Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Mirrabooka Investments Limited Mirrabooka Rights Issue Call. I would now like to hand over to Mr. Mark Freeman, Managing Director and CEO. Please go ahead.
Okay, good afternoon, everyone. As stated, I'm Mark Freeman, the CEO and Managing Director of Mirrabooka, and before we start, I'd just 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 past, present, and emerging. Welcome to this briefing on the recently announced Mirrabooka entitlement offer. We'll give you an update on the offer and the reasons for undertaking this issue. We'll then give you the opportunity for participants to ask questions via the webcast using the tab at the bottom of the screen. This briefing is based on the material available on the company's website. If you're using your computer to access the presentation via the webcast, the slides will change automatically.
Joining me on this webinar today, I have Kieran Kennedy and Stuart Low, who manage the portfolios, so they'll be doing the bulk of the presentation. Andrew Porter, our CFO, is also here, along with Matthew Rowe, our Company Secretary, and Jeff Driver, our General Manager of Business Development, who will all be available for questions if you wish. With that, we'll start the presentation, and I'll pass over to Kieran to start.
Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. For those following the slides, I'll commence on slide three. Starting with the mechanics of the deal, what we're proposing to do here, it's a one-for-seven rights issue looking to raise approximately AUD 85 million. The thinking of the board in structuring this transaction was to ensure two things: as much fairness as possible and also as much simplicity in the way we structured it. In terms of fairness, we really think the fairest value of the portfolio at any point in time is the net asset backing. Obviously, the proposal of this was through a very volatile period through April.
The board looked back at the last five weekly NTAs that we'd released to the market through that period after Trump's announcements on tariffs in early April and seen that the average net asset backing for that period was AUD 3.06, which is the issue price for this transaction. That's around a 5% discount to the current share price. In terms of simplicity, given that these shares are an entitlement for existing shareholders, it was felt that it was fair and appropriate to just keep it simple and make the next final dividend, these shares be eligible for that, and that's been announced at AUD 0.065, which will be paid in August, which is our standard sort of final dividend we've been paying in recent years. We've allowed people to overbid their entitlement, subject to scale back, to sort of really look to raise that AUD 85 million.
That gives good flexibility for shareholders to participate to the extent of their interest warrants. Obviously, in doing this at around NTA, the thinking is it is fair for those that both participate, but also those that are happy with their holdings at the moment. The final point is obviously the most important one. This entitlement closes next Monday, the 2nd of June. Moving on to slide four, I guess the why, what was the thinking behind proposing this transaction? Obviously, there has been quite a lot of volatility in recent years, but particularly in recent months. There are a lot of announcements coming out of the U.S. We think that is an environment where we have seen volatility in share prices, and we think it is an environment where we will continue to see some volatility in share prices.
On a subsequent slide, I'll just discuss what we've been doing transaction-wise in the portfolio, I guess in anticipation of some of these funds coming in. We've already deployed quite significant capital this calendar year to date, but we think this volatility will remain. The second point on slide four, we think is an important one. One of the things we balance in Mirrabooka is we think there's an optimal size. You don't want to be too small because there's obviously benefits of scale, but equally, we don't want to be too large because we want to retain flexibility with how we manage the portfolio. We want to still have good, interesting small companies that we can put into the portfolio where they make sense.
We think there is a lot of literature that shows that by keeping funds at a size where you can perform better, that's in shareholders' interests. A lot of fund managers have competing interests because they're looking to grow their business and grow their funds with that. We look back, and since we first started paying out special dividends in 2013, we've paid out AUD 81 million in excess of what we received in either dividend reinvestment plans or capital raisings. Essentially, this is just a raising to replenish that capital that has been paid out over that period of time, which gives us good confidence that we're not doing anything to grow the size of the portfolio in excess of a level where we think we can still perform for the shareholders.
The other important features as a portfolio manager, we've gone through a period in 2024 where we saw a lot of our positions were running to pretty full valuations. This has been well documented if you've been following our recent releases. We sold down a number of those positions, which has really topped up our franking reserves very well, very nicely. We do not want to be doing that forever. If you keep selling those really good holdings, there is some tax inefficiency in that. A lot of those are down to levels where we think they're good core holdings for the longer-term prospects of those businesses.
