Good afternoon, and welcome to the Mirrabooka full year financial results briefing. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation, followed by a question and answer session. All questions will be taken via the webcast. If you'd like to ask a question at that time, please enter 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, Managing Director of Mirrabooka. Thank you. Please go ahead.
Well, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mark Freeman, the CEO and Managing Director of Mirrabooka 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 pay my respects to their elders, both past, present, and emerging. On the call today, we have Kieran Kennedy, who's the Portfolio Manager for Mirrabooka; Andrew Porter, our CFO; Matthew Rowe, our Company Secretary, and Geoff Driver, our General Manager of Business Development. Before we start the presentation, just a bit of housekeeping on this webinar. This briefing is based on the material available on the company's website. If you are using your computer to access the presentation via the webcast, the slides will change automatically. Finally, 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. And now we'll start the presentation. On slide two, we have the disclaimer to say we're here to talk about the company, and we're not giving any advice as such. Then jumping ahead to slide four, just to remind everyone, Mirrabooka, we invest in companies listed in both the Australian and New Zealand markets. We focus on companies outside the 50 Leaders . From time to time, we do have companies that are in the 50 Leaders , and that's usually because businesses that we've owned may have performed strongly and moved into that part of the market. If that's the case, we don't have to sell immediately. Eventually, we will take money out of those stocks.
So as I said, our focus now is really on companies outside the 50 Leaders , and we aim to provide returns through both fully franked dividends and capital growth. It is pleasing the performance overall over the long term has exceeded the benchmarks. At the same time, investors have received substantial amounts of franked dividends from their investments. So with that, I'll pass over to Andrew Porter to talk through the results.
Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. So the next slide, the financial year and summary that you can see there, the profit for the year was AUD 10.7 million, which was down from AUD 11.3 million in the previous year. Now, although dividends that we received were up, and we actually had an unprecedented contribution from the options trading, we've made nearly AUD 2.5 million in options trading, and as I said, that's unprecedented. The reason for the difference or the reason for the fall in profit was largely due to the trading portfolio. Last year, we had a particularly strong contribution from the trading portfolio with gains in Medibank, which was sold earlier this year, and AMP, which was sold last year, and also in Macquarie Technology. So again, that was unusual.
So as a result of that, the board have declared the normal dividend AUD 0.065, and a special dividend of AUD 0.025, so that brings it up to AUD 0.13 for the year. Portfolio return, we'll come on to... We've got a slide which gives a longer term, a more longer-term view, which is what we like to look at rather than one year when assessing the company's performance. The management expense ratio, 0.56%, down from 0.59%. That is the cost of running the company. It's AUD 0.56 for every AUD 100, and those are the costs over the average portfolio for the year. The costs themselves remain fairly constant, from year to year, but the portfolio grew, and that leads the MER to fall.
The next slide gives some indication of the special dividends we've paid since 2014, AUD 0.49 all in all. So that's one of the features of Mirrabooka, that when the board think it's appropriate, taking into account the franking credits that we have, what the outlook is, what the realized gains have been made during the year, they can look to pay a special dividend. So it's AUD 0.025 this year. That'll be as part of the final dividend of AUD 0.065, so in addition to that. On the next slide, something we like to draw attention to is the premium and the discount. At the end of June 2024, Mira was trading at a small discount. That was not unusual in the LIC market.
A lot of LICs were trading at a discount, and Mirrabooka's was actually probably one of the smallest in, you know, amongst a group of LICs. I'd say now that that has switched since the announcement of the result to a small premium. But obviously, that information is shown with our NTA every month. And the next slide just gives some indication from a longer-term perspective of what Mirrabooka has delivered for shareholders in terms of wealth accretion. So as you can see, the figures there are in advance of the index that we compare ourselves to, which is the Mid-Cap 50 and the Small Ordinaries, but also, and as a point that Kieran has been making in presentations during the year, ahead of the ASX 200. So with that, I'll hand over to Kieran.
