Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Sequoia Financial Group's half-year presentation for full year 2025. I'm Garry Crole, CEO and Managing Director of Sequoia. Joining me today is our CFO, Lizzie Tan, who I will pass to when referencing the accounts on slides 14 through to 16. At the end of this presentation, I will pass back to our facilitator, Andrew Keys, to answer questions that shareholders wish to address at the end of this presentation. If you do wish to ask a question, please use the Zoom chat box, and we'll try to respond to all of these as we go. I'll just touch on our disclaimer. Obviously, as a financial planning business, we would know very well that the presentation that we're giving today is general information purpose only, and we're not taking into account anyone's personal circumstances in respect to what we're providing.
I'll now move to the presentation. On slide five, we're just looking at what we do. What we do at Sequoia is we're providing a comprehensive suite of solutions to Sequoia's business partners. Sequoia's business partners is basically financial planners and accountants. The purpose is to be a resource for those financial planners, accounting firms, self-directed investors who seek a partner that allows them to provide that comprehensive suite of solutions to their financial customers. Our financial planning licensee business, as you can see on the slide, oversees AUD 18 billion of funds under advice, with an extensive network which includes 350 advisors, of the circa 15,000 advisors in the market. Approximately 4% of the advisory market we're providing a licensee service to.
We employ 70 staff to provide our services and support those gatekeepers, help them reduce the cost of providing service to the highest benchmarks we can. I will discuss the range of services in more detail later in this presentation. As I move to the next slide, I will just look to touch on the actual highlights or the actual factual information in respect to the half-year accounts. Again, as I mentioned, an overview of our half-year financial reporting in more detail will be discussed more later in this particular presentation. However, the message I wish to share now is we are far more streamlined business than we were 12 months ago.
The group recorded revenue of AUD 60.6 million, which was down 3.5% on the prior corresponding period, but enjoyed growth in revenue in each of the businesses we now see as core today, being the licensee business and the legal accounting business. Normalized EBITDA fell 14.6% to AUD 2.7 million. However, it came at a time where we expensed all costs associated with making this business simpler and more focused for the longer term. The net profits after tax result was strong. It was up at AUD 3.6 million, was actually up 136.8% on the previous corresponding period for our continuing businesses. On that point, we generated AUD 3.4 million of cash from those businesses, which was a 62% increase on the previous corresponding period. A very positive result in that respect.
The net profit after tax result and that generation of the $3.4 million of cash has actually allowed the company to maintain the interim dividend of AUD 0.02 per share that we paid in the same period half year. At the end of the period, despite investing in a share buyback scheme and paying out a distribution of the normalized dividend and the special dividend that we paid in the last half, we have ended the period at AUD 10.9 million of cash. In addition to that, we also have liquid investments of more than AUD 6 million, placing us in a very strong position to build out this business. Looking forward, on the next slide, as an overview of what we have done in this half year, I just want to touch on a few points.
Primarily, I think management and the board has listened to what our shareholders were talking to us about over the last 12 months, and we've streamlined the business. In the most recent period, being the accounts that we're just reporting today, we divested four non-core operations. We additionally invested in technology to improve efficiency across both of the core divisions, the licensee services business and the legal and administration business division. All of that cost we expense fully under employment costs. This investment in itself is already beginning to become more evident in the numbers, in particular in the legal and administration service division, which is really delivering an excellent return on revenue. Whilst revenue growth was quite stable, profit growth in that particular business was up 70%. That was a mixture of both organic and acquisition growth over the comparative periods.
The reduction of issued capital is also a point I might want to touch on, which issued capital reduced by 5% through the on-market buyback that we initiated. That has improved our earnings per share return. The strong cash balance allows us to maintain that AUD 0.02 fully franked dividend, despite the management team now increasing future focus on growth. Growth of less entities. At one stage, we had 20-odd businesses. We have got a much more streamlined business than we had a year ago. I will touch on that a little bit later. In addition to the financials, over the period, we welcomed Mike Ryan as our Chair, and we made several positive changes to the executive team that we expect in future years will be seen as reasons for our acceleration of our performance. Looking at the divisions by breakdown, we had two major operating divisions.