We can now move out of that mode somewhat with this new capital by allocating it to the things where we see the best value and allowing some of those other positions to just naturally deweight in the portfolio rather than having to incur tax. We're confident there's been good support in our dialogue with shareholders for a number of years. It's one of the questions we often get asked first is, "When are you next going to do a capital raising?" That's been on our mind, and we think lining up now with the timing. That's obviously nice to know as well. Finally, I touched on the franking credits, but finally, just again to distinguish us from other investors in the market, the way these LICs work is that the shareholders own the company.
There's actually nothing in it for us as managers to make this bigger, to make a more profitable funds management business. The benefit of the extra scale received here will go into reduced management expense ratios for the shareholders, which we're very proud of. Moving on to slide five, as I mentioned, we, I guess, positioned ourselves through that significant dip in, sorry, in April, knowing that this was something we were proposing with the board. That gave us confidence to start getting on the front foot and buying some of the positions where we saw the most value. I think the most interesting features of this slide is if you look at the note at the top, AUD 72 million worth of purchases across 40 stocks. 40 stocks is well in excess of half the portfolio.
That's quite a significant cadence for us in terms of adding to lots of different positions. That really reflects it was a very volatile period through April. There were lots of opportunities arising. Rather than trying to aggressively pick a couple of those, we know our stocks really well. We know where we think there's good value in them, and we saw a lot of those sort of prices hit through that period. We were able to spread that investment across the portfolio. That leads us today at a position where we're in a small net debt position in advance of these funds coming in, which has obviously been really beneficial to get some of that money into the market through that significant weakness in April. I won't go through the details of all these purchases. These are the most material six for the year.
There's obviously another 34 under that. I think the other interesting point, though, to note is Macquarie Technology and ARB are two holdings that have sat well and truly in our top five positions for a number of years now. As I mentioned earlier, in 2024, we were selling a lot of our larger positions because we felt they were fully priced. We actually sold quite a bit of these two stocks. If you look at those charts through to 2024, they were a lot higher than they are now. We are really encouraged that these are great businesses and to be back in a situation where we see good long-term value in them again and we can start putting money back into them. That was a key part of the thinking behind this entitlement issue and proposing it to the board.
I guess on slide six, to address the elephant in the room, what's coming out of the White House and Trump's tariffs, the first thing we would say is your guess is as good as ours. We wouldn't profess to be expert in this. We've long since learned to stick in our lane and understand what we understand, which is the businesses that we own on your behalf. I guess our high-level observations are the share prices in the market seem to be moving with each announcement. There's a lot of trading that's going on. It's fueling that. The poor people that are actually trying to run a business and make medium to long-term decisions to try and allocate capital, invest in their business, determine how much stock they need to hold, it's a very challenging environment.
We've been talking to a number of CEOs, obviously, through this period. There's a bit of sitting on hands going on, which is natural. At best, we think there's going to be a window here of some impact from that. Companies sort of holding back, that's going to impact earnings across businesses, across lots of sectors. We haven't really had enough time for that to play out yet. That in itself, we think, will provide some opportunities where earnings create further share price volatility, even if these tariff relief from the earlier announcements are put through. The other key points are there's no proposals at this stage to go back to where we were. The proposals are to have smaller tariffs, but still tariffs. At the end of the day, tariffs do weigh on economic growth and do have an inflationary impact.
We do think on the other side of this, that is an impact across economies and therefore the overall level of earnings in markets. The other point is the uncertainty. There should be a risk factor we think applied to markets for that. As we sit here today, there has been a really strong rebound in share prices, but things are moving so fast that we do think this uncertainty that sort of sits across everyone at the moment will be reflected in further volatility going forward. One thing I would note as we move on to slide seven is obviously markets have rebounded quite a lot since we were proposing this in early April. We are long-term investors, so we will remain patient. We do not feel that these funds coming in means we need to hurry up to invest them into the market.