Thank you, Andrew, and good afternoon, shareholders and participants. So I'm starting on slide 11, just with the portfolio performance numbers, over the usual 1, 3, 5, and 10 years. i guess the first pleasing comment is that we are outperforming over all those time frames. The numbers we're looking at here importantly, do what we call gross up for the franking. So it's just important to realize in Mirrabooka, given the area of the market that we invest in, we do generate significant realized gains. You know, these companies do have capital growth, and there is a bit more activity. We're still a low turnover fund, but you do get capital gains from that. So importantly, you know, we express that value back to our shareholders by paying those out as franked dividends.
You don't get that to anywhere near the same extent in the index. Obviously, the index is not a company that pays tax, so it's important that we gross up our returns for those franking credits to make it a fair comparison with the indices. The other points I'll make on this slide, obviously, the one-year return, you know, very healthily above benchmark. Given this is an annual result discussion, we'll go into some detail on what drove that. Important to note, that is not our focus. We're not looking to optimize one-year returns. We are long-term investors, but, you know, pleasing to have a good year, notwithstanding that.
The other point, looking at the three-year figure and also the 10-year figure, it's important to note, when you're looking at rolling returns over different time frames, you know, the importance of the starting base within that. So if we go back to the numbers we were looking at earlier, the returns since Mirrabooka's inception in 1999, on average, we've outperformed the benchmark by around 4% per annum.
But you get differences over different time frames when you're looking at those starting points. So if you look back three years ago, we'd just come off particularly strong returns, going into that 2022 financial year. That then was a tough year for us in 2022. The two years since have been strong. So again, it's nice to see we're above benchmark for that period. And interestingly, I went back to look at the 10-year number, and leading into that, back in 2014, these numbers were quite incredible. We'd had a really strong run. The three years leading into 2014, we were up 14.6% per annum versus the benchmark. So obviously, that was a high point. Again, pleasingly, though, notwithstanding that, we've been able to outperform from a pretty high point in our returns.
The reason I labor that point, obviously, it's important to look at the premium and discount to NTA at which Mirrabooka is trading when you're considering what to do with your investment. But I'd also say it's important to look at where we are in our cycle, too. If we're having particularly strong portfolio returns, it's important to factor that in, 'cause sometimes when you're a long-term, low-turnover investor, you know, there can be some normalization of that going forward. So moving on to slide 12, again, looking at these contributors to the strong year that we've just had, this is an interesting way we thought we might represent that on the chart this year, just to sort of break down some of the key contributors.
The most important point on this is there's some really large holdings represented on this page. So Gentrack being one that we've only bought two years ago. I think every result we've produced since then, we've talked about Gentrack because it's been such a spectacular performer. It's a billing software company to the utilities industry. We bought it at a really opportune time, in hindsight. It's, you know, really got excellent growth going forward now. At that time, it was pretty beaten up. There were some specific industry and company issues that they were facing. They've navigated that really well, and now they're back on a really good growth path. So it did another 160% return for this financial year. It's done 500%+ since we bought it.
It's now the third largest stock in the portfolio, and it wasn't a very large initial holding. So we don't get those very often at all, but it is the appeal of investing in this end of the market when you do get one of your investments as right as we have in that case. Looking across the rest of this slide, there's some, I guess, linked stocks, really. You look at HUB24 and Netwealth, the financial software platform providers, Carsales and REA Group, the online classifieds businesses, and then some of our long-standing holdings, like Breville, Reece, ARB, just particular strength across a number of our top 20 holdings, which is really pleasing. It does lead into the sort of portfolio activity we've had as a result of this, but, you know, it's been a really good position for the portfolio.
The other factor I will mention in terms of that 12-month outperformance, one of the things we talked about as being a drag on our returns relative to the market leading into this year, was some of the strength in commodities, particularly areas like lithium. That's unwound quite significantly in the year, the financial year, so that has sort of held down the return of our benchmark. While we do have some investments in that space, we still are meaningfully underweight those sorts of companies. Move on to slide 13, that investment portfolio activity. You'll see from the page, the buying and selling actually neatly matched this year, AUD 124 million into purchases in the year, around AUD 124 million in sales. So again, we're about a AUD 600 million fund.
