Afternoon and welcome to the Mirrabooka Investments Full-year Financial Results First Briefing. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only zone. There will be a presentation followed by a Q&A session. All questions will be taken via the webcast. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please enter your question in the ask questions box at the bottom of the webcast window. I would now like to hand the presentation over to Mark Freeman, Managing Director of Mirrabooka . Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mark Freeman, the CEO and Managing Director of Mirrabooka Investments, and welcome to this full-year results briefing. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians from all of the lands we are gathered on today and pay my respects to the elders past, present, and emerging. Joining me today on this webinar, we have Kieran Kennedy and Stuart Low, who manage the portfolio; Andrew Porter, our CFO; Matthew Rowe, our Company Secretary; Geoffrey Driver, our General Manager of Business Development; and Suzanne Harding, who is also involved with business development. This briefing is based on the material available on the company's website. The presentation slides will change automatically via the webcast. Please note that following the presentation, there will be time for questions and answers. You can ask a question via the webcast using the tab at the bottom of the screen.
I'll now turn to page two of the presentation, which is our disclaimer, just to say we're here to talk about what the company is doing. We're not giving any advice. Onto page three of the presentation. Just to remind everyone that Mirrabooka is a listed investment company. It specializes in investing in small and mid-sized companies, primarily on the Australian and New Zealand Stock Exchange. We think about small and mid-sized companies as companies outside the 50 leaders. Sometimes we have stocks that do really well and will move inside the 50 leaders. We don't necessarily exit those companies immediately. We will look to ease those positions out when we think we've extracted full value from them. The company aims to provide long-term investment returns through our holdings, as well as paying attractive, fully-franked dividends along the way.
With that, I'll pass over to Andrew Porter, our CFO, to talk about the results.
Thank you, Mark. On page five, slide four for the full-year results. The profit for the year was down to $7.9 million from $10.7 million. There was a fall-off in the dividends that we received, largely due to the changes of some of the investments, particularly with regard to a fall-off in option income. We had a very, very good year for option income last year. Also, in the trading portfolio, we had some gains in the trading portfolio in positions like Macquarie Technology Group and Medibank last year that weren't repeated this year. That has led to, and I'll move diagonally to the management expense ratio, 0.54%. That's $0.54 for every $100 invested. That's slightly down from last year, which was $0.56 for every $100 invested. We believe that still represents very good value for an LIC or an investment vehicle in this sector of the market.
Looking at the dividend, as was foreshadowed in the announcement and the presentations about the rights issue, the board decided to keep the ordinary dividend steady at $0.065. That's what's been declared today. It is important to note, though, that all of the shares that were issued in that rights issue are entitled to that dividend of $0.065. Portfolio return, bottom left-hand corner, 11.4%. That will be discussed in more detail by Kieran Kennedy, the Portfolio Manager, who will take over now.
Thank you, Andrew. And good afternoon, everyone. I'm now on slide five, the portfolio performance figures. I guess when we're consistently presenting these figures, we like to remind listeners and investors that we are long-term investors, much more focused on the three, five, and 10-year numbers because we think that more represents how we're going against our objectives as long-term investors. Mindful this year, given we're underperforming over one year, we don't want to be seen as ducking that bar. Just to cover off on that, the portfolio did 11.4%, as Andrew mentioned, versus the benchmark at 15.2%. These figures are consistent with how we present them. They represent full franking distribution and grossed up for that franking. That's the franking that we have actually paid out to our shareholders, not the tax that we paid on the realized gains in the portfolio.
We are running at around three years' coverage of dividends in reserve that haven't yet been reflected in these figures when we've paid them out. For the year we've just been through, there's around another $10 million of realized capital gains tax that we'll be paying later in the calendar year. That is a bit of a drag in these numbers. Some other factors that have seen some of that underperformance, often, as is often the case when you're looking at shorter-term numbers like one year, it's often about where you were coming into the year. Just to remind people, last year in 2024, we had very strong outperformance. The portfolio was up 17.4% versus the benchmark at 8.7%. That shows you get some more volatility in these shorter-term numbers.
One of the other features this year is there's been some sectors of the market that have been particularly strong, in which we don't have much representation at all in. That's particularly in gold. That's been very strong given all the gyrations in macroeconomic conditions over the last 12 months. Our decision there really not to invest in that sector has much to do with the fact that we just don't really think we can find world-class long-term low-cost assets that you can hold through cycles. It's more of a trading sector of the market, we feel. We don't think we're in any better place than anyone else to pick where the gold price is going. It hasn't been a big feature.