We think the volatility will come. We think there's some good value across the portfolio. We think if we're patient and keep taking the medium to long-term view, we'll get really good opportunities to put it into the market. The other points on slide seven, as we look across some of the other impacts of this sort of volatile world we've been in, one of the things we've noticed is, and we're hearing from a lot of people, is there's been a natural deweighting to US equities. Lots of global investors are saying they don't like what they're seeing. They're looking to naturally pull back some of their exposure to that market. If you think about the Australian market and how we're placed, that's seen, we think, a pretty significant fund flow into the Australian market as people are reallocating away from the U.S.
You see the obvious similarities with Australia, and we think it only takes a little bit of extra funds out of the U.S. into Australia, and that is flowing into the Australian market. The way we are seeing that is very household names like Commonwealth Bank, Wesfarmers, these blue-chip positions that a lot of Australians own in their own right and through their super funds are sort of hitting ever-expanding share prices at the moment. We think in this environment, allocating capital to a manager that is not in that part of the market, but is looking more broadly at emerging opportunities and better value outside the obvious area that gets all that index flow of funds, is a really interesting opportunity. We think Mirrabooka is uniquely placed for that in terms of being a good place for people to be putting money at the moment.
Importantly, as we mentioned at the bottom of this slide, as a closed-end structure, going back to the point I made earlier, we do not feel we are in a rush. We are not here to manage numbers on the next quarter or the one after that. We are here to keep delivering returns on a five- to ten-year view. We think that combination is very attractive. The final point on slide seven is there is so much uncertainty. If you are trying to invest out of headlines and newspapers at the moment, there is a lot of risk in doing that. Things are changing so suddenly. The fact that we know our businesses, I will hand you to Stuart in a moment to go through the top 20 investments again to remind on that sort of period of time we have owned those businesses. We get great access to the management of those companies.
We can really separate noise from fundamental change. We think that's really important to ask them questions about what their thinking is changing on a five to 10-year view. That best informs where we can allocate capital through what we think will be a volatile period. With that, I'll hand over to Stuart to cover the top 20 positions on slide eight.
Thanks very much, Kieran, and good afternoon all. As Kieran mentioned, just moving to slide eight, the Mirrabooka top 20 holdings. We love this slide. It's a slide we include in all of our updates. I guess it's really valuable. We talk about being a long-term investor. A lot of funds do, a lot of managers do, but I think this really illustrates that point that we do what we say.
I don't think there'd be too many fund managers that would have up to nearly 20 years of continuous ownership for some of our businesses. I guess the reason why we do this is we want to give our businesses time to compound. I guess that's the true value when you're investing in small caps is to try and get into some of these businesses early and hold them along the way and let them do the compounding for us. I guess the other thing it illustrates is that, and we refer to this as these businesses earning their way into our top 20. Quite often when we establish a new position or a new company to the portfolio, it'll be with a smaller amount of funds, a smaller weighting in the portfolio.
What we want to do is over time gain more trust in the management, understand the business, see them execute, and essentially attract more funds from us as the business executes and delivers. We end up seeing that the companies sort of, as we said, earn their way in there by compounding rather than us buying large top 20 positions to start with. I'll pull out, as we mentioned, we're always happy to take questions on any of the stocks in our top 20 or any of the stocks in the portfolio. I thought I'd just highlight two that stand out. Gentrack Group, our fourth largest holding, has only been in the portfolio for three years. This is an example of one where we purchased it as a small holding outside the top 20, and we don't always get them like this. This has been an outstanding investment.
Unfortunately, they don't always pan out this way. We knew this business for a while, and we caught it and saw it when there was a change of management, a bit of a turnaround. Since that last three-year period, it's really executed outstandingly well and gone up probably a couple of hundred percent and earned its way to sort of fourth in our list of holdings. Still a comfortable holder there, but that's an example where you really get it right, and they don't always go like Gentrack has. The other one I'd just call out is Region, only been in the portfolio for one and a half years, neighborhood shopping center business. This was added to the portfolio if you think about a year and a half ago. We were starting to see some stretched valuations. We were a little bit cautious on the market.
We have quite a lot of growth stocks in the portfolio. We thought this one with a really strong yield, really solid defensive customer base, really well positioned, was a good addition to the portfolio. Since that period of time, it has rebounded quite well, producing steady income for us. The sort of stable business we are looking to add as well as having our sort of suite of growth stocks. That one has, I guess, been in there for a shorter period of time, but has performed well. As I mentioned, happy to take questions on any of these stocks, but I will hand back to Kieran now for further discussion.