That shows that, you know, around that 20% turnover, you know, an average holding period of five years and beyond is what we like to maintain with the way that we invest in this portfolio. What you'll note from this slide is, if you're looking at the purchases on the left-hand side, those of AUD 5 million and above, there are far fewer of those than there are sales on the other side. So really what we've done this year, given the strength of returns consistently across some of those large holdings, we've just taken the opportunity of trimming some of those positions. We still like those companies. We haven't sold out of any of them.
On the bottom right of the slide, they're still well represented in the portfolio, but rather than letting their share prices continue to appreciate and continue to grow their size in the portfolio, we've just felt it's prudent, given the strength in the share prices across this area of the market, to reduce some of these positions and just redeploy it across some new opportunities in the portfolio. It is quite an unusual year, and I'll touch on that in the subsequent slide, just in terms of the amount of that we've done in Mirrabooka, but we think it does set us up well, to navigate the, I guess, the market cycles that we see. So just touching on some of the purchases, those that were new to the portfolio, it's a mixed bag here.
IGO is the world's largest low-cost lithium mine. We did buy it into the portfolio. In hindsight, we bought that too early. You know, the share prices that we were paying are well north now of where the stock is trading. But pleasingly, on the other side of that, we've had Telix Pharmaceuticals, which is a nuclear medicine business. They're really well placed with their prostate imaging in the U.S. market, a very large market, and they've got some really interesting therapeutics that they're bringing in behind that. Essentially, that's doubled in share price while IGO has halved. So it's been quite a mixed bag, but they do cancel each other out.
Region is a shopping center business, a real estate investment trust, which we think is really well placed to give us very predictable income, very defensive, and we think given interest rates and some cost pressures, it's just been a good time in the cycle to buy that at good value. Lindsay Australia, a small transport company where we think the industry structure has improved significantly, and they're well placed to deliver better returns going forward than they have done in the past. Then in terms of adding to existing holdings, IDP Education is one we've been talking about. It's been in the portfolio for a number of years. We felt there's a really interesting opportunity has emerged here.
All of the destination markets for international students are putting similar policies in place at once, where they're trying to limit immigration, take some pressure off population growth. That puts a lot of pressure on this sector, but we feel there's only so far that can go before you start having university closures and things that governments don't want to deal with. Most importantly, as all this pressure is brought to bear on the sector, IDP Education continues to win market share. So when that... We don't even need the industry to really start growing again, it just needs to stabilize, and then we feel that market share capture will start to be reflected in earnings growth for that business again. In terms of exits from the portfolio, there's only two material ones this year in Santos and Computershare.
Both were businesses that we were holding on to that had run into the top 50 stocks in the market, so no longer really in our universe, so we felt it was time to move on from those. At the bottom of the slide, importantly, as Andrew mentioned earlier, you know, with this activity, another year of really strong realized capital gains of around AUD 30 million after tax, which obviously has the benefit of bolstering our franking reserves going forward. So just on the slide 14, just to further elaborate on this activity, we just thought we'd pull out some interesting figures here, which is to say that of our selling, around AUD 57 million of that was a net reduction in top 20 stocks from 12 months ago. I don't think we've really seen that before in Mirrabooka.
Time will tell whether, you know, we've been a bit too cute on some of this selling, and whether we should have just kept compounding in really good businesses. But the important point to note is we still have really strong representation in these companies, and we do feel that, I guess, just with this really strong run-up in the valuation of a number of these companies, we feel their long-term outlooks are pretty much consistent with what we thought they'd be. It's a prudent approach to take some of that in terms of realized gains and just look for other better relative value in the market, to generate some returns over the next three to five years.
In doing so, we've put around AUD 61 million into new stocks for the portfolio, and that's seen our stock numbers grow out, or we put 14 new stocks in for the period, five exited, so we're now at 66 holdings in the portfolio. We think that's, that's probably at the top end now of what we want to run with. We don't want to go too far in terms of having too many positions where our level of conviction in each is lower, and our ability to really cover them and understand their progress, can become compromised if you go too far with that. We've also listed just the smaller new additions to the portfolio. So these are all positions under AUD 5 million in terms of initial investment, so you're thinking well under 1% of the portfolio.