The other areas, there's been a couple of stocks that have been sort of nuisances for us for a long period of time, really, because they do fit our framework, things like Pro Medicus and Technology One, which we should have bought many years ago, but they've continued to perform really well. In the last 12 months, they have been big weightings in the benchmark, and they've both effectively doubled again over that 12-month period. We've found them prohibitively expensive for the last few years, but we should have probably addressed that earlier on. There are some of the reasons for the underperformance in the year, but we think in the bigger picture, looking at those long-term numbers, it's pleasing to see that the investment approach is delivering good, solid outperformance over all longer-term timeframes across our 26-year history.
Moving on to slide six, I guess the material initiative that we undertook during the year was the capital raising. We decided to do a one-for-seven rights issue as we saw some volatility earlier in this calendar year. Just to recap again on the structural thinking behind this decision, we went back and looked at that distribution of realized capital gains that we've done since we started paying special dividends in 2013. The number there is that we've paid out around $80 million more than we've been receiving in the RPs and share purchase plans. That's been the net payout of the portfolio when we've made gains. Really thinking about that number, thinking about the demand that's been there from shareholders to have an opportunity to invest at around NTA. We've often traded at a premium, so we know there's good support for a capital raising.
We've been thinking about this for a period of time, when is a good time to top up the portfolio, give us some additional capital so we can rebalance some of the positions. Importantly, in a fund like Mirrabooka Investments, that extra scale does get represented in a lower management expense ratio, which is in everyone's benefit as a shareholder. That's been the thinking. We've been thinking about when to do it. We saw the market sell off through that period from February to April this year with all the Trump announcements coming out. We thought that we were entering a period where better value was emerging for some of the companies that we really wanted to buy, and that got us on the front foot. We did a lot of buying in April when stocks were bottoming at that time.
Effectively, we've seen a very strong rally in markets since. I'll cover this more on the outlook slide, but that leaves us now with a healthy cash position. We'd feel well placed to deploy that into opportunities that we think will come along. With that snapback in the market, we think we'll take a more patient approach to deploying those funds going forward. I'll hand over to Geoff to perhaps give some outcome of the capital raising description.
Thanks, Kieran. We did raise the $85.1 million that we were looking to raise from that one-for-seven rights issue. The takeup for the new shares under the entitlement offer and the top-up facility was 119%. We did have to scale back. The scale back was basically done on the multiple relative to existing entitlement. No one got any preferential treatment over and above that multiple.
We certainly had a number of people who had small numbers of shares that applied for a large multiple of entitlement. We thought the fairest way to solve that outcome was to actually give a minimum of $5,000 in terms of those shares in that process. I also reiterate that we actually had independent advice to the board to help us with that process. We think that given that it was based on a multiple relative to existing entitlement and that minimum, we felt it was a very fair outcome for all shareholders involved. The shares, fortunately, are trading well above the $3.06 price. When we originally set that price, it was around that period where there was quite a lot of volatility in the market. We took an average over the previous four-week period to set that price.
As Andrew mentioned earlier on, the new shares are entitled to the upcoming final dividend. We were very pleased with the outcome. We think that the process was very fair for shareholders who applied. We're obviously very happy with the fact that the share price is trading well above that at this point of time. With that, Kieran, I'll hand back to you to talk about the material contributors to the recent performance.
Yes, thank you, Geoff. For those who've read our media release that we put out today with our financial result, you'll see we've described the year as being quite marked, really, in terms of the divergence of contribution to the portfolio return. If you go back to those one-year figures of 11% for the portfolio and around 15% for the market, it looks like a really attractive year, but there's been a lot going on beneath that, both in terms of the volatility within the year to get to those numbers, but also in the volatility of outcomes in individual stocks to get us to those numbers. With this here, some of the large contributors are large holdings. These are the sort of, you know, the top 20 positions that have really helped drive our performance for the year. That's Temple & Webster , up 127%.
Businesses like Hub24, Life360, Pinnacle , ResMed, EVT, Objective , and Netwealth . They've really helped us to deliver that 11% for the year, as I'd said. Obviously, I mentioned earlier there's a couple of other stocks in the index that we didn't own that have gone particularly well. This is, I guess, the other side of that, where we've had some of our holdings that, you know, they weren't necessarily really cheap 12 months ago, these businesses, but the market has continued to recognize and reward these really good long structural growth stories. We've had some benefit from that in the portfolio on some of these holdings as well. It's worth mentioning we don't sit passively on these positions and just accumulate the returns and, I guess, ride them right through if they've had really good runs. We do test the valuation.
We're wary that you can get extremes in this end of the market. We want to make sure we don't have significant volatility in our portfolio returns. We're sort of conscious that if we do that and harvest some of the gains when some of these positions have run really well, that's the sort of firepower for us to have, you know, dividend capacity and special dividend capacity for our shareholders. In that light, through this period, Temple & Webster and Pinnacle have been stocks that we have sort of most materially sold through the year. We've also lightened positions in Hub and Life360 and Netwealth through the year as well. I think the detractor side of the equation in FY 2025 is quite interesting. The first one, IDP Education, has been, you know, very painful for us.