Thank you, Stuart. On the final slide on slide nine, this goes back to Mirrabooka's inception in 1999. It just demonstrates the long track record of returns.
I think the important point on this slide is one we always try and make, which is, again, the importance of being a long-term investor. This represents the returns for someone who invested at inception, AUD 10,000, reinvested all their dividends, but received their franking credits as a refund. It is putting us on an equal basis with others in terms of getting the gross up for the franking credits. We do not actually include participation in share purchase plans or rights issues or anything like that in this. We try and keep it simple. I guess going back to my earlier comment, we often have a lot of support and questions around when are you going to next do a capital raising.
We think this long-term track record and the ability to actually buy shares at NTA, we think that's the sort of opportunity that we think is attractive for shareholders in terms of this entitlement issue. With that, we'll close and hopefully get to the interesting part. Let's take some questions, Jaye.
Thanks, Kieran. I've got a question here about applying for additional shares and the top-up facility. Can we give an indication about directors' discretion associated with allocation scale-back? Because clearly, people do not want their money tied up for a period of time. There has got to be significant scale-back.
Yeah. We'll be taking some external advice on allocating the top-up. I think, I'm not sure what the timing is. Next week. We do not. Yeah. It will not be too long. Yeah. It will not be too long.
We're looking to do that immediately after that. As I said, we will take some external advice on how to do that allocation, and it'll be done pretty quickly. I guess the point is we want to be fair to shareholders in terms of that approach. We're very conscious of that. That's the way we'll be recommending it back to directors based on the external advice that we receive.
Yep. Kieran, the market's obviously changed a little bit since the first announcement issue. Sort of what's your approach in terms of taking the funds and potentially at these sorts of market levels?
Yeah. That's the obvious question. It's one we actually discussed with our board last week. Things are moving very fluidly. I guess in simple terms, as I said, we tried to do the entitlement at net asset backing.
As it turned out, because of the rising market and the timing of these situations, we're now at a discount to the asset backing. I guess that's more attractive for people putting money into this entitlement than it was intended to be, to be really transparent about it. On the other side of that, the attraction for us to put that money into the market immediately has diminished somewhat. That's the obvious point. That's the trade-off. We discussed this at the board last week. Really encouragingly, across the whole table, we all agree that we're long-term investors. Things have moved quickly in the last month. We think our ability to deploy this capital into the market and generate returns on a long-term view remains really strong. We've got strong conviction in that. We'll be patient.
The most important thing is not to sort of say we're in any rush to put any money in. If markets sort of keep, I guess, appreciating from here, then we'll just take more of a patient view and remain long-term in the way we think about it. Still have very strong conviction that this will be a really value-creating thing for the portfolio in the fullness of time.
Thanks, Kieran. It looks like we've had a bit of technical difficulty. I'm going to apologize and ask that question again for those who weren't able to hear it. Perhaps the question was really, given the way the market's performed since we announced the issue, what's your approach to investing in the market given the current market levels? My apologies.
No, that's fine. No problems at all. No.
As I was mentioning, we had this exact discussion around the board table last week. The obvious trade-off that's occurred here is we were trying to price this at the fair asset value price, taking an average through April. Markets have rebounded quite strongly since. That makes it more attractive for people to participate in this issue than was probably intended at the time. It's just the timing of the way these things have worked out. The trade-off on that is it's not as attractive for us to immediately employ that money into the market today as it would have been in April. This is what we discussed, and we remain steadfast that we're medium to long-term investors, and that's the basis on which we'll invest this money. If it means we need to be just a bit more patient to deploy this capital, that's fine.
We think there's a lot of volatility in the world that will impact companies in different ways. We'll see opportunities from this, but we won't be in a rush. If it requires a bit of extra patience to deploy the capital, that's fine. We'll back ourselves in to get good returns on a medium to long-term view. We remain as convicted that this will be a really good value creation opportunity for the portfolio as we were.