Given that, I won't labor them in terms of describing them, but we like to be really transparent and show investors, you know, what is in their portfolio, acknowledging that, you know, this is your portfolio that we're running, so you should have full coverage of what's in there. We do think it's an interesting area to stimulate some questions at the end of the presentation. The top 20 holdings, again, this is an area where we have been trimming some of these positions, but as you'll see, you know, really good weightings across some really good businesses here. We do like to really differentiate what we do in Mirrabooka by showing these orange bars, our ownership period, which we think really does bring to life the fact that we are long-term investors.
We are aware we're active in terms of valuation, but at our core, we want to hold really good businesses for the long term, and that's what's been the secret to our return since Mirrabooka was formed in 1999. With that, we'll move on to the outlook. So on slide 17, we've just given some descriptions of how we're viewing the world here. I guess the most important point we note is we're not macroeconomic-focused, top-down investors. We start from our investments in the companies that we have in the portfolio. That forms our outlook, but you need to be aware of what's going on in the world to think about how they're being valued and where the opportunities are to deploy capital.
So I guess we're making the point here that, you know, that we're fully aware of the strength of share prices we've seen across the board, as I've mentioned a number of times in this presentation... But we still like the long-term earnings growth outlook for the core holdings in the portfolio, where we do look to continue to rotate capital into, you know, better medium-term value opportunities. We're super mindful that we're just not buying inferior quality companies that look cheaper. You know, we don't want to fall for that value trap, 'cause that just creates future turnover and really diminishes the returns you're getting from outstanding businesses. So that's a key consideration that we continue to have. We think we've managed that quite well so far, but that's a continued focus going forward.
In terms of the bigger picture, obviously, inflation, interest rates, you know, the health of the consumer has been the key topics for the last few years. It remains so. I think, hopefully, it looks like some global inflation is moderating, which, you know, takes away some of those really, I guess, tail risks that we've seen, where the economy can really slow down, which is helpful. It's a bit more sticky in Australia, which we do need to navigate to make sure we don't fall behind other economies around the world. And then the other wild card, I guess, that's been introduced is all the elections that are going on. It's quite a concentrated period. Lots of different policies coming out of different parties.
But the point we make there is, there's been a lot of different political regimes in place since Mirrabooka was started in 1999, across all economies around the world, and if you're in great companies with their own unique growth drivers, they tend to be resilient, and if things do come out of left field, they tend to be really well, well-placed to adapt. And that's the key protection we have against volatility, the businesses that we own in the portfolio. So which brings us to a close, and I think with that, I'll hand back to Geoff to cue some questions.
Okay. Thanks, Kieran. So I've got a few questions here. I'll start with this one about did we participate in the Guzman y Gomez float?
No, look, we didn't. Is the easy answer. We obviously had a look at it in terms of, you know, we always like to look at interesting new businesses when they come to market. There's a number of characteristics of the business that we really like, but what we'd point out is, it was a pretty narrow float in terms of the amount of money they were raising, new shares being issued. And it did require investors to get a decent allocation, you really needed to have been in it pre-IPO. They'd done a capital round, and then those got the opportunity to follow up. So I guess the way we look at it is, it's now definitely on our radar as a potential investment.
We do like some characteristics, but we think given the way it was floated, that sort of tight, you know, allocation of new shares, it's a, it's a fairly generous valuation, so we'd need to see that come back a fair bit before we'd be looking to put it in the portfolio.
Thanks, Kieran. Question here: Looking at the recent portfolio sales and recent portfolio purchases, it appears management is moving down the spectrum of quality. Is management comfortable with the risk that high-quality companies, such as REA, Reece and JB Hi-Fi, surprise to the upside in the upcoming reporting season or announce compelling capital management initiatives?
Look, so I think this is—it's a great question, because as I mentioned in our presentation, this is the question we're asking ourselves all the time. And most years, you'll find that we let companies, you know, compound their returns, and we stay long-term in our investing. Perhaps, you know, the post-COVID period, where we had a particularly strong year, I think back to 2021, and the portfolio did 55% and had significant outperformance, and, you know, we saw a really big run-up in valuation across a number of companies. You know, that—we saw a normalization of that after that, and perhaps that's a factor in our mind go—you know, this time around.