We've been very on the front foot that we have really good long-term conviction in this business. We're very aware that the international education sector is under a lot of pressure. That wasn't new to us in our thesis. It's fair to say we've underestimated just how sharp that pressure has become. I guess the core thesis that we're really looking to keep retesting to make sure that this is just a cyclical issue, albeit a very deep one, is to just keep testing the market share side of this equation. If we believe, as we do at the moment, that they are the market leader, the whole sector is under a lot of pressure, but we think they can continue to eke out gains against their competitors. We've had plenty of instances in the past where we've gone through tough cyclical conditions.
You can be quite surprised on the other side. You don't even need a howling tailwind in terms of the cycle, just the headwind to fade. You do see the leaders start to get back on a growth path. That's really what we want to test when we sit down with management again in August. There's a lot of noise in the numbers in terms of the way the students are flowing into the business. There are lots of different implications for different types of students into different markets. It's not a clean story at the moment to see that the market share is really coming in at the rate we'd like. We really need to get underneath that hood when we catch up with the company in August.
The next two, I think, are really interesting just to give a bit more of a flavor with Mirrabooka and what we do. Macquarie Technology and Reece, we often look for these businesses where we get really heavy alignment with founders. These businesses can often go through periods where they're not really on the broader institutional radar. They can be quite illiquid, these stocks. You get management teams that don't really like getting out and selling their wares in the market. They like to keep things fairly private. They keep their disclosures brief and factual, but they don't get on the sort of roadshow trail like a lot of companies do. We like those businesses when they've got good long-term track records. It's just really interesting to see how their share prices can move, we think, quite differently from how their actual fortune moves in the business.
As I think about Macquarie Technology , this is our largest position in the portfolio and has remained so. The stock was down around 30% for the financial year, and we just feel that it's really quite hard to reconcile. This business has got really attractive expansion coming their way in their data center business. We think it's just a case of impatience. It's not happening in the next quarter or two, so the equity market moves on and looks at other things. On our timeframes, when we're looking three and five years down the line, we think this business is appreciating in value every day. We were actually reducing this position through FY 2024 when the stock was sort of pushing up into the high $80s. This year, it actually became our largest purchase again, and we were buying stock back in the $60s.
We do think understanding these businesses well, keeping a long-term view, but then taking advantage of when the market does these things is to the benefit of the returns in the portfolio. Reece, similarly, has actually now become a fairly small position in the portfolio because we sold this very heavily when they were doing particularly well in their U.S. business a few years ago. Their profits ran very hard, and the rating on those profits went particularly high as more liquidity came into the stock after the U.S. acquisition. It was flavor of the month for a while there, and now they're under pressure. The U.S. business is facing some cyclical and structural pressures, and the earnings have been under pressure and declining. You'll see a 42% decline. We're actually thinking about this business and when do we get back on the front foot.
We think it's a good business, and we're just looking to see some signs that those earnings are getting toward the bottom. This is one we'll be looking at as well in a similar way to take advantage of that. Finally, OFX is one that, again, we don't get everything right in this portfolio. That one hadn't worked. It's not a strong enough competitive position, so that's been a painful smaller position, but one we have exited. It's just a demonstration that the returns in the portfolio are attractive in the long run, but they do come with individual instances where you don't get the outcomes you're looking for at this end of the market. With that, I'll hand over to Stu to cover some of the more investment portfolio activity for the year.
Thanks, Kieran, and good afternoon all. Just moving to slide nine, activity over the financial year.
What have we been doing in terms of both purchases, sales, addition to existing holdings, and some reduction in our ongoing holdings? Maybe just starting with the purchases, new stocks of the portfolio. Treasury Wine Estates and Ramsay Health Care, these are both quite large businesses that have been owned in the portfolio previously. Both of them have had a pretty tough period after COVID. The last couple of years have been for individual reasons, which I'll touch on. Both of them, I think, by the way, have looked at probably hard in terms of share price over that three-year period. With Treasury Wine, we saw this broadly in the alcohol industry, a lot of inventory stocking over the last couple of years. In particular, the Treasury's and Chinese tariffs really hurt the business, and more recently, some management change. In Ramsay, it's had its own issues.
We saw, obviously, private hospital volumes fell away quite substantially after COVID, and they've been unable to recapture some of the cost inflation in that sector, followed by a failed takeover. When we look at these, we are looking through some of the near-term issues, and we characterize these as having a latent value on the asset base. With Treasury, we think some of the hard assets are really interesting. The Penfolds brand is, I guess, a globally well-regarded luxury brand. We think that's very valuable. Ramsay as well, we think particularly the Australian assets are quite interesting. Given there have been some headwinds, we've taken what I would call modest starting positions in both of these.