Thanks, Kieran. Appreciate that again. That's okay. I encourage you to ask any questions. I gather we are back online, so please ask any questions that you may have. There's a question here about LIC capital gains. Will they continue to be a feature or likely to continue to be a feature of Mirrabooka dividends going forward?
The answer to that is yes, as long as the tax legislation allows us to do so. I have not seen any indication that that will change as yet. Realized gains and the return of them through the dividends and via the LIC gains is a very important part of the Mirrabooka story. Just to remind shareholders, those only work if you are paying tax. If you're not paying any tax, you don't get a benefit from it. If you're in a taxpaying position, your superfund, or as an individual, yes, we'll continue to pay those out. They do more good in shareholders' hands than they do in the companies.
Realized capital gains obviously generate franking credits as well. Absolutely. Which can be important for people in low-tax paying environments. This question was asked before, but I'll ask it again.
Will there be any scale-back, and how are we going to determine that, Mark?
Yeah. So any scale-back really is a function of how much stock gets bid for. I mean, there's obviously a cap, the AUD 85 million. We're happy to take up to that full amount. If the extra bids come to that amount, then you'll get the full amount. If we get amounts beyond that, that's when there'll have to be some sort of scale-back and impact. The answer is capped, but we'll just have to see how much bids we get. As we mentioned earlier on, we are using someone external to help us with that process. That's very clear-cut. We're obviously also very cognitive of treating shareholders very well within that process also.
Question here.
Did the company purchase any shares with debt with the hope to replenish that with the SPP? I assume that that question's really about the rights issue. Yeah.
Yeah. Look, we always carry a debt facility to have flexibility. We increased the size of that modestly. We have now got an AUD 15 million debt facility. That is just important because you never know when market dislocations are going to occur. For those that have followed us closely, we had quite a bit of cash at the end of the half year of the December interim report. We have got a reasonable running tally of realized gains for this financial year to date, which will require some sort of tax payment late this calendar year. We have also got a final dividend that will be coming up soon as well. We are completely fully invested.
We've got some modest net debt today. Then we've got that dividend payment coming up and the tax payment later in the year. Knowing that this capital raising was something we were working on really gave us the opportunity to deploy some money into the market in that April period. Whether that was the key window of volatility we've seen with sort of the Trump dislocation, we're not sure yet. We feel really encouraged that we got to deploy some good capital. Some of the prices we were able to buy stocks at versus where they're trading today, quite remarkable, some of them in terms of how much they've appreciated. It's been really good knowing this has been coming.
I guess an ancillary question here in terms of another shareholder asking it.
If the full entitlement is reached, the portfolio will hold 11-12% cash, which will typically experience as a drag on performance.
Any comments on that, Kieran?
Yeah. So I guess if you think through, once we factor in the dividend and tax, 11 and 12 is not it won't be as high as that and the fact that we're fully invested today. So it's not quite as high as that. The spirit of the question is we will have more cash than we've had recently. It's interesting. I've gone back and looked at the history of Mirrabooka and pulling together the numbers for the 25-year letter. On average, we've had about 5% or 6% cash in the history of Mirrabooka. In recent times when interest rates were really, really low, thankfully we were much more fully invested in that.
Over the fullness of Mirrabooka, of time in Mirrabooka and the returns we've delivered, we've overcome that drag. I guess the way we think about that is there's a lot of good growth companies in this part of the market already that has some sort of high return capability within it. Cash is not there as sort of an asset allocation decision. It's not there to be trying to pick markets, but it's there for the flexibility in terms of the volatility we've seen. We've always been a bit like that in Mirrabooka. It doesn't worry us at all to have some cash. The most important thing for us is to use it when we see value and use it with conviction when we see value. We won't be complaining about a drag, but we won't be worried about a drag either.
If the market goes down,
it's not a drag.
That's right. If the market goes down, it's not a drag. The other point is it's generating interest at the moment, which it hasn't been doing in recent years. We do get some interest income out of it while we're waiting for the best opportunities to deploy it.
Okay. Just reminding you asked a question via the website. There's a question here about how much we've raised for the rights issue so far.
We can't really answer that question other than to say we think there's reasonable support out there. We're speaking with people. We'll have to wait till we get to early next week to determine how much we actually raised.