I want to spend time firstly on both. First, I might talk about the fact that we had four divisions in the prior year with over 20 companies. We have now streamlined to two operating divisions with half the number of businesses. On the licensee and advisor services business, we have three main business units with three functionalities, one being licensing advisors who own their own businesses. That is the 350 advisors you often hear me talking about. We are providing a license to those parties who own their own business, and we provide them a service. The second part of our licensing and advisory services businesses is that we employ staff as salaried advisors, and they provide services across various client segments and support our business, but we own the business and we employ people.
We have four businesses in that section: personal advice, which comes under Sequoia Financial Advice; high net worth advice, which comes under Sequoia Family Office; the asset management general advice business, Sequoia Asset Management; and the corporate finance, where we have Sequoia Corporate Finance. We then have two other support businesses that support those particular businesses. One is our media business, and the second one is where we can create specialist investment products. On the legal administration services side, we have several brands, but again, streamlined to three functions. The first function is establishment of legal documentation. The second function is providing legal advice on actual structures individually. The third part of that particularly is providing SMSF trustees, accountants, and financial planners a service where we provide SMSF advice and administration to them.
This simplified structure sees us with a 10% market share in that particular area, the legal and documents area, and less than a 5% market share in the licensing and advising services. A lot of opportunities for upside in those particular areas from where we are now. The next slide is our legal and administration side. If we look at that, looking at the legal and administration service business in isolation, what we have seen is we've seen revenue grow slightly, AUD 4.5 million- AUD 4.7 million. However, the profitability of that business, revenue growth was only 5%, yet the margin growth was over 70%. This half year was about creating efficiencies in that business, investing in technology so that we could grow in the future, and enabling that business to recommence its short-term to medium-term goal of moving from 10% market share towards 15% market share.
At the back half of this particular half, we introduced a number of new products, and we're very excited in the future of those. There's definitely an opportunity to further scale this business profitably from an inorganic and an organic aspect, and we'll allocate capital to support that right opportunities as they come along. I wish to reiterate just finally, in this particular business, we fully expensed our investment in technology in this period under employment costs. We employ programmers. We employ IT staff as employees of Sequoia. We do not outsource this function, and we've fully expensed it, not capitalized any of that in this particular half. This investment has resulted in the ability to have higher automation, less staff in processing, and launch new products to market quicker, which we have done in November and December.
I would expect to see some revenue growth from that in the next half. On the licensee service, the second part of our business, revenue in this business actually fell. Much of that, or all of that, fall, because we actually had revenue growth in most areas of this business, was as a result of the divestment of the general insurance business, the reduced offerings in the special investment product area, a slowdown in our corporate finance salaried advice business, and from the closure or sale of businesses within the media business. All of those reduced revenue, obviously, being closed or going in slow mode. However, much of that was offset by continued revenue growth in the salaried advice businesses outside of the corporate business and the licensee business, which is the major business, being the InterPrac Financial Planning and the Sequoia Wealth Management license.
We're very encouraged that we've been able to take steps to reduce the amount of business, focus on what we're very good at, and we do expect to see a much stronger second half in this division for full year 2025. This is actually evident already in the performance numbers we're seeing for January and February.
I'll now pass to Lizzie Tan to discuss the next few slides in respect to our financials.
Thank you, Garry. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I'm Lizzie Tan, Chief Financial Officer and Company Secretary here at Sequoia Financial Group. It is a pleasure to be presenting our half-year results with you today. In this half year, the company reported modest results compared to the prior half year. The group's revenue for continuing business was AUD 60.6 million, equivalent to 3.5% down from last period.