They're very large businesses, so we could have much larger holdings, but I think we'd probably wait and see for some operational tailwinds to occur in both sectors and for businesses just to start honing a little bit more before allocating any more capital to both. In terms of the other new stocks of the portfolio, we've talked about Channel Infrastructure before, but I'll touch on it again. A really unique business that started out as a New Zealand fuel refining business and turned into an import terminal about three or four years ago. It's a monopoly business in New Zealand, and it handles, I think, probably 95% of Auckland Airport's aviation fuel, as well as a significant amount of fuel more broadly for the New Zealand economy. Management has done a really good job there.
They've got a really good asset position at Marsden Point, very unique, and have been working away the last couple of years to monetize that through different projects. We really like that. A very defensive earnings stream, and it was one we added to the portfolio late last calendar year when we saw a lot of stretched valuations in some of our more growthier stocks. In terms of additions to existing holdings, I think Kieran sort of touched on the Macquarie thesis. One that's another one of our top holdings is ARB. It's been in the portfolio for many years. Once again, it had a little bit of a post-COVID hangover. There's been a lot of purchases of these types of equipment, overlanding and stuff like that when people couldn't travel.
We saw that a little bit of a hangover was followed by some specific issues they had with one of their partners in the U.S. More recently, it's been a little bit weak following the tariff announcements. ARB produces a lot of their equipment out of Thailand, and obviously with the Trump announcements, there's been quite a bit of uncertainty as to what will happen in the near term. Once again, we think this is a really good 10-15 year business, outstandingly well managed, really good balance sheet, a really good market position in Australia, and an emerging position in the U.S. We think any short-term issues will be overcome. Quite happy to be buying that one through some of this period of weakness. The other one that was an existing holding was Region Group, a neighborhood shopping center. Very expensive income.
We added to it once again in that period last calendar year when we found valuations quite stretched. This has gone through a period where costs have grown a little bit higher than income, and that's now inverted. We think that one's quite attractive and secure, effective income. Turning now to some of the sales. We've had two businesses that have exited the portfolio through takeovers in PSC Insurance and Dropsuite. I guess every fund manager likes to think they have sort of a higher quality portfolio, but it is a function that we do see a number of takeovers throughout the portfolio. Generally, every year, we'll get one or two. I think the settings in the market mean we're probably likely to have one or two more over the next financial year, I'd like to guess.
We've got a period where we have really had no IPOs of note for a number of years. We've got significant liquidity in the system. Markets are running at quite all-time highs. I think probably we're likely to see one or two. It's something to watch out for. We don't bank on it, but it always is a relatively pleasant surprise if we get good value for our holdings. Sigma Healthcare, another one that exited the portfolio. We bought this around the time it was going through the merger with Chemist Warehouse. Unfortunately, we didn't buy enough in hindsight. Chemist Warehouse is an outstanding business. That one, post the acquisition going through, being approved, rocketed into the top 20 holdings. It's now a very large business and outside of our index. We sold that one and moved on.
I guess the last one of note that exited the portfolio is FINEOS. We were in this one from the IPO. Bit of a disappointing investment for us, really, to be honest. It had quite a few of the hallmarks that we liked. It's found a lead software business with global growth, a really good position. I guess the mistake we made with this one, as the time in 2021 when the market was quite hot, was it wasn't creating free cash flow. We held onto it for a number of years, waiting for it to reach an inflection point, but it still hadn't created free cash flow. In the end, we've made a decision to move that one on. Given it does have some of the hallmarks we look for, we'll still keep watching it.
It'll be on our watch list, but it just hasn't created that free cash flow that we'd expect from a software business. In terms of the reduction in ongoing holdings, I think Kieran touched on Pinnacle and Temple & Webster , which were basically share price appreciation and portfolio management. Nanosonics is the same, had a very strong run after announcing its second Chorus product. We still like that business, but just taking the share price strength as an opportunity to trim those. I'll now probably hand back to, oh no, I won't hand back to Kieran. I'll move on to the 20 holdings on page 10. This is a slide we produce every period. It's one of our favorite slides, I think, because we talk about being long-term and letting our businesses compound.
I think this really illustrates that we do what we say, but not too many fund managers that will hold a business in the small and mid-caps for 15 or 20 years continuously. I guess what it does is it allows our winners to really compound and produce results for us. We've talked previously that when we start positions, we tend to keep them relatively small and let them earn their way into our top 20 when we gain trust with management, when we understand the business, etc. It tends to be that we don't get too many changes to this. This period, there isn't too many changes o f the ones that are, I guess, more noticeable because of the shorter time horizon, Region we touched on. The other two I'll just note are Life360 has worked its way into the top 20.
