting a return on what you're spending?" Inevitably, the answer was no, right? When things are going along nicely, no one really is compelled to ask those tough questions. It's only when the opportunity presented itself where you could ask those tough questions because contextually they made sense to ask, where it revealed that, you know what.
They're probably not fully deployed with all the SEO, and they're probably not all busy. Guess what? I think we can do more with probably less. It was an opportunity to test that thesis, and in most cases it proved true. In marketing, same. We kind of said, "Well, when you look at your marketing spend and you pair it back to what you're getting, and you measure it against leads and session times and transactions, is it really optimized?" Inevitably, the answer is probably no. We were able to go through those exercises and really become more efficient. Now, some of those costs will inevitably return, but never to the extent that they were before. The delta from your revenues to your OpEx should always be greater now because you've actually had a chance to really look into it.
It's a mixture of a bit of employment, bit of marketing, bit of other. Moreover, it was about are you as efficient as you could possibly be and foresee an opportunity to become more efficient?
Yeah. Good stuff. Thanks for that, Shaun. Well done again. Thanks.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Roger Coleman, a private investor. Please go ahead.
Hi, Shaun. A couple of quick questions with respect to the presentation. For each of the companies, could you give us an idea of, in future, cash balances and the desired cash balances to expense ratio for conservatism? That way, we can follow the buildup in cash and then the spill over into your parent company expenses, so we can calculate when dilution finishes for the overall company.
I can't obviously answer that in detail on this call.
Just in terms of the future.
If you look at slide 20, you'll see just the EBITDA performance, which is not a bad proxy for cash, right? If you want to think about businesses being profitable and retaining the cash balance, the ratio of your revenue, for example, to that cash balance. Say for example, in Pakistan, they might want to have a cash balance of $500, which is two months revenue, whatever the number might be. They might say, "We want a cash balance of three months revenue as a cushion, anything above that would either be invested in some way in growing that business, perhaps in a new geography or a new product set, or remitted back by way of dividends to shareholders.
Okay.
The largest one, of course.
Okay. Understood.
So I-
Yes.
Yeah.
Just moving on, the next question, could we have average currencies for the half year in quarterly reporting? Because some businesses like PAK, the Pakistan businesses, have overcome a 60% depreciation in U.S. dollar terms. The AUD reporting is somewhat misleading to the real activity that's going on underneath. I wonder if we could just have the current exchange rates you're using on a half yearly and quarterly basis, please.
Yeah, we can look at putting a table in for that effect so you can get a look through into the local currency. It's fair to say that the businesses probably performed better over the last six months in local currencies than they did when they go through.
Yes. I'm just moving on. Just one last question. In terms of post-COVID or pre-COVID, you've obviously got a worldwide dispersed operation, a very small head office. I've seen small companies like Enero having a CEO worn ragged by doing 12 overseas trips from the Antipodes there. How are you gonna manage yourself personally, the pressures of trying to run something across three continents with a small overhead?
I think our model's always been about cultivating self-sufficiency. We've spoke a lot about, if you go back to our investor relations in the last half of last year, thematically, we spoke a lot about businesses and their self-sufficiency, and that was measured by their capital needs, i.e., can they get to breakeven and do they have the cash they need to grow? Number two, it was about the development of their local management team. We never had a view that we would live in departure lounges forever and trying to go in and literally parachute in almost and hope for what we've got. The aim is always to help them develop their own capacity to manage the business efficiently. When they get there with a bit of scale, they get there when their revenues tick over a certain number, they get there when they're market leaders.
If you look at our businesses, they've all now developed their local management teams, to the extent where they're far more self-sufficient than they've ever been, logically, right? The work that we do with our portfolio now is more pointed at their strategy rather than execution on the ground. We've spent the last three, four years talking to them about operational aspects and helping them and being there. We're really more focused on how do they deliver scale in their markets? Have they got their strategy right to do so? Have they got their product set? Coincidentally enough, we've been able to manage our portfolio quite efficiently over the last four to five months based on the fact that we've had access to things like Zoom and others. We're not terribly worried about that.
I mean, nirvana for us is that, we own more and more of these businesses, maybe 100%, and they're really able to operate under their own steam, both on a capital needs basis and on a management basis. That's our aspiration, and that's what we're driving towards. We're hopefully gonna travel, well, certainly in the last few months, not much at all.
Right.
Less is more in that context.
Right. I've got one last question relating to the less competition coming out of this COVID. Does that mean there's less opportunity because the ones that survived are more expensive now than the ones that have sort of faded away and others are buying?
I would say the ones that have faded away were probably not the ones you were going to buy anyway.
Right.
That's sort of That would've been a function of time anyway, but I think it just goes to the idea that COVID has accelerated so many aspects of what we do into today that might have taken a year or two, whether that's product innovation, whether that's market leadership improving, whether that's competitors falling away. I just think it's brought forward at a rapid rate instances, aspects of what we expected to happen over the next couple of years.
Right. Just on the share price chart, that's not your fault.
Thank you. I think.
Yeah. Good idea. Right. Okay. Thank you very much. Goodbye.
No worries, Roger. Cheers.
Thank you. That does conclude our question and answer session at this time. I will now hand back to Mr. Di Gregorio for closing remarks.
Thanks, everyone, for dialing in. I hope that this was useful. Again, our fourth anniversary, thanks to those that have been on many of these calls over the last four years. We hope to have you on these calls for the next four years and four years after that. Just to recap, I think we've worked really hard over the last four to five months in getting ourselves into a really good position, by way of our business model, our balance sheet, and the performance of our portfolio. We're really excited about the next six to 18 months and what's possible. We look forward to coming back to the market as regularly as we have, and continuing to update people on what's happening with our business. Thanks again to everyone, and we'll talk to you soon.
Thank you. That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.