I think the other thing these days, because of the way you can pay for the take-up of the rights, which is through BPAY on a form, you get a lot of people that simply wait till the last day to do it. It is really hard to tell. We have had good interest. Yeah.
Okay. I have not got any other questions. Okay. This one just came through. What are your thoughts on Mineral Resources?
Yeah. We do not own it. We have never owned it. There was a long period of time there where we looked at it and felt it would have been good to own it because it did sort of meet a number of our characteristics in terms of the founder and the way they are growing the business.
We think in the latter period, it's become a bit harder because of some of the governance issues and most particularly because of the balance sheet. That now makes it a much different proposition where you've really got to take a pretty strong view on the direction of the commodity prices they're exposed to. That, to be honest, takes away a lot of the interest for us. We're not smart enough to be able to pick that. There are other opportunities that we can explore. We think we can invest in with more conviction. There's more of a comment here than anything else, but it says if Warren Buffett is happy to sit on a massive amount of cash to redeploy when an opportunity arises, we're happy to see Mirrabooka do likewise, of course, on a much smaller scale. We won't compare ourselves to Warren Buffett.
[crosstalk] We'll accept the support. That's right. Yeah.
What are your thoughts on Domino's Pizza?
Yeah. Look, that is one we've owned, and it was painful in the last few years. We don't own it at the moment, and it's hard to see sort of the green shoots you'd need to see in terms of a turnaround as we speak. We keep meeting with the company. We think there is some level of interest because we've seen these sorts of situations before where businesses expand too aggressively, get a bit carried away, stretch their balance sheet, and then go back to sort of saying, "What is it that made this business great in the first place?" and start to strip the business back a bit and get back to that.
We think that the company's now fully faced up to their issues, and they're back in that mode about getting more out of what they've got. That is the first step we need to see and we've seen to make it interesting again. The share price looks interesting, but we want to see a bit more in terms of how we think they can start to consistently grow the business. We'll be tuning in and meeting the company as often as we can over the next period to do that.
Got a question here about directors taking up their entitlements for topping up. As we outline in the booklet, distributors and shareholders, directors have indicated they'll take up their full entitlement, but they're prohibited actually from topping up any extra shares. That's the situation there. Thoughts on James Hardie?
Yeah.
This is an interesting one for us. It is a 50-leader investment. If you go back to last year when a lot of things were pretty fully valued, we were actually entering the mode of exiting this position. The shares were sort of mid to high 50s at the time, and we felt that was a pretty appropriate valuation. Still a great company. It was one we had a bit of mixed feelings about selling out of, but thought that was time to redeploy back into our small and mid-cap part of the universe. Since then, we saw the share price retrace a bit, which sort of stopped that selling. We saw the recent transaction of the ASX business in the US, which has really spooked the market a fair bit. We agree with some of the negativity around that deal.
We think they have overpaid for that business. We think that is a shame, and that does have a value implication forever, really, if you've overpaid for something. Equally, you've got to sort of look forward and say, "From these prices and from this situation looking forward, what's the best outcome for our shareholders in this investment?" When I guess the peak hysteria around that deal was in place, the stock fell back below AUD 35, and we actually felt we'd go the other way. We actually built the position back up again and bought some stock because really, I guess the way we're characterizing this is a bit different. It's kind of the opposite to most M&A transactions we see. Normally, you buy something, it's inferior, you don't know it yet.
You tell everyone how accredited that is and what it does to your numbers and how fantastic it's going to be. Then two or three years down the line, we see that it is an inferior business, and that was an illusion, really, and the value's not created. This one, we think they bought a really good business. They've overpaid. That's obvious on day one. When we're two to three years down the line on this one, we think the sticker shock of what they've paid will be known. That's already in the price, but we'll be seeing the returns from what they've bought and the quality of what they've bought. We think it is a bit of a flip. We've been back on the front foot in buying this one recently.
Thanks, Kieran.
Comment about Macquarie Technology Group today, sorry, about the share price falling and what's the situation there? Yeah.
