Right, good morning, fellow shareholders. My name is Chris Meyer. I am a Director of PL8 . It is my pleasure to welcome you this morning to the company's full-year results presentation. I was flicking through the slides we put on the ASX this morning, and it just strikes me how amazingly dependable and consistent PL8 is. I had a serious case of déjà vu looking through the slide presentation. I wasn't even sure we had the right period under review because it seemed very similar to the last time we spoke. That's a good thing. Sometimes boring in investing is exactly what investors want, and hopefully all of you listening in today appreciate the consistency that is PL8 . I'm joined today by fellow Director, Dr. Don Hamson.
He's a well-known figure to many of you, and he's been called many things, but given my intro, maybe today I'll even call him Dr. Dependable. The consistency of performance of PL8 is quite encouraging. The usual story today, we'll go through a company update, which is really the results and the dividend and the profits and so on of the company. Then we'll go through the market as Don sees it at the moment. Often the most interesting part is the questions at the end. We will certainly take questions from all of you, and we'll endeavor to get through them at the end. You will see a live Q&A box at the bottom, so just type your questions in there, and we'll get onto it at the end. Don, I think you're going to do both the company and the market update.
With that introduction, I will hand over to you.
Thanks, Chris, and good morning, fellow shareholders. Not raining in Sydney, which is a good thing. Flipped over the all-important disclaimer, and now onto the results themselves. It was a good year in 2025 despite a lot of volatility. Profits for the company in terms of investment returns in dollar terms was AUD 83.6 million, which was about AUD 17 million ahead of FY 2024. That's a good result. Total return for the underlying portfolio after fees was 15.5%, which is pretty healthy. That includes franking credits, but it's after fees, and it beat the benchmark by 0.4%. Remember that, while it is a Plato Income Maximiser, it does actually have dual objectives to outperform the market and to provide more income along the way. It did both of those in FY 2025 and has satisfied both those objectives since inception. It paid AUD 0.066 monthly dividends.
In terms of the NTA of the company, we started at [AUD 1.082] per share, and the portfolio performance added [AUD 0.138]. The costs of running the company, which is ASX fees, fees to the administrator or atomic, and directors fees, etc., was just AUD 0.001. It's actually a very cost-effective company. The management fees, sorry, and the dividends paid was AUD 0.066. That's the, which leaves on the waterfall chart ending pre-tax NTA of AUD 1.153. We went up over AUD 0.07 for the year, which is healthy even after paying out AUD 0.066 in dividends. I think that's a pretty strong result for shareholders.
I think it's worth mentioning, while you clear your throat there, that the NTA as of yesterday is AUD 1.19. The markets and the portfolios continue to rise since the end of the financial year.
Yes, yeah, that we've still seen new all-time highs on the Australian market early in this financial year. If we look at the return for the year, I mentioned it's 15.5%. That included 7.5% distributed income, compared to the benchmark's 15.1%. Excess total return, as I mentioned before, is 0.4% for the year, and excess income is 3% higher than if you were just in an index fund. Of that income, we'll include franking in that income. We actually, 1.2% of that excess was actually excess franking relative to the market. You can see from an inception point of view, our return has been 10.3%, a little bit ahead of the market at 10.2%, and our income generated has been 7.6%.
One of the things probably holding back the income level in the last 12 months has been the share price of PL8, which has been trading quite strongly and continues to trade quite strongly. Overall, it was a pretty good period for performance. What I would actually say was a relatively tough year for most income investors because it was led more by growth stocks than income stocks. You might say one of the best performers for the year was CBA . CBA now actually has a yield of less than the market. It is no longer a high-yielding bank. It's a low-yielding bank. The market was actually led by low-yielding stocks, not high-yielding stocks. Just graphically, if you look at our income versus the market over the last 12 months, we've added up there in franking and cash, and you can see it's substantially higher than the market.