For those that don't know, it's a tracking app. A lot of people might use it on their phone. This is a global business, founder-led, really interesting business, and they've executed outstandingly well, growing that business to nearly 80 million users globally. That's an example of one that's been up quite significantly in the last year and moved from outside our top 20 into the top 20 through share price appreciation. The other one to note is Cobram Estates . We have talked about this business in the past, a really strong brand and olive growth position in Australia and now moving more heavily into overseas markets. That's another one that's had a really strong year, up quite significantly, and has earned its way into our top 20.
In the question time, I'm absolutely happy to take questions on any of the top 20 or any of the holdings in the portfolio, but for now, I'll hand back to Kieran.
Thanks, Stuart. Just on to some final comments on the outlook. I guess it's changed a lot over the last six months. This is not dissimilar to what we were saying six months ago. We had the adventure of Trump and Liberation Day and what that did, you know, to markets. We had a 17% drop from peak to trough very quickly at that point in time in April, from February to April. As we've moved from April through to June, we've actually recovered all of that. We're back now near where the highs were in February. Quite a remarkable period of volatility through that six-month period.
I guess for us, what this slide in the outlook is saying is that we feel fortunate that we're not an externally managed sort of investment trust in this small-cap space that's always subject to inflows and outflows and looking to promote the business and run money and try and perform every quarter. That's a really difficult, challenging role. We think that our structural advantage of being a listed investment company with fixed capital, a good loyal following from a good track record of investing, means that we can step back from a lot of that volatility, a lot of that noise, and just make decisions that make sense on a long-term view. Really, that's just a message in patience. We don't feel like our cash position following the capital raising is burning a hole in our pocket at all. This is not unprecedented.
We've been in this sort of position in Mirrabooka a number of times through the history. If I look back through the history of Mirrabooka, on average, we've had about 6% cash and still delivered returns of around 12% per annum over the 25-year history. I think that what that says to us is, while cash can drag on returns when markets are running, the most important way to deliver returns is to buy good business as well. If we make sure we continue to focus on that, we think in the long run, the returns will look after themselves. I guess we're open for business to buy new things, but we're not going to force it. We're going to be patient, and we're going to wait till we can find really good conviction buying with that capital.
With that, we'll close and hand over to Geoff to queue some questions.
Thanks, Kieran. We've got a few questions here, which is good. Just to remind you, you can ask questions via the webcast. I've got a question here. Assume you're a bull market where we're currently at, without too many qualifiers. Where, in your opinion, is the Australian market developing? I guess in small caps and medium caps is obviously our specialty.
Yeah, I guess the question when you're talking about bull markets, I suppose you've got to separate the two things that drive share prices, the first being the earnings and then the other being the valuation on those earnings. I guess what we've found a little bit challenging when we've had bull markets in recent years, and I'd say we're probably in one right now, is in aggregate across the market, we're not seeing raging economic growth in the large economies around the world that sort of says, you know, we've got a new dynamic coming through in earnings and we all need to chase that in terms of the share prices. A lot of what's been hot in markets has actually been the valuation on stocks.
I guess, you know, picking where that's going to drive going forward, we'd have absolutely no idea in terms of how valuations can re-rate higher from here. We're more observant of where, you know, where the market is and where our opportunity set is to deploy capital. At the moment, we're seeing that the sort of higher growth companies, the ones with the best prospects, are particularly well rated in the market. That's leaving us a bit wary with our long-term lens. It doesn't say anything about where they're going to go in the next 12 months. Often, those buoyant conditions become more buoyant before they don't. These could run further, but it's just hard for us to deploy much capital in that space at the moment.
Thanks, Kieran. A question here about having an estimate of what percent of Mirrabooka portfolio revenue comes from global sources.
Yeah, we just had a look at this earlier, this question coming through. Looking at the top 20 stocks and just doing a quick look through those businesses, it's around 35% of their revenue will come from offshore. It's quite an interesting exercise, actually, because there's about half of those stocks, things like Macquarie Technology , Temple & Webster , EVT, EQT, Hub24, and Netwealth , the Platforms, Region , Cleanaway. They're all purely domestic businesses that are, you know, at a zero in them. Then on the other side, you've got businesses like ResMed, ALS, Breville, Life360, James Hardie, who are majority offshore. There's a lot of difference in that. When you look at across the whole portfolio, they tend to balance out at around a third of the revenues coming from offshore.
Thanks, Kieran. Technology One, you've sort of talked about, but I'll ask the question again. Sorry. Technology One has an annuity-like earnings profile. As a long-term investor, this seems to be something Mirrabooka looks for within its portfolio. Is there any reason why we don't invest in Technology One? Is it simply that currently the valuation issue?
It is the valuation, but you know, I guess going to the question, they're exactly right. If you sort of look at the sort of things we look for when we're looking for investment, there's no doubt Technology One has and does tick a number of those boxes. It's got really good ownership from, I guess, the people that founded and were running the business for a long period of time. Very good sticky recurring revenue, great cash flow, great return on capital. Where we've fumbled this is a feeling that they were a bit constrained in their growth in terms of saying it was an Australian business, local government, you know, there's only so many customers you're going to win. Just wondering, for the valuation, how are they going to be able to grow fast enough to keep delivering share price return with that sort of constrained customer set?