Thanks, Jeff. Stuart here. I'll take that one. Just a bit of background for people on the call. Macquarie Technology is our largest position in the portfolio. It provides cloud, telco, and owns and operates a number of data centers, still run by the founding brothers, the Chudleigh brothers, who own a large chunk of the equity. This is a business that had gone quite strongly, run quite strongly with a number of the data center operators. We, as Kieran mentioned earlier, we've done a little bit of trimming last year. I guess the key catalyst for Macquarie share price selling off and the broader data center space being to NEXTDC and DiGiCo was around some fears.
There was a DeepSeek, which was the Chinese AI business, came out, and obviously that stirred the market in a way that they could do a lot of the compute power with less GPUs and CPUs. I guess there was a broader view that data centers, to the extent that data centers, would not be needed as much or the density of data centers would not be required. There is a little bit of fear that you might end up in a position in a couple of years' time where you have an oversupply of data centers and potentially too much capital being deployed into this space. I guess since then we have had Microsoft come out and buy a little bit of data center capacity. We think that was a bit of a reallocation to one of the large other cloud providers.
Since then we've seen still a number of positive updates from the main AI players, and the large hyperscale providers still seem to be spending quite significantly in this area. We don't know what the outcome will be. We do know there's a lot of capital being deployed. However, we're taking a bottom-up view on Macquarie Technology rather than playing this as a data center play. We look at it bottom-up. It's been very well run, really conservative balance sheet. Their large data center that they're building at the moment has been fully permitted in a really desirable area in Macquarie Park. It doesn't look like there will be too many other data centers built in that area.
We think the incremental capacity that they are bringing into the market in the next couple of years should have really strong demand, and that will probably quadruple their data center capacity in the next probably five years without overly stretching the balance sheet. We do watch that space to see if there is too much capital being deployed. We are watching it. For Macquarie Technology in particular, we do not think they will be caught up in that. We think there will be strong demand for their capacity, and the balance sheet is really quite conservative and well run. We have got a lot of conviction, as Kieran said. We have been looking and buying that one in the last couple of months, and we think the share price is reasonably undervalued here.
Thanks, Stuart. There is a comment here about referring to the comments on tariffs.
Obviously, this morning the tariffs were blocked in court. We'll see how long that lasts. How might this affect your plans?
This goes back to what I was saying earlier. I think headlines are driving markets. We try and be as different as we can. We think we've got a competitive advantage over other investors in the market, particularly in this area of the market, in that we've got fixed capital. We're a listed company, so our capital is not fluid with our performance over the next quarter.
That gives us the luxury to not try and interpret every headline every day and run around with our hair on fire trying to work out what the next thing to trade is, but to say, "What is the long-term view of the businesses we own?" I'd sort of see this as just another data point in a series of data points around a tariff thing that's hard to understand and explain. I think these headlines are going to keep coming, and hopefully they provide opportunities for us to add to the portfolio. With ARB, it's a bit on the tariffs again. I guess with ARB, has the market been spooked by the tariffs in the U.S. more recently? Yeah. It looks somewhat. I think auto tariffs into the U.S. have been particularly complicated because there's been a number of iterations of it.
They've had a specific carve-out around auto and auto inputs, and then there's different countries of supply. It's been particularly hard to follow, and ARB are working through that. I think actually there's also a bit of concern about the Australian near-term earnings outlook. Things have softened a little bit in Australia. I think a lot of people that look at ARB see some value, but say, "I'm not sure that the profits are going to accelerate anytime soon." Therefore, it's not the top of the list to buy if you're a shorter-term investor. Our lens on ARB is much more about the strategic moves they've made in recent years to secure the largest retail ownership and the largest retail footprint in the U.S. Sorry, that part ownership in that.
That is particularly strategic for ARB because it gives them really good visibility on the products that are selling in that market, the products they should be developing for that market, and then the ability for their products to get better shelf space in that store network. We think the company would have been dying at this position five or six years ago. They've been able to acquire it very cheaply. It's barely moved the share price. On our horizon, on a five to 10-year view, that's much more interesting than any tariff or anything that's knocking ARB around today.
Thanks, Kieran. Any comments on any investments that haven't worked out as expected in recent years? We all talk about our successes, often discussing the mistakes or better described as miscalculations. Hindsight is a great learning tool to fine-tune the methodology.