We recorded lower revenue to focus less on structured products, sales, and weaker corporate finance activity. In addition, the divestment of our insurance broker companies also contributed to the decline in revenue by AUD 1.1 million. On a positive note, there were increased commission earned in our financial planning and greater sales in legal documents business. Both companies reported higher revenue of 2% and 18%, respectively, compared to last period. A large part of the revenue growth in our legal and administration division was a mix of organic and through acquisition. Total OpEx also decreased by AUD 1.7 million, or 2.9%. This is due to the divestment of insurance broker companies and lower hedging cost, which is in line with the decline in structured products revenue. All these have contributed to a half-year normalized EBITDA of AUD 2.7 million, which was lower than last period by AUD 500,000.
Worth mentioning under non-operating items, we reported a net accounting gain under disposal of our insurance broker companies and two media companies, Informed Investor and Corporate Connect Research, both non-core businesses of about AUD 3.4 million. We have since merged Share Cafe and our legacy media company, Finance News Network, together. These websites have been revamped and rebranded. Efforts were made to reduce the overall cost base of running the media operation. The recent restructure from four to two divisions and streamlining existing operations and improving accountability structures of our businesses have led to redundancy costs being incurred. Through natural attrition, we expect the real salary cost savings will be experienced in the second half of this financial year. That said, I'm pleased that our company today reported an NPAT of AUD 3.6 million on our continuing operations for this half year compared to last half year of AUD 1.5 million.
This is an increase of AUD 2.1 million, up by 137%. Therefore, today, we declare an interim dividend of AUD 0.02 per share, a payout ratio of 70%. I'll move on to the next slide, our balance sheet. Our total assets reported is high at AUD 75.8 million. Cash balance remains at AUD 10.9 million with no bank debt. Our strong cash balance provides support for further business growth and capital management initiatives, allowing the company to deploy AUD 8.7 million cash for buybacks and dividend distributions. Our investment in ASX-listed shares at the end of first half was valued at AUD 6.4 million. This makes up our total liquid assets amounting to AUD 17.3 million. To date, we have a high franking credit balance of AUD 18.5 million. This is due to large tax amounts we have paid in the last two years. Moving on to slide 16.
Cash flow from continuing operations in the half year was AUD 3.4 million, up by 62% compared to last half year. During this half year, we made healthy returns to our shareholders in the form of more buybacks and dividend payments, which amounted to AUD 8.7 million compared to AUD 7.1 million in similar payments last half year. Also, I'd like to highlight that our cash conversion to operating profit has improved substantially to 126% compared to last half year. This reflects better cost control, business simplification, and divestment of non-core assets. Over the period, the company's liquidity has improved, recognizing that we have expensed all technology spend and our revenue are highly cash-generative. That concludes the financial results presentation. I now hand back to Garry.
Thank you, Lizzie. I wish to touch and give an overview now of some of our key strategic initiatives completed and in progress, most of which we started at the commencement of 2025. As I mentioned earlier, we divested four core businesses or non-core businesses. We have streamlined existing operations. We continue to invest in technology to enhance our efficiency. We restructured the Sequoia Specialist Investment business and the media business, and that should enhance margins and start to increase revenue. Much of this has occurred already. Many of the other progress are ongoing. We've talked about our franking credit balance in the slide that Lizzie presented, but I also would like to give confidence in respect to our strategy in respect to our future dividend policy.
Because we have such a strong franking credit balance, we can pay tax-effective dividends to shareholders, and we're definitely going to be looking at moving from what we had previously, a 20%-50% payout ratio, to a 40%-60% payout ratio long term. At the half year, we paid 70%. The reason for that is because we're confident the second half will be stronger as we streamline this business and move to a more tailwind incentive. Might just move to our next slide. There are many industry tailwinds in this industry. Sequoia is in a strong position to benefit from industry tailwinds as demand for financial services continues to increase. From my perspective, much of the last 12 months has been difficult. We're trying to, this is a growth business.
The opportunity for us is significant, but I've felt a bit like, I've personally felt a bit like being caught in peak hour traffic. I know where I want to go, but getting to the end destination is longer and taking longer. We've had interruptions, roadblocks, all sorts of things that have been frustrating. The positive that I'm actually seeing is I believe we're now moving off that roadblock into a freeway, and parts of the industry tailwinds really excite me about where we can now take this business. We have an energized board, a supportive share register, an upskilled management team, and we really are coming out of that congestion period that was somewhat frustrating onto the freeway, and we can focus on what we see as industry growth in several parts of our industry.