It's fair to say their ability to keep delivering 15% odd profit growth year after year for a very long period of time has been better than we expected. The rating that's gone along with that has kept appreciating. It's made it very hard in recent years for us to join the party in this one.
Again, you've sort of spoken about IDP , but I guess the question is why do we still hold it?
Yeah, look, that's a question we always ask. You've got to retest your thesis when it's fallen as much as it has, absolutely, and we continue to do so. I guess the simple answer to this is because we believe it's still the market leader in its space. We do a lot of our work talking to people in industries in the real world. We like to get away from just hearing what the company's got to say, but particularly just hearing what stock brokers and market commentators have got to say and really get in the industry to find out what's going on. There's a lot of complexity in terms of the way the flows are going, what that looks like in the next six to twelve months. The one consistent bit of feedback we still get is that this is the best operator in its space.
We think when an industry is under as much pressure as it is today, to sell out of the leader of that, we think would be a real risk. We want to really weather this period and see what the other side looks like. Importantly, we haven't lost faith in the people and they've got strength, relative strength on the balance sheet compared to businesses that are under this sort of pressure.
A question here on Macquarie Technology Group. What's your view on Macquarie being able to obtain a development approval on their potential land purchase? There have been previous reports of electricity shortages in Macquarie Park, and the local council appears to be slowing granting further approvals.
Yeah, no, I'll take that one. It's a very insightful question. Someone who knows the space quite well. Just the background for people who don't know, because it's quite a recent announcement that Macquarie purchased a, well, had an option to purchase a further land holding. They didn't disclose where it is. I think a couple of people are trying to speculate whereabouts, potentially in North Sydney. As the question alludes to, the current Sydney West data center that they're building right now took a long time to get through Ryde Council. There has been, at various stages, opposition from councils about the best use for some of this land. It's quite significant. We do have a bit of a housing shortage. Data centers do draw a lot of power. They are relatively contentious. I think Ryde Council in Macquarie Park has been one of the most conservative.
It is quite an interesting question. It's something we're thinking about. I'm not sure where the land purchase is exactly, which council it will sit on. I think it is one of the key issues that the company will have to negotiate. We have a lot of faith that they've been in the market for a long period of time looking for land. They're big holders in terms of the management owning a lot of the shares. They make very deliberate long-term decisions. I'm hoping that they've purchased a piece of land where development shouldn't be as hard as potentially the last one has been with Ryde Council. It remains to be seen. It is absolutely a fantastic question because that'll be what we'll be talking about with management next time we see them.
Thanks, Stuart. Question circling back to Sigma . How come we were exiting that? Does it still have a growth story going forward?
Yeah, so I guess transparently here, it all happened so quickly with the Chemist Warehouse merger. I guess we're thankful that we did participate in that before it was all de-risked and the share price ran as hard as it did. On the other side of that, we had a position that had effectively doubled in value very quickly. It still wasn't a very large position in the portfolio, yet it's a large company now that it's merged. This valuation is still well out of our investment universe. We had a sort of a modest position rather than a full position. We just looked at it and felt we can't really justify adding to it given the company size and I guess the valuation here. Is it going to contribute much running with a modest position in a stock that's not in the portfolio?
That was really, really portfolio management reasons to sort of move that one on and take the gain.
Thanks, Kieran. Question here about Car Group. Are you familiar with the current CFO of Car Group? Any thoughts on his potential to take over from Cameron McIntyre i n the next few weeks?
It's a very current question. Some of the announcements this morning. Yeah, so look, we definitely are. Willie is the CFO. He's been at car sales for a number of years. Actually, interestingly, Mark and I were just remarking about this earlier before this meeting that similar to when Cameron McIntyre was appointed, it's the CFO taking over as the CEO. You just have that moment where you sort of have to recalibrate thinking about someone, you know, not as the CFO anymore, but now the CEO. The jury's out on that because sometimes that transition isn't well made by some people. If I have any doubt with Will, it's pretty much the same doubt we had with Ken. I just hadn't seen him as a CEO. It's fair to say he's been absolutely fantastic. You sort of go to, why has he been fantastic?
I think the business has got a really good culture. People have good tenure there. It's particularly well run. A lot of stability with the board. There's a lot of things in place that we think, you know, when you have an orderly transition from someone who's an internal successor, we think it's a good starting point to have some good confidence. Time will tell how we'll get done.
Thanks, Kieran. Question here about Gentrack. Basically, talking about being an interesting position, having a bit of a transition here. Our thoughts on Gentrack.