It's a good question at the moment. We're going through our annual review process as we speak, where we go through and look at what we're learning from our good and bad investments. It's a great question because if you're not learning from your investments that don't work out, you won't limit them in the future. You have to reflect on them deeply. I'd put them in two categories for Mirrabooka. The smaller ones are probably a bit more acceptable for Mirrabooka in that we're trying to identify characteristics about what might make this company succeed in the future. You're trying to deliberately be a bit early so you can find those sort of Gentrack situations that Stuart described earlier. That won't always work out.
What we've been learning on those is to keep them small and then only build them when you see actual fundamental progress in the business. One of the mistakes we've made historically is you buy it, you think you've got a good thesis, the share price then falls away a bit. You think, "Oh, we better buy some more because it's better value." Those smaller emerging positions, we're now much more buying with the business's progress, and we think that's helped our hit rate in this area. The second sort of category of mistakes is where larger positions where we sort of either buy the wrong business or pay the wrong price. We've had a pretty significant one of those recently in IDP Education, which we firmly put in the latter of those, i.e., paying the wrong price.
We think this is the market leader in international students out of emerging markets into Western markets. They placed them. Clear market leader. That has got a very strong track record of growth as a market, but has seen a very, very significant dislocation in recent years with a lot of Western markets now sort of changing immigration policy, a lot of political noise around that. Obviously, that has seen student numbers drop away very significantly. We do not think that is structural, but we think the pain has got more in it. It is not rebounding anytime soon. Our reflection on that was to say we think identifying the market leader when there has been that sort of dislocation is good for the portfolio.
We've done that really well in the past, but we needed to take a broader view of, I guess, the downside scenario and say, "Well, if this really accelerated in the way it has done historically in different times, what would that really do to the profit?" and step back and set our buying to a broader range of outcomes. I think if we'd done that, we'd still own it, but we'd own it at a better cost base than we have today. Thanks, Kieran.
We'll make this the last question. Will Atlassian Jira take up their entitlement? I guess, Mark, as background, Atlassian Jira are shareholders within Mirrabooka. I guess the other point is that they'll be treated just like any other shareholder within that process.
I guess the other thing is it's really up to the directors of those particular companies about whether they participate in the entitlement offer or not. Do you have anything further to add to that, Mark?
No, that's correct. It's their decision, but they are shareholders, so they're entitled to participate in the issue like everyone else is.
Okay. We'll definitely make this the last two questions. A couple more have just come in. Did we sell JB Hi-Fi too early?
Yes. Yes. I'll elaborate briefly, but yes. Where we got this one wrong was we bought it pretty well, but we felt it was fairly mature, and we sort of anticipated that a bit too early. We still think there is a maturity in the fact that they're not going to have double the stores anytime soon.
We think the nature of this sort of category of products they sell has changed somewhat. They're much less discretionary than they ever were. There's so much innovation that goes into this sort of communications area of the market that it's fast changing, and that gives them a better growth profile than we probably gave it credit for. Still steady growth, but yes, we sold this too early.
Thanks, Kieran. This is the last question. I guess in our annual reports and what have you, will we consider the inclusion of detailed summary of returns on a three-accepted industry basis investment portfolio? Gross, NTA gross, and TSI. Andrew, do you want to?
Yeah. The remuneration report for Mirrabooka Investments makes reference to the AFIC remuneration report because AFIC, which employs the team, is a subsidiary of AFIC.
Those measures, the gross measure and the NTA return measure, are included in the measures that are used to determine how well the team is doing. Those figures are available in the AFIC remuneration report with regard to share return. Actually, it has not been because internally that is not considered an issue that we can control. We will take that on notice, have a review of it with the board.
All right, Mark. There are no other questions, so I will hand it back to you to close the meeting.
Thank you. I would just like to thank everyone for joining this presentation. As we said earlier, it closes on Monday, I think, at 4:00 P.M. There is time for considerations there. Just to remind everyone again that the take-up of the stock, you will be entitled to the full dividend, the final dividend.
It'll probably go ex in July. Obviously, the next contact point will be the full-year result webinar, which we'll be also doing in July with a similar format to this. 17th of July. 17th of July. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining.