Earnings Call: H2 2019

Feb 27, 2020

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Frontier Digital Ventures FY 'nineteen Results Conference Call. All participants are in a listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Sean D. Gregorio, CEO and Founder. Please go ahead. Thank you for that. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our 2019 full year results presentation. You all will have to our investor presentation, which was lodged with the ASX this morning. I'm going to reference that presentation as we go through it this morning. You'll see on Page 2 that it's in 3 sections. 1st section, we'll talk through the results themselves. We'll go into a bit of detail on the headline numbers and some of the individual companies. The second section does give a strategy update. You will note in the second section, if you've been following us for some time, that there is what might seem like some early information, I. E. Information that was in our debt maybe from a year or 2 ago that was deliberate. What we have been receiving in recent times is an increased volume of interest from new investors, investments from outside of Australia, particularly North America. So we've, I guess, accommodated some of those new investors in this deck to give them a bit of background on the business that might seem repetitive to some, but certainly brand new investors, we want to make sure they see a lot. And then in Section 3, there is a further expansive appendix So I'll just remind people of our accounting treatment of the various entities into which we have invested. And I'm not going to give you one page there on most of the businesses as well. So we'll go into the first section, Section 1, which is our 2019 results. If you flip through the Slide 4, you'll see a slide titled rapid revenue growth. So that again just demonstrates the half and half growth since we exited for the first half of twenty sixteen. 2, ways in which we report our results to the market. 1 is at 100% portfolio level, which is 100% of everything. And then beside that, you'll see the portfolio share. So this is the percentage of the portfolio that we own. You carve that out so investors can get a clear understanding of the percentage of that revenue that can be attributed to FCB. Those charts, we're really happy with the performance of 2019. I think it's been the best year in FTB's short life, where our revenue actually accelerated. Our revenue growth accelerated versus 2018. Not many companies can write claim to that. And what we've continued to deliver is really solid results half on half. Underlying that has been of our business, which is, as you know, to invest in local entrepreneurs running marketplace businesses in emerging markets. We've got a portfolio that is really increasing quality now. And as a result, we're able to come back to market and consistently deliver on our results. And more importantly, I think, continue to deliver on what we said we were going to do right back to 2016 when we listed. So our full year revenues are there. Everyone can see. And as I said, our growth did actually accelerate year on year, which is a pretty impressive result. And you'll see the continued rapid growth on our percentage of that. If you take over the next slide, you'll see that the feature of our portfolio is that all of the individual businesses are now starting to perform better and better, and that means more of them are getting closer to profitability. We always talk about our business in a portfolio sense. We will increasingly being talked to investors about our portfolio on an individual business sense which of the businesses are starting to get larger and larger and become more material. So while we will always come back to that portfolio view, what drives that is obviously the performance of the underlying businesses and free cleaning to see that we've all had the Dibble had really solid years and we all had improved, for the most part, the EBITDA position. So it means that at the portfolio level, FTV continues to deliver on what it said it would do. And you can see that the EBITDA performance, again, has significantly improved over each year. And we're really pleased with where that's got us to in 2019. Some of the operating metrics you can see on Slide 6. Now these are obviously a lot of lead indicators for us to drive the businesses and just really consistent growth over many cars now. And again, I guess that comes back to the nature of our portfolio. We were across a number of markets, more across a couple of verticals, and it really does ensure that the indicators, the metrics across our portfolio continue to grow really strongly in 2019 as well. I'll move on to Slide 7. It's a really important slide for people to understand. It includes on the left side of it, the operating companies, but it also includes the percentage of those companies that we own, the vertical that they exist in and the 2018 on 2019 revenue and the relative growth. And beside that, we will break out for you the FDD share of that fee and fee that some of the parts will go faster in 2019 than we did in 2018. A big part of that is we have a couple of businesses really had breakout moves, performed really well. A feature of the markets we're investing is that the model was smooth. What we do focus on though is the trajectory. From quarter to quarter, half to half, different things happen in different markets, but our portfolio is structured in such a way