If we look at what we see as opportunity for a business like Sequoia has built over time, they include being part of the advice needs for growth in superannuation assets, continuing to see more and more members, even in industry super funds, as their account balances increase, looking to get financial advice from a financial planner. The challenge in that, of course, is to keep the costs down to a reasonable level so more people who realize they need it can afford it. There's no doubt that rising demand is there. The challenge, obviously, is there's not enough advisors to support the demand from Australia. That's a major opportunity. One of those major opportunities that I see is in digital transformation and fintech integration. That's part of the reason why we have a media business. It's part of the reason why we have a salary advice business.
It's part of the reason why we have our own internal IT staff and programmers. We really see a terrific opportunity in digital transformation and fintech for this business in the future. We will supply our advisors, those 350 advisors that have face-to-face interaction with their clients, access to our internal digital transformation and fintech teams. We've employed new staff that are specialists in SEO. We've employed a new head of media. There are some very exciting parts of the business that we're looking forward to. They are big tailwinds for Sequoia. We've paid it forward, and I expect that we'll see some of that return over the next periods. There's also a major intergenerational wealth transfer taking place.
There is a very strong growing affluent and mass market of affluent investors looking to get returns ahead of inflation that may have attempted to self-direct invest, but are finding that if they do have a partner that provides them a reasonable service at a reasonable price, they're going to get to that end destination a lot quicker. Sequoia, their advisors and the internal intellectual property that we have allows them to do that. In respect to the share price or the stock drivers for Sequoia, I've listed those on the right-hand side of this page and listed some catalysts that we think could provide value for Sequoia investors. Consolidation of the industry is obviously a major one. As I mentioned before, Sequoia has approximately 4% of the advice market that we're providing a license for. That's very small.
There are 10-15 providers of services in a similar manner that enjoy a similar market cap or a number of advisors they are providing services to. Clearly, that industry needs to consolidate, and we expect it will. Our strong balance sheet places us in an advantageous position to focus on taking advantage of that, increasing market share. The other thing I see as a major stock driver for Sequoia performance is getting a higher utilization of services from our existing customers. I think one of the challenges that we may have had in the past is that we had too many services and too many messages that we were trying to get across to those existing customers. The streamlining of the business into three major functions in the licensing services business and three major functions in the other part of the business is a much simplified message.
Our state managers and our team are now getting out to our customers and talking about what we can do to help them gain efficiencies as we complete and implement findings of our strategic review. That is being seen extremely positive. The other thing that we think is an important part of the stock drivers is that we need to provide shareholders with confidence in our ability to generate both yield through the distribution of dividends that we have just done now with the AUD 0.02 interim dividend. More importantly, and as importantly, is to provide earnings per share growth through business growth, improved financial performance in respect to net profit after tax as we did in this particular half year, and continuing and making decisions on what the best capital management strategies are for the business.
This takes me to the end of the formal presentation at this stage. I would like to thank my fellow directors, all of our staff, particularly Lizzie Tan, our CFO, who has been so instrumental in managing shareholders' capital over a long period of time in a safe manner. Our balance sheet, our net profit after tax performance, our continuing dividends at such a high yield is a tribute to Lizzie's performance in that respect. We have a vision, and it's a big game. We're really excited to take this very small company to a much larger company over the next three to five years. I think we have the management team in place now to do that. I think we've got the board that's cohesive and strong, and I'm really excited to lead this business.
I'll now pass back to Andrew Keys, who will take some questions of both Lizzie and myself.
Thank you, Garry, and thank you, Lizzie. A reminder for participants, if you have a question, please enter it into the Q&A portal, and I'll happily facilitate that. We do have some questions already. Garry and Lizzie, the first one for you, Garry. Given the size of Sequoia, can you share some more color around why you hold a AUD 4 million investment in a competitor in CAF?