One of the challenges at the moment is, as Chris has mentioned or I mentioned before, we're at an all-time high, is that share prices are high. They're factoring in a lot of good news and lower interest rates, et cetera. Actual dollar value of dividends paid by Australian companies has fallen over the last couple of years. The yield on the market is actually pretty much an all-time low in modern history. It's at, or in the franking credit era, being 4.5% if I look at a growth basis and a cash yield of only 3.4%. That's one of the challenges, is that yields are lower. One of the reasons I think yields are lower is because we have seen the interest rate cycle turn. We've now seen three interest rate cuts by the RBA . We're expecting one more interest rate cut this year.
Share markets always look ahead. They are valuing companies based on those lower interest rates, based on the fact they think that company performance will be better in the future. The actual current yields in the market are quite low relative to history, apart from that COVID year when a lot of companies cut their dividends. If we take that out of the equation, that 4.5% gross yield is the lowest I've seen in my career running equities. Moving on, if you look at the longer-term performance, I would say this performance here is the performance of the investments of the company, but the company itself invests into the Plato Australian Shares Income Fund into a zero-fee unit class of that. This is the longer-term performance of the Plato Australian Shares Income Fund, which dates right back to September 2011. We are almost approaching 14 years.
You can see on this chart, the top two lines are the performance of that Australian Shares Income Fund after fees, in blue, compared to the market, in gray. You can see slowly but surely we have outperformed the market over that time. We are quite index-like, so we do actually hold a portfolio which is fairly similar to the index, and we've slowly but surely outperformed that index. Both those lines, I would say, include franking credits. So it's franking credits included in the fund's returns as well as franking credits included within the index of the S&P/ASX 200 Index. You can see we've outperformed over time, and that has continued since the launch of PL8 in 2017. We have also delivered more income. The bottom two lines are the cumulative value of income distributed.
Again, the blue line is from the Plato Fund, and the gray line is the market. We have always generated more income than the market over time and have continued to do so in the last 12 months. It is boring from the fashion that we just keep putting out that excess income. If you look at the time series for PL8, we listed in May. We paid our first dividend in October because we had to generate some income before we could pay it out. Since then, we have a continuous history of paying monthly dividends. We did reduce those dividends in the pandemic when a lot of companies cut their dividends massively by the market. At the market level, about a 35% decline in income in 2020, calendar 2020. Then we have increased dividends as things improved in 2021.
We have paid AUD 0.066 a share for the last couple of years. This chart doesn't include a couple of special dividends that we have paid along the way that shareholders have benefited from as well. Of course, all these dividends have been fully franked. Lastly, looking at how the company has traded relative to the value of its underlying assets, a bit of a squidgy line here, but the dark blue line is the share price of PL8, and it's recently sort of approached around AUD 1.40. It's been trading more recently up to around a 20% premium to the underlying assets, which are the gray line, and the light blue line is the premium. For quite a bit of last year, probably the first half of last year, we were trading at a 10% premium to NTA.
In this calendar year, that premium has blown out to around 20%, 15%-2 0%. I'm not sure exactly why that is the case. I think one of the reasons might be that interest rates are falling. You'll see that if you've got money in cash or money in term deposits, the term deposit rates have been falling. We've seen three cuts from the RBA , 75 basis points. We expect another 25 later in the year. Whereas the dividends paid by PL8 have not reduced. I think that's one of the reasons why the share price has been so well bid of late. The other issue is that, you know, and I'll probably get asked this question, but even though we are trading at a strong premium, because of capacity issues and other things, we're unlikely, or we won't really contemplate doing another issue of shares.
We want to make sure that we don't get too big for our boots and not satisfy our objectives. We want to continue to deliver higher income than the market and outperform. The problem with fund managers is sometimes they get too greedy. They get too big for their own boots, and it becomes harder as you run more money. I think we're very satisfied with the size of PL8, and we want to continue to deliver higher income than the market and outperform. I'm now going to turn to the market update. Before I do, I'll just remind a lot of shareholders that our target client, and it's not saying that everyone is retired, but generally our target client base are retirees who want to receive regular income from their investments and live off those investments.
I think the good news for retirees is that the government hasn't changed things of late. At the moment, it is indexed with inflation, but the first AUD 2 million of your, when you're in pension phase super, your current transfer balance cap as of 1st of July this year is AUD 2 million. If you've retired this year, you can transfer up to AUD 2 million if you have AUD 2 million in your superannuation into your superannuation in your pension account, and it's tax-free, and you get a full refund of franking. I think that's why a lot of retirees love fully franked dividends, and they love regular income, and there's nothing more regular than paying monthly fully franked dividends.