that it all evens out, and we've been able to deliver a really strong result as well. We won't go into the individual businesses there, but I'm sure anyone on the call who's viewing the deck deck can look through that list and see that it's been pretty solid contributions across the board. And now getting more and more of our businesses, and we would reference this in previous investor presentation, up over that $1,000,000 revenue mark. I think you've got a couple there that are in the $900,000,000 in FY 'nineteen. There's only a couple that we're really still there in that $500,000 mark in total revenue. Important to remember that when we listed in 2016, I think half of our portfolios probably had only a couple of $100,000 in revenue in total. So it's been really pleasing to watch even the smaller businesses in our portfolio start to get some size and scale and get some growth over the course of the calendar year. Going to so that's really the financials and we will go to questions at the conclusion of the presentation. So we can come back to some financials based on the Q and A. We have updated our strategy section. As I said, it continued to communicate a really consistent strategy. And I think if you go back to our previous investor deck, you'll see that much of this narrative remains really, really consistent. We have included some strategy slides just to the new investors and those that are interested in our business, which I said earlier, has become a longer list, A bit more background. Essentially, our footprint on Slide 10 is now very much focused around Asia and LatAm markets. We've done less and less in Africa. We've exited a couple of businesses during the course of 2019 that were in our portfolio that were in Africa. So our focus is very much around 2 geographies, developing Asia, so that's Asia, mainly Southeast Asia and South Asia And of course, some of those LatAm markets. And the LatAm businesses did really well in 'nineteen. And as you know, whilst we continue to invest in automotive, we are very, very focused around the property verticals. So our business over the recent years has matured a bit in that really focused on a couple of regions and really focused on a couple of verticals. And you can see that reflected in the slide part of the geographical breakdown on number 10. We break that out a bit more just to help people understand the emphasis on property. And you see the 7 portfolios, property 4, automotive and even 1, a general classified business. And again, in focus for us, whether it's property, automotive or other, is market leadership. And we continue to really drive our investment to focus on the market leadership and what they can leverage with that market leadership once they become a trusted brand in their individual market. I further add on Slide 12 again is an extrapolation and an update on the model. So when we started investing in online classified businesses, it was very much the traditional model that everyone understood, which is consumers coming to a website, finding a house, finding a car, clicking on an ad and then really disappearing into the ether. What is happening now in all of our markets and we're really excited about it is that as these classified businesses become market leaders, they increasingly extend their leadership in a given market and really start to become trusted intermediaries. They really start to become marketplaces. This is a really interesting dynamic we're seeing. The online classified model evolved rapidly around the world and developed markets. It's interesting that the online classifieds model has developed and evolved really perhaps even more rapidly in emerging markets. So many of our brands, obviously market leaders, are now starting to leverage that leadership, not just to sell ads to property agents or property developers or car dealers or car manufacturers. They're really leveraging that position to play a much more active role in the transaction. And we talk about this in the context of it being a 2.0 world, not a very well used label, but it is very much a rapid evolution of what's happening in classifieds. And one could argue that what's happening now or starting to happen is a genuine disruption of the model. I think historically, the evolution of online classifieds was improving on a process that would otherwise a bit clunky, helping property agents sell more properties at a better price. It's helping consumers find properties. But this has now evolved to the point where the portals are starting to become marketplaces where people grow not just to click and then leave, but actually remain within that ecosystem within that marketplace that's been created and then much closer to the transaction and in many cases now starting to complete the transaction with the portal being up close to that process. And in many occasions now, portal is starting to take some of the commission that's generated at the point of transaction. So what that's done, I guess, is opened up markets. So when we look at markets, we're not just thinking about advertising revenues that are possibilities. We're now thinking about advertising revenues. But on top of that, we're thinking about transaction based revenues and many other revenue streams that come out of a process such as buying a property. It's really exciting part of our business and one that we're very, very focused on and very, very interesting to see how these businesses are leveraging their position into