That's a good question to start off with, Andrew. From my point of view, without giving away too much internal thinking on it, there's probably two or three reasons why we hold CAF. First is at our entry price. They're paying on an annualized basis, AUD 0.03 per share, fully franked dividend. On our entry price, that's a 10% fully franked yield. We see that as a good investment at the time. Continuing on, looking at their half-year results that they tabled a few days ago, we continue to believe that they're an undervalued company. More strategically thinking, and this has already commenced, is there's a lot of opportunities, as we talked about, for consolidation in the industry.
Apart from that, there's a lot of opportunities for groups like Centrepoint and other groups that we like to work together to help try and reduce the cost of advice. We think our investment in Centrepoint allows us to have some skin in the game and open up dialogue between the two companies. That has commenced. For example, just a couple of examples for you, Andrew, and the person who asked the question is that they recently launched the IconiQ platform, which is a platform they hope to become like HUB24 or Netwealth, etc., in the future. We're looking to approve that IconiQ platform for advisors in the Sequoia Group. The pricing that they're offering to the market is very good. The list of underlying investments is very good. The backer, FNZ, is a technology business that we highly commend.
We use FNZ at Morrisons with our 20% investment. That is tick, tick, tick from our perspective. On the other side of that equation, it is not a one-way street. I have talked to the CEO, John Shuttleworth, on a number of occasions about having a look at some of the services that Sequoia provides where Centrepoint does not. We are engaging at that level. We are talking to them about our media business. We are talking to them about joint opportunities on our finance business. We are talking to our corporate finance business and M&A opportunities. There are a lot of mutual benefits from us having a share ownership apart from the pure financial decision. That is probably the answer to my question, Andrew, or your question.
Thank you, Garry. Probably another question for you. This relates to the Wealth Advisor Group and their substantial shareholding. How involved is that group as a new substantial shareholder, and to what extent are you working with them?
It's early days. They're representing they've got a shareholding, obviously. My understanding is they're representing an existing shareholder under an IMA. Both the Chairman and myself have had meetings with them. The very positive aspect about the meetings that we've had with them, and they actually touched on in their ASX announcement today, is that they believe that obviously they believe Sequoia is a good investment. They're talking the same language as we are talking. They believe there's an opportunity for consolidation in this industry. They may have recognized that we've got a very strong balance sheet to be able to be a leader or a participant in consolidation. We want shareholders who add value and see the opportunity, and we believe they do.
Thank you. Next question, I'll direct it to Lizzie. In the licensee and advisor services division, the company said that the revenue decline was contributed by divestments made. Can you provide a sense of what the organic growth was for the segment and sort of which part of the business drove it?
Yes. In the licensee services group, the major company, the core business is InterPrac Financial Planning, which contributes just over AUD 49 million to the total revenue of the group. SSI, which is structured specialist products, and also Sequoia Wealth Management, both also big contributors. They take up almost 80% of the group's revenue. The remaining smaller companies also contribute to the companies within Sequoia. Although small, they are very crucial, and they provide a lot of support services to both the other companies, to our advisors in financial planning, and also to the accountants and all the clients within the legal and admin businesses. Yeah, I hope that sort of answers the question.
Thanks, Lizzie. Is there any guidance for the second half of the year for Sequoia?
No. The only comment we make in respect to that is the commentary we put in the ASX releases that we expect the second half to be stronger than the first.
Okay. Thank you. Garry, are you able to provide any update on the current situation and perhaps perception of risk for Sequoia around Venture Egg and that whole topic?
Yeah, sure. I don't want to say too much on that. Venture Egg is an authorized representative of InterPrac Financial Planning. They recommended clients into the Macquarie and Equity Trustees platforms, which had Shield Master Fund as an investment option. The Shield Master Fund has had redemptions frozen, and its responsible entity, Keystone Asset Management, has been appointed into liquidation. ASIC has expressed concerns about the fund Shield's business and various aspects of the fund, which was obviously not known to anybody, including the advisors that recommended it and Macquarie and Equity Trustees. I think the best way to have a look at ASIC has a web page that talks about Shield, and I'd direct anyone to that.
Thank you, Garry. Lizzie, a couple of questions around the underlying EBITDA performance of both divisions. I think perhaps to clarify for participants, in the presentation and the narrative, we use the term the operating profit, I think, for the divisions. But that operating profit is actually the proxy for underlying EBITDA. Is that correct?
That would be correct. That operating profit is what we would sort of consider or be used within the organization as normalized EBITDA, not the reported EBITDA, but normalized before any non-operating transactions.
Thank you. Next question for you, Garry. Do you expect a turnaround in the licensee services division in the second half? I guess, why is that so?
Yeah, no, definitely. There are several reasons. The first reason is history shows that the second half in the financial planning license business is always stronger than the first half. Many people who have ongoing service agreements with their financial advisor tend to have them in the period March through to June. That is a historic thing. I expect that to happen again. The second aspect of it is that we did initiate a number of cost strategies in respect to employment and restructuring many parts of those businesses, including removing some. We expect that to normalize in that second half period where we get the benefits of those strategies. All the costs of changing the business were incurred in the first half. All the benefits of making those changes will occur in the second half. I think you can be very confident about that.
As I mentioned before, the demand for advice is continuing to increase. We have simplified our message. We know where we want to be. It is an analogy, but we are coming out of the congestion. We are entering the freeway. I am very, very confident in our licensee business, our salaried advice business, and the two support businesses that we have in that regard. In respect to one of them in particular, specialist investments, we listened to our shareholders. They had some concerns that we were creating structures that had higher risk. We ceased doing that to a major degree. We have pivoted that business, a lower cost base, but a much more conservative investment style. For example, the hybrids of the bank notes, there is an opportunity there to provide some replacement-type products for investors looking for high yield, low risk.
They're the types of areas we'll move into: shorter duration, no leverage areas. We expect that to be positive in the second half as we move into that.
Thank you, Garry. Question around the legal and administrative administration services division. It's well known that Castle and ABC contributed fully in the first half of 2025. Looking at the revenue and the operating profit performance, though, can you provide some context around that organic performance within that division?
Yeah, sure. The organic performance was flat in respect to revenue, but profit because of the actions we took in respect to staffing and particularly technology enhancements improved the result. The other thing is the sector itself. We won market share, which is important. The sector itself saw the number of registrations of companies on the ASX—it is not the ASX—on the ASIC platform reduce over the period. Our percentage of that particular market increased. The number of accountants that are ordering their companies, trusts, and super funds through that particular division has increased. Our retention rate on our existing clients, which is approximately 1,400 accountancy firms of the 14,000 accountancy firms in Australia, is very high. We expect the second half to see an increase again of people setting up structures in respect to companies, trusts, and self-managed super funds structures in itself.
We've also took a couple of stepbacks in the half in respect to updating some of our legal documents, improving them, and launching new products, which only took place in November and December. We just want to be the absolute market leader in the highest quality legal document that we can possibly provide. Unlike some of our competitors, we are actually a law firm, and we write the document, and we improve the document as law changes in particular, in respect to some trusts, etc. That gives our accountants a very high level of confidence to buy our documents. We're increasing our marketing of that information. As I touched on before, we have 10% market share. There are two other providers that are large. One at 15% market share, one at 20%. One is a legal firm. The other is not.
We're going to get our messaging out there more, and people are hearing our message. We're very highly regarded by the industry in respect to the quality of our documentation. Our technology is improved, and I expect that will flow to a much stronger half in respect to revenue contribution, but increasing profit contribution, which is actually very, very good. The efficiencies that we're investing in are paying dividends.
Thanks, Garry. Another question for you. Are you currently looking at any bolt-on or acquisition opportunities, and where would you allocate incremental capital?