Yeah, no, thanks for that. Once again, another really insightful comment. I guess Gentrack, you know, we purchased it really well. It had an incredible couple of years there, rocketing from sort of $1.70 up into the tens and elevens. I guess we characterize it internally. We have the same discussion about this business because it was a sort of a turnaround story. Now it's evolved into a pretty robust business in terms of the size of its revenue position. Now it's got a net cash balance sheet of $70 million. Really turned itself around, but we're trying to understand what this business looks like now that it's much bigger. In terms of growing from where it was as a micro cap, it's a lot easier than where it is now.
I guess whilst it's continuing to execute really well, it's just a function, I think, of this business ran so quickly that it probably needs to have one or two years to consolidate. I guess show the market it can continue to grow by winning new clients would be, I guess, my characterization.
Thanks, Stuart. Question on the IPD Group. After experiencing 12 months of exploiting the commercial construction sector, do you expect any further acquisitions?
Yeah, so IPD Group, just to inform everyone, this is a position we put in the portfolio a couple of years ago at IPO. What they do is they're a distributor of electrical equipment into the Australian market. A lot of the large sort of industrial electrical equipment manufacturers don't really have the reason to be on the ground in Australia. It's not a large enough market, so they rely on distributors, and IPD do a really good job of that. It has had a bumpier year, but really that's just the ebbs and flows of being in an industry like this. You know, where they're reflected in commercial buildings, that market's been pretty dormant. We're not at all alarmed by that.
The stock had run particularly hard because they've had a good run in their earnings, and the rating that got on the radar and the rating went with that, it's fallen away. We've actually bought a bit of stock recently on having a share. We just think that's the usual volatility in the business. Yes, they will be acquiring businesses, but I don't think it'll be sort of thesis changing or large or dramatic. It's just adding on functionality and product set that they think can add to their growth profile.
Thanks, Kieran. I've got a series of questions from the same person. These are probably stocks that are not necessarily in our universe, but I'll stand corrected. I've got questions on thoughts on essential infrastructure service providers such as Janus Plus and Vysarn. I think it's cool. Perhaps you answer that one first, yeah.
Yeah, look, looking ahead, I can see the other question, Perenti and Duratec.
Yes, I'm not sure.
Yeah, so look, I guess stepping back to what we do at Mirrabooka Investments, we're trying to hold businesses that we think have the ability to sort of get into that top 20, like Stuart described earlier, things we can hold for ideally 10 plus years, make their job a lot easier if we find the right ones. When you're looking at the market like that, you're really looking for things that have got sustainable competitive advantage, something they do that others would like to imitate but would find hard for some sort of reason. When you're talking about service providers, we just think that's harder, much harder to define. You've got businesses that are, I guess, contracting to win work. There's terms in those contracts.
There are periods of times where these businesses could do really well if they're in a good sector that's doing well, but to own them for the long term, expect they're in their own right going to give you a return over and above the market and not give you a lot of heartache in down cycles through that. We find it hard with these service providers. These aren't businesses that we spend a lot of time on, but that's not to say they're not going to do well in the short to medium term for other people.
Thanks, Kieran. Back to an area that's probably more familiar to us. Hub24, Netwealth , and Life360, I should say, have had a great run with recent performance and good performance in the share price. It appears these positions have largely grown. With the recent capital raising, do you see value in increasing these position sizes?
It's interesting because I look at these positions and I suppose it's stepping back to the capital raising. We had a fair bit of cash at the last result coming into this calendar year, reasonably cautious at that time, but then you saw the market sell off aggressively. That got us on the front foot to say, let's raise some capital. Let's, I guess, do what I described earlier. We had the structural reasons in place. Let's pull the trigger and do it now. Knowing that we were doing that meant that when all the sort of craziness happened in April with all the announcements from Trump and stocks selling off, we actually added to Hub24, Netwealth , Life360 in that month, and we actually deployed all our cash and went into a modest debt position. We've raised the capital since.
We've got a lot of that capital still intact, but knowing we're doing that gave us the chance to participate in the market. You look at, you know, Hub's nearly doubled since then. Netwealth has nearly doubled since then. I think Life360 has doubled since then. To the question, would we be looking to put some of the capital raising funds into those positions now? No, no. We did in April, but not at these valuations. That shows you just how dramatic this recovery has been in the market in a very short space of time.
Thanks, Kieran. Question here on Ordinate h as the thesis changed over the last 12 months? It's a highly cyclical business, obviously.
Yeah, no, once again, a good question. I guess Ordinate. I think probably the thesis has changed a little bit. This was a business that became, I guess, somewhat of a market darling, for want of a better term. It produced post-COVID sort of 20% to 50% volume growth in each of those three years. We got a little bit of a shock when they had a pretty significant downgrade. I think it was a reflection for us in the broader market that whilst this business is attempting to turn into a bit more of a software business, it still sells a lot of physical chips, cards, and modules. It sells them to a lot of OEMs, which then place them in different audio visual equipment. There is a lot of inventory that sits in the system at any given stage, and that's pretty opaque.