transactions. If you go over to Slide 13, it basically means as markets open up more opportunities for our classifieds businesses that many of our businesses are really starting to improve their trading position. Obviously, growing revenue is very important. You can see from the data that we're seeing a general improvement on profitability, which means a cash cash burn, which means that we're getting more and more businesses becoming self sustaining, which is really important, both from a financial perspective and from a management perspective as well. Where that does lead, after these, is with a really strong balance sheet and really well positioned as we head into 2020. We've been pretty busy over the last 6 months or so. If I think back earlier in 2019, we were very focused on just consolidating the operational capabilities of our investment companies, And that was really a big focus for us over the last number of months. Part of our strategy again is to start to acquire larger stakes in the businesses in our portfolio. We know the entrepreneurs very well now. We know the businesses really well. And if I go back to December, we increased our position in E ProCastus, which is a great business in some of the LatAm markets. We increased our stake in AutoDeal in Philippines. It's the leading auto site there in the Philippines and exceeded 3,000,000 visits for the last for the first time in January. So no other auto site has done that. It's really, really impressed with how they're tracking. Beginning of this year, obviously, we would turn off a really positive 2019 where we saw a number of our partners trade profitably for the full year. We saw another couple of our partners and our partner companies trade profitably in Q4. So the underlying performance of a lot of the businesses has really started to improve. And as we rolled into the start of 2020, we also have increased our stake in our near and a half, property port of India now, which is a market we really like, and we've increased our stake in Sri Lanka as well. And at the same time, we managed for the first time to make an effort of one of our investments, which was proxy a portal in Vietnam. That was done for a number of reasons. We were very, very pleased with that outcome and delivered a substantial return to shareholders. And I guess in some respects, proof of concept of our model where we were able to achieve an exit, but at the same time, we continue to invest in businesses that we can see scalable, growing and ultimately are profitable businesses. Just on Slide 15 again, and this is addressing a wider and wider investor audience. So we've got to talk to our potential investors about the potential for return to shareholders. We are very focused on the fact that we need to give a return to shareholders, and there are many opportunities for us to do that, one of which is obviously monetization opportunities, which is documented on 15. I'm conscious of time. There are a couple more slides there. We should go back to the, I guess, the history of SDV and a bit of information about the register. And if you look in the back of the appendix there at Section 3 or the 3rd section, like I said earlier on the call, there's a little more information on the accounting treatment of our portfolio because it's not clear when you look at our statutory reports how it relates to the performance of our portfolio. And and the slide which helps people understand the accounting treatment of the various investments we've made. And further into the deck, you'll see a one page update on most of the businesses there just to demonstrate their track record and with some highlights of 2019 and how they've progressed. So on that note, shortly, I'll pass back to the moderator who is going to facilitate some Q and A. But I think it's been the best year in FTZ's short history. We're really, really pleased with how it finished and really, really pleased with the progress of our portfolio. And as I said, I think it maps very, very consistently to the strategy that we laid out. We're very excited about what 2020 holds and beyond as we continue to grow this business. So on that note, I'm going to hand over to the moderator who's going to facilitate any questions that might be there for people who have dialed into the call. Thank you. Your first question comes from Yvonne Reeves from Morgan Financial. Please go ahead. Good morning, Sean. If I might just pick off with a question on zanine. Obviously, last year was a great year. You had quite sensational growth in the Zameen business. I just wondered what the potential is this year to grow. I mean, obviously, the main driver of growth is the number of projects which are participating. I just wondered what this year looks like in terms of the growth rate you can achieve. Thanks, Ava. You're right. Zaneen, once again, the team there did a great job. They exceeded their budget expectations. They exceeded our expectations, which was tremendous, keeping in mind that the market in Pakistan last year was pretty tough, had significant exchange or currency depreciation. But even in the face of that, the management team delivered an outstanding result. Again, we look forward into 2020. Things in Pakistan are probably some green shoots in terms of things getting a bit better as the year goes out. And we think the business will have another really strong year. It's difficult for us to say how much it's going to go by, but the guys have always over delivered. So we always go into fairly conservative expectations. The management team there have done a great job and have over delivered in every single year they've invested. So I think if they can get anything like they did this year, we'll be very happy. A big, big factor is the volume of transactions that they can facilitate and that they're only still at a relatively small part of that market. Agency market in Pakistan is probably starting to flatten off for them a bit. They've got most agents getting more spend out of them like a lot of the more mature portals becomes a bit more of a challenge. But the volume of new transactions is still pretty good, and that's part of the model that they're really focused on. So yes, we remain pretty optimistic about the year ahead, and we've got a great team running that business. And in terms of the it's obviously they made a small EBITDA profit. Would you expect them to be running better than breakeven in 2020? So they were ahead of the curve this year. We didn't think that they would get there on a full year basis, but they did. So again, it was above our expectations. And I think our message to the management team is just keep growing as fast as you can. And where that leads to EBITDA, we're probably not about halfway through to you. But it's a pretty mature management team and they know what we're doing, but we still think there's a lot of top line growth. And we wouldn't have to strangle the business to deliver a big margin if we thought that there was still a lot of top line growth to be had. So I guess it's finding that balance. And if it's okay with you, I'll ask a supplementary on Infracasas. Obviously, they had an absolutely tremendous second half. And I'm just wondering whether there's an element of seasonality in their business now. I mean, what I'm trying to work out is whether the second half, which was just an absolute blinder in terms of revenue, whether that's the new base or whether it's going to be like a seasonal growth we should anticipate? Yes. There if you look historically back, and I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but I can anecdotally tell you that their second half is generally better than their first from memory. And again, I've not got all of that data in front of me. What they've got really good at, there's probably three things driving that business, and it all started to come together in the second half. Got a really strong management team. Ricardo and his team have been at it now for a few years. They know their markets really well, and they actually execute really well, as you appreciate either. In emerging markets, strategy is one thing, but execution is almost everything else. And they've done a really good job of it. They've increasingly number 2 is they've increasingly got better at leveraging their classifieds base. So they've got really strong classified businesses. They're leveraging those as the playbook suggests into facilitating transactions. So they're actually getting much better at that. And the way in which they go about it is quite efficient. So it's a very tech driven way in which they help consumers connect with property developers, with sellers. And it's a low cost way of doing it as well. So it's very efficient. Number 3, that sort of put their toe into the market in Peru, which we're pretty excited about. Peru is the size of the other 3 markets combined from a GDP perspective. So it's a really big opportunity for them. But they've done it in a really thoughtful way. They haven't gone in all guns blazing. They haven't gone in and better farm on the market. They're doing it smart. They're doing it at low cost. And they're doing it very segment specific around urban areas. So those were the sort of things that started to drive the business in the second half. All of those remain in place, but the first half seasonality does come into it and there are a few local factors which will probably make the second half stronger than this year, which is not the difference with the last year in that economy. Thanks, Sean. Your next question comes from Ryan Evans, a Private Investor. Please go ahead. Ashu Wang, thanks for continuing to ask questions. Just wondering what you've seen so far and what you anticipate you might see in terms of coronavirus impact, particularly in some of the emerging markets that may not have as good in particular deal with an outbreak? Yes. It's very topical. And yes, I think the interesting thing is that all of our businesses are very domestic. So they're not transported businesses. They don't rely on trade per se. They don't rely on movement of people or goods. They are very local businesses, which to some extent insulates them from international dynamics such as coronavirus. Not to say that they are immune from, of course, or not. We haven't seen a tangible or any evidence of that impacting the businesses so far. But I think it remains one of those things that no one is quite sure where it's going to finish. And when one gets different information every day about how it's being managed, it's a bit difficult to put a finger on how it's going to affect our businesses. But I think if I were to look at one of the mitigating factors, we are very each business is very domestic and it's very local. It doesn't rely on anything that is transborder. And to that extent, it's probably on the right side of the ledger for the public business that might not be affected. On the other hand, you did right. I mean, emerging markets, corona does seem to be around Asia a lot, but we just haven't seen the impact the businesses in a tangible manner. But it's latency, I guess, that so far no material impact, Interesting in 3 to 6 months to see what Thank you. Your next question is a follow-up from Eivor Reese from Morgan. Please go ahead. Sean, everyone else seems to be shy here, so I'll just barge in. With Autodeal, obviously, they had a strong second half. And I was a little bit surprised at how good the revenue growth translated through to the EBITDA margin. Can you give us a flavor of how far penetrated you think they are at the moment of the revenue potential for what they're doing? And also, if you can give us a flavor on whether you think the kind of EBITDA margin they were generating in the second half is now the new normal for them? Yes. It's a business that has got better with time, as obviously that might sound, but it's been a momentum business. So they started in their own auto portal, the number 1 in Philippines, but those of you who know their history will know that they started with a big emphasis on new cars. New cars are a final lucrative part of the auto market in emerging markets since 2nd hand cut. So their legacy is slightly interesting or slightly unusual to be where they are now, which is a market leader. A big part of that momentum has been their product. They're very product focused. It really is an excellent product. If you're a car dealer in the Philippines, you use their product. The back end is very strong, and it's given them a sense of movement. And then we started to see that momentum gather pace in the second half. I think we had a pretty good result from an EBITDA perspective. But again, it's not a business that we're likely to strangle to get big margins out of because if you look at the market there, they are still relatively small vis a vis the order market. So they are very large in the online market in the online order space. Clearly, number 1, good penetration with dealers. It's probably only in the second half of the year where the market started to appreciate the fact that what Autodeal generated was a ton of car transactions. They've been measured perhaps before that as a business that was a leads business that generated visits to a website and made inquiries to dealers. Where it started to come together was when they marketed themselves, found as strongly to their customer base to dealers and correlated the fact that what they were generating for deals was transactions with cars, not just leads, not just people coming in and inclined, but they were responsible for most of the transactions. And we started to see that come through in the revenue number, which certainly helped the EBITDA number. I'm excited about what they can do in 2020. Another business that we're going to stand with would be margins. We really think that they're in a great position. It's taken them a long time to get there, and they're quite excited about what lies ahead. But again, similar to Janine, we're not going to strain on our margin, but we think that there is still a heck of a lot of opportunity in what is a pretty good market in Philippines, but which they have penetrated a relatively small part of. And in terms of the way they're growing, are they wiping out a competitor in that market? Are they wiping out a competitor? I wouldn't say that there's no one who hit us in doing what we're doing, number 1. It has become a hell of a lot harder if you're behind them. Carmody really struggled. This is one of their competitors. There's a few people popping up trying to do transactions, but they're fast becoming the glue and the room when it comes to people using Internet to find cars. The market is still relatively in a frequency though. So we think that there's a long way to go. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else than auto deal if I was in the Philippines. And if there's no one else in the queue, I'll ask another one. Obviously, Hoppler had some issues last year and some problems emerged with the business model and it's transitioning over to a different kind of business model. How long do you think it's going to be before we see whether that new business model is working or not? Yes. It's a good question. Does it go to the challenge that is out there for the idea of portals moving into transactions. And there's one thing we do know about portals moving into transactions is that as predictable as the classified business model was, the transactions model is less clear. So we're seeing a lot of variations on how portals are facilitating transactions from high touch versions where there's a lot of involvement in helping people buy house through a car, so a more technical or tech based solution to helping people buy a house through a car. Hoppler had a model where they were very engaged with the broker networks around Manila. That was proven difficult to scale. They've pivoted. They're now engaging more directly with brokers. So more brokers are starting to come under the Hotwood brand. If you would imagine, real estate agents in Australia starting to operate under the REA brand, for example, they're now getting more brokers come underneath the Royal Mailing brand, which gives them a couple of advantages. It gives them a bit more control over what's happening. It enables them to provide conditions slightly different. But there is a kink between pivoting from what they were doing to what