But we are, I guess, the point we'd make is, while this has made up a significant part of the selling we've done during the year, we own these businesses, and in terms of the weighting that we have in these stocks, the money we still have in them, it hasn't been diminished as much as it might appear by just looking at the transactions. And to date, you know, the buying we've done on the other side has outperformed, you know, the selling in a net basis, and that's something we do monitor. One year, it's not that important, but after three, five, and ten years, we wanna make sure that sort of each cohort of transactions is generating that extra value, because we're mindful of the tax you're paying, the transaction costs in doing it.
So I think we just fall back on the fact that our long-term outlook in these businesses, as a general statement, hasn't really changed a lot over the year, but their valuation relative to the market has quite a bit. So we just think we can navigate potential volatility in the market better by just locking in some returns on them.
Thanks, Kieran. I'll throw this one to Mark. After paying the dividend and tax obligations that we have, there will not be a lot of cash left. Are directors considering raising more capital via a share purchase plan?
Yeah, look, we've done share purchase plans in the past, and it's something that always gets discussed. You know, Mirrabooka does have ongoing activity, so it can come and go a bit. So we're not concerned about not having cash left because, you know, as Kieran pointed out, there's always, you know, something that looks a little bit toppy that we might trim a bit. But it's more about, you know, share purchase plans to grow the business. I think. So we haven't made a formal decision on doing another one, and that's up for the board.
But I guess some of the things we think about is, you know, what opportunities we're seeing in the market, where we could deploy that capital, but also, in terms of what it's doing to the size of the company. So making the company bigger is good, in that it reduces the MER. The downside of making the company bigger is that, you know, potentially, it can make it difficult to get good positions in the really small companies. And performance is what we think about. We're not We're not an external fund manager that needs to make the company bigger because we charge more fees. We don't charge fees, we just do cost recovery.
Therefore, we're more interested in what's the best size of Mirrabooka to give us the best performance, rather than the actual size of the fund. So that is some of the things we think about it, but it's always on the agenda, but nothing's been announced at this point.
I guess also, Mark, where the share price is trading relative to NTA is also important.
Yeah, that's important. But, you know, at the moment, the share price is around that NTA. So that means that we're, it gives us a lot of flexibility. That's we wanna do something.
Kieran, a question about Domino's. It's had a few misses recently. Does Mirrabooka still own Domino's Pizza?
Yeah, look, we've got less in Domino's Pizza. So I guess that does reflect the question quite well. We've been disappointed by those misses in earnings. We also need to acknowledge that our timing in buying it wasn't good in terms of looking at, you know, the cycle of this business and, you know, where the earnings were and the sustainability of that at the time. But I think that the, the thing we're really reflecting now, you, you can sort of look back and sort of, you know, have hindsight about some of those things we could have managed better. But looking forward, it's, you know, how are they gonna navigate their way out of, you know, the challenges they're facing at the moment?
You know, what sort of earnings growth can that deliver, and what sort of returns does that give investors from here? And I think, you know, I think some of the challenges they now have is there's a number of global markets that they're looking to improve at once. You know, it's a much more complicated business than it used to be, in the earlier days when they had a really good run. So that creates some challenge. And I think also when the pressure comes on, you sort of have two different sort of sets of stakeholders to try and appease at the same time. Obviously, you know, the franchisees who put their hard-earned dollars into these businesses, they need to be getting a return or the health of the whole business struggles.
And at the same time, you know, they're trying to deliver the best returns they can to shareholders of Domino's Pizzas. And, you know, when the pressure's on, the margins are being squeezed, it's challenging to do both of those. So yeah, so, look, we do have less of it. If we do decide to exit it completely, it is one we'd still keep an eye on, 'cause there's characteristics of it we like, but we do feel it's a fair bit of work to get this one back on track, is our current thinking.
Thanks, Kieran. Question here: "Has management analyzed Step One and have any comment? It appears to tick off a number of the characteristics that Mirrabooka seeks, high quality... Sorry, high return on equity, cash flow generation, founder-led and aligned, and offers a direct-to- consumer model, not unlike, Temple & Webster.