I suppose our philosophy generally is if we can deliver enough income for you, for your shareholders to live off, they don't have to start selling shares or selling assets to fund their retirement, and that reduces longevity risk. I've just highlighted on this chart, you know, a fully franked dividend might be, you might receive a AUD 1 cash dividend from a BHP or a, you know, Westpac or whatever it might be, but if it's fully franked, it's actually worth over AUD 1.40. I think that's why, when you get the franking credit refund from the government, I think that's why pensioners, retirees love franking credits, and were very, very upset when the ALP were looking to get rid of franking credits two elections ago. I think the good news is that they're not really talking about reducing the value of franking credits.
Potentially, it looks like they're going to tax super at 30% for balances over AUD 3 million, but they're not looking to get rid of franking credits at the moment, and we hope they won't. I'm going to update not on last year because last year's happened, but more on, I suppose, the results seasons of last year of other companies. We've gone through our own results, but we've just, today is the last day of the August reporting season. We compiled some numbers very quickly yesterday based on information up to yesterday. Companies reporting yesterday of the companies that we follow. Of those companies, about AUD 34 billion in dividends were declared. The good news, I suppose, from the chart there is that the average dividend increase of the companies we follow is 26% positive. That looks like a pretty good number that they, you know, that dividends increased by 26%.
I would say the problem with an average is that something like a Beach Energy, which increased dividends by 200%, or Evolution, a gold miner, and gold miners have benefited from strong gold prices. Evolution increased dividends by 160%. They tend to skew that number, and that pulls the average up. They're small companies, so it sort of is a bit misleading, I think, in terms of a typical company, which is why we have in light blue on the chart the median dividend increase. If you ranked all companies from best to worst, and you took the one in the middle, the median company, the one right in the middle, the more typical company, actually increased dividends by over 5%, which is more than inflation. We think that's not a bad result.
If you're a glass half empty person, you might focus on the last grey little bar, which is actually small and negative. It's - 2%. That's the dollar value of dividends did actually fall again, and this has been quite common for the last couple of years, as the dollar value of dividends has been going down, even though the typical or average company has been increasing dividends. The reason for that is if you look at the companies that have cut their dividends, such as Fortescue , BHP, Rio , Woodside, they're big companies and very big companies in the case of BHP, and they're a large part of our index. When BHP reduces dividends by 16%, Fortescue by 33%, and Rio Tinto 15%, all basically due to lower iron ore prices, that's going to reduce the dollar value of dividends.
The typical company is actually doing okay. I think the results season is not bad. It's been quite volatile, but typically most companies have increased their, you know, 64% of companies have increased their dividends, so more increasing than decreasing. Those that are decreasing are largely due to some extent factors outside their control because BHP or, and Woodside, they can't control commodity prices. They can't control the price of iron ore, and they can't control the price of oil and gas. Those have been falling for the last couple of years. We move on quickly to just a few, and I won't go through these in detail, and there's probably much more information on these charts than ever. Commonwealth Bank was actually a pretty good result, but the reality is it increased earnings.
Cash impact was over AUD 10 billion, which is a lot of money, but it was only up 4% from last year. It's growing, but it's not growing all that well. With Commonwealth Bank trading on a PE of something like 27 or 28, it's hardly a strong growth stock, and it does look a bit overvalued to us. It increased its payout ratio. Its payout ratio is now close to 80%. The good news is, it actually has plenty of franking credits, so it was able to increase its final dividend in line with its earnings. Other than that, pretty good results, well-run bank, good management, very low bad debts. Bad debts actually fell again. Their bad debts were only seven basis points. It's well capitalized. It has the ability to return capital. It's been buying back some of its shares as well as increasing dividends.