What we saw was a reasonably significant stocking and then a destocking event. I think there was a bit of a reflection that probably this business didn't deserve the really high software multiples that it was attracting at the time. With that said, we sold quite a little bit, quite a lot of it, sorry, throughout that period in the teens and the 20s. We do think it is a really good business, though, despite not being full annuity like a software business. I think, yes, the thesis has changed, but we still think it's a really high-quality company. It's a dominant player in its space, and we have retained a holding for that reason.
Next year. Question here again on HMC Capital. Kieran?
Yeah, whether we think it's attractive at the moment. HMC, I guess they're trying to build a fund management business off the back of some really good earlier deals they did. Life, I guess, recovering the Masters sites, which is the original HomeCo consortium property deal. That was very clever. They were the engineers that sort of pulled together the Sigma Chemist Warehouse deal. That was some really canny deployment of capital that created a lot of value. I guess they tried to build a fund management empire around that. The challenge I think they have now is the key asset you had in one of those businesses is the confidence of the capital providers. Some of the deals they've done recently have shaken that confidence. They've had a few deals that haven't gone well.
It leaves the business, I think, as an investment case, it's fairly binary here because if they can't recover that confidence, you can't really grow without having the capital coming into the business to fuel your growth. If they can recover that confidence, then you could look back on a period like today and say that was a really good opportunity to buy it when it was out of favor. We'll keep an eye on it. We haven't really seen enough in terms of sustainable competitive advantage to say this is something that we need to promote above other things in terms of our focus and really have a go at it at the moment.
Thanks, Kieran. Question more broadly about the market. What are the specific signs you would be looking for to justify taking funds off the table, derisking dozens of the whole market and a range of other assets, property, crypto, coal, etc., if it were very hot to you?
Yeah, so I've been doing this a long time and, you know, I'm sure Mark could answer this question quite similarly. We think predicting markets will more often be wrong than right. If you're trying to deliver really attractive long-term returns, you're much more likely to impact that negatively than positively by trying to call markets. There's a lot of people trying to do it. It's challenging to do it. At the same time, we are very focused on observing what we're seeing in markets. It's observation rather than predicting, and just using that to influence the way we deploy capital to make sure that we're buying good businesses when there's good value on the table. In the question, things like crypto, gold, some of the crazy transactions that are going on overseas with crypto and the way that businesses that are buying crypto coins are now being valued.
You don't have to look very far at all to see lots of signs of speculation, sort of divorced from fundamentals and just things running pretty crazily in a lot of sectors. That does add to our awareness as an observation. Would that mean that we're going to go and, I guess, sell a hole in our stocks and go further into cash? No. We think it's best to pretty much let the businesses that we've chosen to be in the portfolio run through the cycle and they will deliver our return. We then add to those returns by, I guess, trimming them when they get extreme and adding when they're sold off. We're in the fortunate position now where we've got good capital in terms of cash ready to deploy.
This sort of observation is much more about us being patient with the cash we've just raised rather than trying to call the market and sell further and go further into cash.
Thanks, Kieran. Back to Ramsay Health Care. Was there a specific trigger to add Ramsay to the portfolio recently? It has been trading well below $40 for over six months now, and arguably the same headwinds remain today. You mentioned seeing latent value in Ramsay assets, Australian assets. Do you expect the company to find a way to invest its overseas assets? Do you expect Ramsay Health Care to have a success bidding for specific healthcare assets, I should say?
Yeah, so look, the answer to this is our investment case today has really been just the observation that you've got a really good quality portfolio of Australian assets that are under cyclical pressure. You've got a competitor like Healthscope falling over and the system can't thrive without private health operators being able to earn a sufficient return. That's really been the core of the thesis so far and that's been the case for a while. That's been enough to take a modest starting position, as Stuart described. Some of the triggers that the market's all looking for in terms of the question, you know, things like earnings turning, what are they going to do with the Healthscope? Are they going to sell some of these offshore assets? They're all the same questions we're asking.
We don't feel we've got particular insight and that's been the trigger to put it in the portfolio. It's just observing the situation at the moment, saying there's enough there to have a modest position. We hope some value can be realized along the lines of the questions we go forward.
Thanks, Kieran. There's no more questions here, so I'm happy to hand back to Mark to close the meeting.
Okay, thank you everyone for listening in to this webinar, the results. Obviously, the next touchpoint in terms of getting some feedback will be the AGM in October. Obviously, we'll get another chance to hear from the team at that presentation. After that, we'll be in January with the half-year results. I really appreciate the questions too. It's a very important part of our process that everyone gets a chance to ask questions. We look forward to seeing you at the next presentation.
That's some good to do conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.