Yeah, we have looked at it. So for those in the audience that aren't aware of it, Step One, it's an online-only underwear brand. Started with men and has moved into a women's range more recently. We had a pretty close look at it at IPO for the reasons that have been listed. You know, the returns are good, a really backable founder. We didn't choose to participate. It had a particularly rocky run after listing, where they missed some numbers and, you know, profits really came under pressure. To their credit, we haven't seen them more recently, but they have rebounded quite well. I was looking at some numbers the other day and, you know, their profit growth had been exceptional.
I guess the point I'd make, though, just to water that down somewhat, particularly the comparison to Temple & Webster, is, you know, this is one range of products. You know, they can come in and out of fashion. It's very competitive. Temple & Webster, we view more as a, you know, really well-placed retailer who can move their range that they're showing on the page at any point in time, just on what people want to buy. We think that's a far more significant moat around that business than, you know, one brand of underwear in a very competitive space. So it's something we probably will touch on, catch up with again, but, probably not a high priority and not something we have a lot of money in.
Thanks, Kieran. So given the IGO share price has halved since purchase, are we thinking about actually adding to that position?
Not materially. I think IGO, the reason we don't have—I guess, the reason we're always underweight this sort of stock, it's a resource company. The prices it achieves when it sells its commodity is completely outside of its control, and there's very significant cycles, and that goes across all resource companies. So I guess in our portfolio, you won't... Unless they sort of have a really good run in terms of the money we put in them, you won't really see those sort of businesses up in the top 20 holdings or 30 holdings in the portfolio, because we think we can put our money in businesses that don't have that sort of significant outside influence.
So I guess that's the annoying part of, you know, our execution in this case is, you know, you see, you know, the appearance of better value now than where we were buying it on the way down. I mean, it had fallen quite a bit when we started buying, but it's kept falling, and it's more a case of saying, "You know, this would be a great time to be building our initial position," but you can't sort of, you know, fire the same bullet twice. So, I think we accept the cost base we have. Pleasingly, we know that we've got the largest scale, lowest cost miner in the world, so that gives us really good resilience to be an investor in this. You know, the prospects are getting better returns from here, but not one we'd follow up and buy more of.
So Mark, I've got a question here about the other side of share purchase plan. Have we considered share buybacks at an appropriate time?
Look, we have an ongoing facility available, where we've got approval to do buybacks. But you want to see a pretty decent discount before it would trigger us to act in the market. We'd rather the market sort out the premium discounts over time. But obviously, Mirrabooka's done pretty well at trading close to its NTA, and sometimes there's a bit of a discount, sometimes a bit of a premium. Not enough either side for us to warrant any activity at all. So if you sort of say, "Well, what discount would you like to see?" I mean, it depends where the market is, as well, but, yeah, certainly something close to 10% or more. Otherwise, we'd rather the markets sort that out over time. We're not really intent on shrinking the company by buying back stock.
We also sometimes wonder whether buying back actually closes the gap on some of them. So yeah, at this point, with the share price around NTA, it's not an issue for us.
Thanks, Mark. Comment about the option trading for you. Can we elaborate a bit more on why that worked so well this year in terms of income?
Yeah, look, so it goes back to some of those large holdings in the top 20 that we had sold down during the year. So what we're doing with our option strategy is what's called writing call options. So it's a bit of an interim step when we're considering reducing a position where we can consider doing that. So you might have a holding where the price is running up to higher levels, and you're thinking that, you know, that's getting large in terms of its weighting in the portfolio. So you're essentially selling a contract to a counterparty to say, "If this share price rises by..." We can choose the number, but ordinarily around another 10%, normally around the next three to four months, then they get the chance to buy it off us at a set price, those shares.
So when we do that, we get income for writing that option. And it's a really low risk, I guess, strategy for us because it's stocks that we're thinking if it hits that price, we're likely to want to reduce it anyway. So effectively, we're getting paid in advance of that, some option premium. So I'd really see that as a bit of an adjunct to the realized gains we made during the year. It's part of the same strategy, and it's just another form of return we got alongside that.
Thanks, Kieran. Has the holding in PSC Insurance been sold? And if so, are the proceeds being used to pay the Mirrabooka dividend?