It's a good, well-run bank, but I think it does look a bit on the expensive side. We still rotate in and out of it, but we've been a little bit underweight over the last 12 months. Luckily, we've been able to pick other stocks at about four. I think one of the interesting charts, which we've shown for a number of years now, is the Commonwealth Bank's sort of spending data. They are the biggest bank in Australia. They have the largest credit card and debit card book, and they're able to cut up spending. This is data analysis and sort of using a little bit of AI, but they can work out what you're spending money on.
That spending data highlights that the good news there is that across the board, people are spending more on discretionary items, discretionary items like going out and eating out, going on holidays, buying TVs, those sorts of things, which you don't necessarily need. Across all age groups in the April to June period of this year, which is after the first interest rate cut, we saw increased spending on discretionary items by younger people as well as older people. For the last couple of years, older people have been spending more, people over 55 years old, but younger people have been doing it a bit tough. They felt the real blowtorch of rising rents and rising interest rates. They had been, in some cases, younger people actually been spending less on discretionary items than they had been in the previous year.
You can see that that's actually turned around in April to June of this year. Those interest rate cuts are probably already biting. We've had another one since these results are out. I think that augurs well for a lot of the domestic-orientated stocks within Australia, particularly some of the retailers. Highlighting that was JB Hi-Fi, which we thought was a very good result. The market initial reaction was negative, but it did bounce back. Earnings are up 5%. It's supposed to be, you know, problems with discretionary items, discretionary spending, but they increased their earnings. They paid AUD 1.05 as final dividend. On top of that, which we love, is a AUD 1 special dividend fully franked. We like that. Their sales have continued to be strong in the first, so in July, they released their July sales numbers.
Harvey Norman's actually, it's a similar sort of company, has announced its results this morning. Their actual early July sales are actually up 9.9%, so even better than JB Hi-Fi. That's indicating that the discretionary spending seems to be continuing to increase even in this financial year, which augurs well for the next one. I suppose the only negative for JB Hi-Fi was the CEO resigned or retired, I should say, but that was expected, largely expected. Telstra was a pretty good result, increased its dividends a little bit. You know, its mobile business is doing very well. Good free cash flow. I think it's a reasonable result. Nothing stellar, but not bad. It's one of the stocks that we've liked for the last while and paying a good solid dividend. If we move on to the insurers, we've liked the insurers for a number of years.
They've had the tailwinds up until recently of higher interest rates and a little better periods for claims. Suncorp has actually finalized its sale of its bank. If you adjust for that, it actually was not a bad cash earnings and dividends were pretty strong. I think that was a pretty good result. QBE, we think was a good result. Unfortunately, they did announce a little bit of a disappointing sort of outlook in terms of, you know, their gross written premiums, which is sort of their revenue, was not going to grow as fast as the market thought. They were sold off heavily on the day. If you actually look at the results for 2025, or the first half of 2025 because they're a December-end company, actually, to our view, was very strong. We still think they're not bad and paying okay dividends.
Of course, there's always a few, I think, laggards. We actually, and we've got one here, which was, you know, slightly disappointing, I suppose, which is BHP. It was all to do with the iron ore prices going down. Stand out, actually, copper was a strong result within BHP, but they still make most of their profits from iron ore. They're spending on Jansen, so their payout ratio was pretty low. It was an okay result from BHP. We expected a cut in dividends, but it's just highlighting that Australia is very, Australia is very resource-focused. Some of the real laggards that we weren't in that had cut their dividends, you know, Accent and Whitehaven had very big cuts, not as bad from Horizon, but for something like its business, you don't expect any cuts in dividends, but it cut it by 11%.
These are a few of the stocks that we avoided because we expected them to have high likelihood of cutting their dividends. Another one which we probably should have mentioned was Domino's Pizza, which had quite a large cut at its dividends and also one that we're not in, and a bit of a shocking result this week. Everybody's also, you know, I suppose at the end of the day, it's looking forward rather than back. I just want to conclude on this slide, which is if we, you know, part of our process, we do actively trade stocks and we go and buy them for a few months to get their dividends. Part of the protection to avoid the Horizons and the Domino's Pizzas of the world is we do actually forecast the likelihood a stock will cut its dividend. It comes up with a probability.
A high probability is bad. If a stock has a very high probability of cutting its dividends, you probably don't want to be there. On this chart, high is bad, low is good. Here, rather than looking, you know, it's all done, all this probability of dividend cuts done at the individual stock level, but on this chart, we aggregate up all the individual stock probabilities for cuts to form a market-wide picture of the dividend outlook. The latest read on that is basically about average. There's a straight line there, is the long-term average, about 20%, 22% of companies cut their dividends each year in Australia. That's a pretty high number because we are very cyclical, like resource stocks are quite cyclical and depend on commodity prices. In a typical year, you see about 22%. The last number on that there is about 23%. It's basically about average.
We think the outlook for dividends is okay. It's about average, and, you know, we're cautiously optimistic. We think interest rate cuts here should be good for the Australian economy. Tariffs have led to a lot of volatility earlier in the year, but the reality is they don't have great impacts on Australia. We're, you know, fairly optimistic that dividends will start to increase over the next 12 months. From a positive point of view, iron ore prices seem to have stabilized around AUD 100 a ton. Hopefully, we won't see that fall too much more. We're cautiously optimistic about the outlook for dividends, but I've probably said enough, and I'll now hand over to Chris to see if there are any questions from the audience.
Great. Thanks. Thanks, Dr. Dependable . It's always good to get an update from you. It's also great to see there's 95 of us online. It's wonderful on a Friday to see such engagement from the shareholder base of PL8. As I've said, now it's question time. We're going to move to your questions. If you do have one, please type it into the Q&A box. Ian asks the first question, and maybe Don, I can take that one to give you a bit of a break. He asks if the full-year dividend statements for PL8 are available for shareholders, and if so, he's going to terminate his monthly paper statements. The answer, in fact, I spoke with Todd Kirby, who's the CFO of the company yesterday, and he says today, I think, is the day those annual dividend statements should be available through Automic, the registry.
That should provide you with enough information to prepare your tax returns. Obviously, it would be great if shareholders use those annual tax statements rather than get paper monthly statements, both for the environment but also for the cost of the company. It does cost us to send out those monthly statements. If you don't need them, and you can rely on the annual one, then obviously all the better. Ash, then Don, I don't know if you want to take this one or I'm happy to. He asks about the profit reserve to retain the level of dividend payments. Do you want to answer that, Don, or?
Yeah, we're both directors of the company, so we could probably both put an answer on that. Yes, we do maintain a profit reserve, and we have quite a healthy profit reserve if you look at our financial statements. Probably the one more binding factor on the ability to pay dividends is our franking credits because we receive franking credits from some of the dividends that we receive from other companies, although some of those dividends are not fully franked and some may actually be unfranked. The franking credit is probably more binding, and we do have a franking account balance with a few months there. Remember, the company is always receiving dividends over time. This is something that the directors have to consider, how does that look relative to what we're seeing in the marketplace. Our aim is to try and maintain a constant level of dividends.
In the past, when we saw, during COVID, we had a very strong view that there would be a big decline in market dividends, which did actually eventuate, our directors took the conservative approach to reduce dividends. This is something that we look at. We want to try and maintain stable dividends. I think people always like to be able to know what they're going to get each month. The aim is to try and have stable dividends. We have to look at what we're getting. I mentioned before the one challenge in the Australian market today is that the dividend yield on the market is lower than it has been throughout history. The dollar value of dividends is lower, and that's one of the reasons why the yield is low. It is a case of share prices being lower.
It's something that our directors look at every time we meet. I don't know whether you want to add any more, Chris, to that.
No, I think it's probably quite a good segue, Don, into, you know, if franking is the sort of binding constraint to some extent on the company's ability to pay a higher dividend, you know, how can you generate additional franking? I think there was a question around, you know, like paywall, maybe dividends and franking is our dividend payout ratios at companies. Is there wiggle room there to increase them, or does it really require the economy to sort of get better and therefore earnings to get better in order for the dividend across the market to improve?
Yeah.
Which of those two, Don, would you say is, you know, is the economic growth what you're thinking is going to drive dividends, or is the increase in payout ratio something companies can pull in, you know, as a lever without economic growth kicking in?