they are doing. They're now getting some momentum back. And I think the only signs this year are good, but it's going to take probably the better part of this year, maybe 3 quarters of this year to really see that new model start to work in a way that we think is right and we can see a scalable profitable business at the end of it. Early times are good, but it has taken a fair bit of work just to pivot to that version of what they were doing. As I said, it does go to the fact that when forwards get involved in transaction, it is less clear as to what the answer is. And you've got to be really good at it and you instill between all of our partners. But the Hoppler pivot is gone, and they've had a much better start to the year than they had a finish to last year. Thanks, Sean, and well done to everyone this year. Yes, you really shot the lights out. Thanks, Elmer. Thank you. Your next question comes from Kevin Vitolli from VN Capital. Please go ahead. Hi, Sean. Just a couple of questions from me. Firstly, on Packwills. That's obviously one you've had in the portfolio for a long time. You've often said that the underlying dynamics of that business in terms of the share of idles that it has is always a great starting point and probably one of the more dominant classified businesses that you're seeing in that regard. It's been probably disappointing for a few years now given what's happening within the auto space in Pakistan. With the green shoots that you see when you talk about the domain, do you see similar things like that impacting the auto space in Pakistan? Or is that really more property related? Related? No. I mean, I would say that there were some regulatory changes made in Pakistan that affected consumers' ability to buy big ticket items. So we know that there's a change in government midway through 'eighteen. The mandate for the government can increase the tax price, not many people pay tax, not many people lodge tax returns. Just to give anyone who's on the call a flavor of that, 2% of the population lodged a tax return. The government introduced a regulation that said if you're going to buy a new car, you've got to lodge the tax return and you've got to demonstrate it when you buy that car. So There were regulatory changes that drove that business over whack. We also suffered from the fact that the currency depreciated significantly. And again, the mean was somewhat insulated because properties traded in local currency, cars being imported, the buckets are imported in U. S. Dollars. So the Camry went from $40 to $55 in a matter of a month. They had the perfect storm. They weathered back through last year. What we saw at the tail end of last year was an improvement from the operating metrics, which are normally a predicator of an improvement in the financial performance of the business. We saw some improvement in the latter half of last year, more toward the end of last year, to be fair. And we're starting to see those continue into this year. And the funds are, I guess, cautiously optimistic about Praxables. And the interesting thing about that business, as you pointed out, Kevin, is that it's based on its metrics, based on its brand, it's extremely dominant. They only have one competitor, which is a horizontal. Horizontals always tend to get the low end of the market. Paco is continues to be that brand. Interestingly, its consumer traffic has continued to grow. It's probably growing in popularity over the last 12 months to be even more dominant. It's taken some time for those regulatory changes to wash through, starting to normalize. We're starting to see some positive signs, and we're cautiously optimistic. But your life to business will be in business for a long time. It does demonstrate also that secondhand cars in emerging markets is not always easy. There's a big emphasis on that new car market. So we're encouraged, and we continue to work closely with the operators on getting that business back to where we think it should be, safe for the fact that it got whacked around a lot by unforeseen changes and probably things that were out of their control, to be fair. So the core business itself still looks really good. We're just we're just hopeful the macro picture improves so that the business can improve as well. Okay. Thanks, Matt. And just secondly, on a couple of the transactions that occurred this year and how you kind of compare the opportunities. I think if you look at Propsley, obviously, the fastest growing business from a revenue perspective last year, but a lot of investment backed into the business. You mentioned a couple of your comments earlier on that you don't want to hand through your business by not allowing it to invest. So I was just curious, when we look at that proxy example and the revenue growth we saw last year, was there anything in there that was kind of nonreoccurring? Because it looks like it was a pretty solid opportunity even though it was requiring further investment. And how do you compare that to say something like IMI and My House Square, obviously, with that profitability, but you're willing to increase the investment by that business where it's growing a bit slower and increasing the stake at what looks like a high multiple? Yes. So it's interesting. So the proxy business, we liked and we invested. We liked the model. We liked the direction it was going in, and we thought that it was building a sustainable, scalable business. It is heavily focused around transactions. It's