No, it hasn't been sold. You know, we have looked at that. As is ordinarily the case in these situations is, you know, there's a return you leave on the table if you sell them in advance. So you'd normally only do that if you think that, you know, there's some sort of reason that there's risk, undue risk around the transaction. This is an industry player, probably been looking at this company for a long time. We see very low risk, so we'll hold it through to get the full return and not let someone else get a return out of it over the last few months, that it's listed.
Thanks. Question about ARB and whether the U.S. strategy can deliver long-term growth for the company.
Look, that'll be a key question we'll be asking them in August. We're just about due to catch up with the company. You know, they were due to open a new flagship store under their own steam in the U.S. soon. We're hearing different things about where the land's sitting on that one. So I think, you know, it could be a really interesting time to see what ARB are doing next in the U.S.. But we're encouraged more broadly when we step back from the tactical way they're going to approach it just by the relationships they now have with the large car manufacturers over there and what that does for their branding. And we think that gives them a really good opportunity to be a bit more ambitious in that large market.
You know, they've done quite well out of it historically, before some recent bumps, but to really sort of step it up to another level of materiality. That will be probably the number one area of focus we'll have with ARB when we catch up with them in a month or so.
Thanks, Kieran. Question, apart from IPD, does Mirrabooka hold any businesses leveraged to the increased electrification of the cash, such as electric contractors such as SXE?
Southern Cross Electrical, I think that is. Yeah. No, we don't. Look, it's interesting, we bought IPD because in our process, we like the people, we like the history they had, we like the returns the business generated or generates, we like the balance sheet, all the things that we look for. This sort of thematic around, you know, it's great to have some exposure to electrification of the economy, that's been fantastic because it's really helped propel the earnings growth of IPD since we bought it. But I wouldn't say that was the reason we went to look for one of those to have that exposure in the portfolio. It's not really the way we invest. It's just great that it's come along in a, in a company that we think has been great for 20 years.
So question about Gentrack. How, how, what's the timeframe we look to potentially hold that?
Yeah, look, so we, we ask ourselves that. I mean, the first thing we make sure we're not doing is just selling it because it's gone up a lot. That's, that's not good investing. You've got to just be thoughtful and think about what's the outlook from here. And, we've had some expensive examples historically, where, you know, things get on a great momentum run with their earnings, and, you know, you do fall into the trap of starting reducing them too early. And you look back and think, you know, the buyer of that was, was right, not the seller, just because it had gone up a bit. And I think the most important point for Gentrack, which really, you know, I was in London recently catching up with a number of companies, caught up with Gentrack, caught up with one of their competitors.
It really struck me that it, it's a very, very big global market they operate in, and they're a really small business. So the return we've had so far has been, you know, fixing it, getting it back on track, and then the fact that so much is now changing in, I guess, electricity markets around the world. There's different billing, it's more complicated. The incumbents don't feel as well placed to sort of keep up with those changes. That's given people some encouragement on the outlook. But reflecting on it again, after seeing the company and doing that study tour a month or so back, it wouldn't take many contracts at all for these guys to really get some very strong revenue and earnings growth from here. And, you know, they're playing very large global markets. So, you know, we'll watch it.
We're mindful it's had a very big run. We're mindful the valuation equation is very different to what it was, but we're very encouraged by the, what they can do in this business over the next five years and beyond.
All right. Thanks, Kieran. Doesn't look like we've got any other questions at this point in time. So, with that, I'll hand back to Mark to wrap up the session.
Okay. Thanks, Geoff, and thank you all for listening in to this presentation. As we've sort of been highlighting, it's 25 years for Mirrabooka now. Certainly those shareholders have been a part of Mirrabooka for that timeframe would have enjoyed some good returns. We're always very conscious that the shareholders own the company. It's your business, and we're trying to generate good, sound investments on your hard-earned cash. That role will continue into the future. As part of that, these presentations are really important to give shareholders a chance to hear what's going on with our company, importantly, ask questions. Probably the next point of contact will be the AGM in October. That'll be webcast. It's another opportunity to listen in to what's happening in the portfolio. Thank you again, everyone, for attending.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. That concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.