I think you've got to take that on a company-by-company basis. For instance, Commonwealth Bank is now pretty much at the top end of its payout ratio, so it probably doesn't have any ability to increase its dividend payout ratio. On the other hand, BHP and some of the miners are actually up towards the bottom end of their payout ratio, and so they do have the ability to increase their dividends. However, BHP has committed quite a bit of capital investment over the next couple of years, so it's unlikely, I think, in the short term to increase the dividend payout ratio. The reality is, you know, over time you would hope that earnings grow. They have over the last 45 and, you know, or since history.
Over the long term, earnings have increased at the market level, and if you look at a long-term trend, I think we're still on that increasing earnings. It's just we had a soup. If you look at the history, there were fantastic dividend increases in 2021 and 2022. After that big fall in 2020, the dividends bounced back almost entirely in 2021, and in 2022, we saw super profits from the resources companies with iron ore prices at high levels and oil prices at high levels. We're probably above trend in 2022. We've had a couple of years pushing us back towards probably that trend line, and now we're probably at or slightly below that long-term trend. My hope is that earnings will increase, and I think interest rate cuts in Australia should help out because GDP growth has been very, very weak in Australia.
We've avoided a recession, but we're nudging along at very low growth rates. In fact, some economists would argue on a GDP adjusted for population, like per head, we're actually going backwards. Hopefully, we'll see earnings increases are probably more likely to pull us out than payout ratios increasing. The problem, of course, is that our resources sector is beholden to commodity prices, and that's not something that any of us have a good crystal ball or any control over.
Got it. Don, Sally asks, why is there a difference in the NTA between PL8 and the managed fund? I mean, I could probably answer that. I mean, PL8 is a fund of funds. PL8 owns units in the underlying fund, so there will be a very tight correlation between the NTA of PL8 and the underlying fund. The value of PL8 was set at IPO at a different price to the price of the fund, so the sort of starting point is different between the two, which is why the unit prices or the NTA of both won't be the same, but there will obviously be a very tight correlation between the two. Essentially, you're owning the same thing by owning PL8. Peter asks, choosing between PL8 and WAM's copycat PL8 WMX, what's the argument in favor of PL8 or WAM? He also asks, Betashares as a copycat fund.
Maybe, Don, I'll take, I'll have a first crack at that. You can always chip in there. I think the WAM one has bonds in it, so it's very different to start with. That could probably be the main reason why I think PL8 is more pure. If you are looking for equity market exposure and income, PL8 gives you that. The WAM one does not. On Betashares, I haven't actually looked closely at that one. I think it's the more recent listing that you're talking about. Remember, most of the Betashares product is sort of on autopilot. It's something called smart beta or factor-based investing. PL8 is actively managed by the Plato team.
I think, as Don would probably attest to and has attested to with their track record, it's much more difficult in dividend land to create that smooth distribution and the performance ahead of the market if you're on autopilot than it is if you have a team looking for opportunities and consistently moving in and out of dividend positions. Don, I don't know if you have anything to add there.
No, I think you've covered it pretty well. I don't really, I haven't also studied what the Betashares fund is, but I think you pointed out that the WAM strategy is, I think, 40% bonds and cash type holdings. It's quite, it's a different animal. It's not 100% equity exposure. I think one of the reasons they launched that was to take some of the money from hybrid. It's probably targeting a little bit more like a hybrid, which is more a fixed income type product but with franking.
Don, do you want to have a go at Lawrence's question here? PL8 trades at such a big premium, much higher than other LICs. Is it not more conservative to invest in the unlisted fund if there is a market correction?
I'm not allowed to give financial advice, so I can't really comment on whether it's more conservative or not. What I would say, and Chris has already said it, PL8 invests into the managed fund. You're going to get the same investments whether you go in PL8 or the fund. You're correct in that there's a big premium between the value of the underlying assets or the NTA. PL8's trading at a price that's much higher than that. If you're a value investor and you're going to get the same thing, but you can get it cheaper in another vehicle, then that's definitely the case. I don't exactly know why it's trading at such a big premium.
My hypothesis, which I've already mentioned in the presentation, was that I believe the expectation of lower interest rates has meant that people are going to get less on their term deposits and their cash at bank. I look at the income from PL8. It's substantially higher. I think there's some switching. We haven't increased the supply of PL8, so we're not doing an issue. There's more buyers than sellers. The price goes up. That's my speculation as to why it's doing it. I think some of those other LICs are also trading pretty, you know, I think the WAM LICs trading at a premium as well.
Yeah, Don, I would just add, you know, there's quite a lot of bank hybrid money that's out there that's maturing and rolling off. Many of you probably know the bank hybrid market is no longer going to issue new securities. That money that's investing in bank hybrids is looking for fully franked income, and PL8 is one of the few that pays monthly fully franked income. Maybe, Don, the last question here, actually we've got a couple more, is from Ash. LICs on our reporting, some LICs are reporting their franking reserve and their profit reserve as a multiplier of the current dividend. Is this something PL8 might consider? It's a good question, Ash. Actually, for everyone on the line, we do actually do that.
If you look at the quarterly dividend announcements of PL8, where we announce the next three months' worth of dividends, you'll actually see we do in that announcement state what the current level of franking is. I'll just go to that now. As at the end of June, when we did our last dividend announcement, we said that the franking account balance was AUD 9 million, which was equivalent to a fully franked dividend of AUD 0.028 per share at the current tax rate. If you just look at those quarterly dividend announcements, you will see that detail. Then Lynn, I'm not sure if this is directed at me or you, Don, but it says, can you please promise me that Don will never retire? Dr. Dependable must not retire.
I don't think I'll work forever, but even Warren Buffett retired. Into his 90s, I'm not sure I'm going to be working till I'm in my 90s. I would say that what we do, our income strategies are targeted for retirees. I do read a lot about retirement. One of the things I've read in the last 12 months was 10 points to know about retiring. Point number 10 was don't retire. I like what I do, and you've got to keep yourself active. There's only so much golf you can play or what have you, and I'm not a great golfer anyway. I do like what I do, so I have no intentions of retiring anytime soon. Sometimes you find that there is a time when you've got to hang up the boots. I'm not planning anything in the short to medium term.
I have the luxury of sitting next to the Plato business at Pinnacle. You know, it's not just Don. Don, I don't know if you, you know, Pete Gardner, I think many of you have met. Don's been building his team. Don, I don't know if you want to do a quick business update or.
Yeah. I mean, I know I'm probably the face, the income face of Plato. I do a lot of traveling, a lot of discussion, you know, talking and marketing to clients. Pete Gardner is, you know, and myself run that fund. We created the fund, 14 years ago. Pete was a co-founder of Plato. He's got a PhD just like me. You're in excellent hands if I was to retire or fall under a bus or whatever it might be, not that I intend to do either. Plato itself has 15 people, on average, about 23 years investment experience. We have four PhDs in the team. Some of you may have heard of Dr. Dave Allen. He's a great member, addition to the team who we hired about seven years ago. We've got some other very good staff members there. There's no I in team.
Plato has a very strong process. It's quite a disciplined process. We've refined it over the years. I think this maybe goes back to the other question about competitors. We've been doing this for 14 years. We're very experienced at doing it. Some of the don't come lately don't have that sort of track record. Hopefully they will succeed, but we've been doing this for a long time. We know how to move around. We've gone through the pandemic. That was a pretty interesting time for income strategies. We weren't running this in the GFC, but we were actually developing the IP, I suppose, during that GFC period. I think you should be rest assured that there's a strong team at Plato.
It's probably also just worth finishing up that the PL8 board, who hasn't been on these calls, but you've seen at the AGMs, are also the same board that's been there since IPO. Jonathan, Lorraine, and Katrina, you know, dividends are an important part of PL8, and they ultimately determine the dividends. Having that consistency and continuity is also, and they're also not planning on going anywhere anytime soon. More consistency and dependability from Dr. Don. We'll leave it at that. Thanks for your questions, Don. Thanks for your insights. To our shareholders online, thank you for your time on a Friday to listen into what we had to say. Hopefully, you're happy with your PL8 investments. We plan on doing just as much of what you've received in the past in the future.
Thank you very much.