the business in our portfolio that was most focused on pure transactions. And we certainly liked its trajectory. It'd be fair to say that that trajectory started to shift and we saw the ability to generate results to generate revenue become more expensive to the point where spending a dollar on marketing to get a dollar in revenue, we thought was problematic. Some of the direction that the entrepreneur wanted to take that business in, we didn't think was a sustainable, scalable direction and became evident to us that to pursue the path or that path was going to be extremely expensive and require a heck of a lot of capital, which our view on that was that it was not necessarily the right way to go. And that was probably when we started to reassess the investment. The other part for us, Kevin, is that our model is trammised around owning more of businesses, not less of them. We're an operator. We are buying more of our better businesses. And with that, we'd like to have strategic oversight. We'd like to have operational input and we'd like to be partners with the entrepreneur. In the case of Topsy, it was heading in exactly the opposite direction where Wood will be coming. We were going to be diluted significantly, and we weren't going to have that level of influence in control. So it didn't fit in our portfolio from a strategic perspective. So when we put those two factors together, we looked at the model, we looked at where it's going, we looked at what it was going to cost, much as we liked it earlier, we probably fell out of love with it. And when we looked at the ability of how we view our investments and how we want to operate, it didn't fit that either. So we took the opportunity to exit, and we're very, very pleased with that outcome. When you want to compare it to something like our Me and My House, quite a different business. It's a business that we think has a really solid growth platform. It's the leader in its market on a classified basis. So it has leadership in that classified category, which we think is really important for scale and sustainability. If you want to then augment that with transactions, It's got a model that is one that doesn't burn a ton of cash, which we quite like as well. And we're able to work with that entrepreneur in a really productive way. And we think that that's a really good recipe for us. It satisfies our belief that we want to be strategically and operationally involved. And we're very happy with the progress of that business because we think it's built on a really solid base and we think it is scalable and we think it is sustainable. And I wish we didn't feel the same way about Proxima necessarily over time. And we liked Proxima really a lot, but it just wasn't going in a direction that we thought was scalable and sustainable. So we took the opportunity directly. Okay. Thanks, Matt. Thank you. Your next question is from James Hillias from Bell Potter Securities. Please go ahead. Good morning, Sean. Welcome on the results. I just had a quick question on the West African part of the portfolio. It's tended to lag the rest of the investments. And I just wanted to know what real dynamics that you like about the region and sort of what strategy do you have, what the group companies have in that area to drive the growth and penetration in the market? Yes. Look, John, I think if you look at our deck, you'll see that our priorities in Asia and LatAm and the Africa markets are the less of a priority. We have optimized our portfolio to the point where we're in the largest the 2 largest speaking English markets, which is Nigeria and Ghana, and they make up that West Africa entity. And then Morocco, which is probably the most developed market in Africa, ex South Africa. So we quite like that market. In terms of those West Africa markets down in Nigeria, they're slow growth. We've got really what we think are really solid businesses there. They're market leaders. They're growing a bit. It is operationally tricky markets to get right, but we're kind of satisfied with where they're at. But we know, and it's true of the markets in that part of the world, that they are going to take a bit longer, and we have to be a bit more patient. We think the outcome, the long term prize, and we do take pride in the fact that we make long term decisions. We do think the long term outcome in those markets is still pretty positive. We know that they're going to take a bit longer than Asia. We know they're probably going to take a bit longer than LatAm, but we do fundamentally like the 2 businesses. So they get a tick, and we remain committed to those 2 markets. All right. Great. Thanks for that. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. De Gregorio for closing remarks. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for the questions. Much appreciated that there's a level of interest in what we're doing. Again, I think 2019 from our perspective was our best year yet in our short history. Fantastic, but I think we're getting better at this and our proof of concept is coming through. We're seeing that in the level of interest in our business. We're seeing that in the size of the register now, which is significantly bigger than it was when we listed. And I guess we look forward to 2020. I'm pretty excited about what's happening across our group of companies. And again, I'd like to thank everyone for dialing in and their continued support. And as I said, we're excited about Plinatrons.