It's a good question. Obviously, I can't disclose too much about that, but we're always looking. The industry consolidation is obviously one that we're always talking about, always thinking about. Bolt-on acquisitions into licensee services, salaried advice, and that legal and document space, they're the three major focus areas for our growth. We are interested in acquiring salaried advice businesses. We are interested in growing the number of advisors we provide the license to, and we do want to increase market share in the legal and documents business. I'm always out there looking for opportunities to do that, whether it be organic or by acquisition.
Thank you. Another question that is coming. What's the right level of cash you think the business needs to have on its balance sheet to operate with the perspective that there's nearly AUD 11 million of cash on the balance sheet at the moment, but the capital program of dividends and the buyback has contributed to that balance coming down? How do you manage that level of capital program with the current level of liquidity?
I might share this answer with Lizzie, but I'll start first. When Lizzie and I partnered up in this business four or five years ago as CEO and CFO, we had very little cash. We have not raised cash since. We've created cash by running businesses that have performed. We've divested some businesses, and we've created our own cash flow to run operations. We'll continue to do that. This is a high-cash business that we operate. Working capital as such, requirements are quite low. However, we are very keen, and we have done this for the last few years. We're keen to grow by acquisition when the opportunity is right. We are also very reticent not to dilute shareholders where possible. We need cash for acquisitions. We need some working capital.
I might pass to Lizzie just to give an answer in respect to what she thinks is a reasonable working capital limit for our existing two divisions.
Yeah, just to touch on that and also to add to Garry's comment, our cash balance as of today is just under AUD 12 million. It is obvious that our business, the changes that we've done in the last six months, have paid dividends. We have divested non-performing companies or non-core businesses. That definitely has sort of improved our cash flow. Having said that, we are very focused now with running and also improving the operations of the businesses and streamlining, reducing the cost base. All these have added to our healthy cash flow. Having said that, we have come a long way. We have worked really, really hard in the last five, six years to maintain that healthy cash position and making all the right decisions in terms of capital management. We have done really well.
Having said all that, I think we are looking forward to a stronger position in the next few years. Yeah, I think we'll be in that situation. I think the sale of Morrison definitely has helped, but we have returned a lot of dividends to our shareholders. Having said all that, we are in a healthy balance sheet. We have a healthy sort of positive retained earnings in our balance sheet. All this sort of is proven that Sequoia is now on the right track to continue to go to the next phase of growth.
Thanks, Lizzie. While you're rolling along there, another question for you. What were the one-off costs in the first half that you'd expect to see drop out?
As part of what we announced last year, we did a lot of streamlining. We reviewed our operations, and we're down to 10 operating businesses compared to we used to have like 20. Obviously, we have looked at all the costs and any that doesn't work, we have terminated those. We have reviewed the team structure and reduced the cost base. As I mentioned, we are expecting salary savings of about AUD 1.5 million per annum annualized. We will start to see those savings coming through in the second half of this financial year. Having said that, we did have to make some redundancy costs, which was not that material because we have terminated a lot of contractors because the roles have been made redundant. I do not anticipate any more redundancy payments to be made in the second half.
We are still, and this is subject to the strategic review that we are going to undergo in the second half. That remains to be seen. We do not anticipate any sort of material or major changes from the team perspective or also the group structure.
I might just add to that, not that I know the actual answers, but we've moved offices in Melbourne and Sydney. We had costs associated with the 249D notices. We had costs associated with the improvement in our IT. There's several costs in there in addition to that AUD 1.5 million annualized savings in salary.
Thank you. Question for you, Garry. Any comments, update on the progress of the Euree business?
The Euree business is stable. It's got about AUD 160 million in funds under advice, funds under management. The two, the Growth Fund and the Balance Fund in particular, have performed extremely well. They're low risk profile. One is looking to get CPI + 3%. The other is looking to get CPI + 4% as its target return. Both are in the top quartile for the Morningstar rankings for the one month, three months, six months, and since inception. We are hopeful that that allows the research providers to increase their rating. If that was to occur at the next rating review, they currently got a 3.75 rating for the Growth and Balance Fund and a four-star rating on the REIT Fund that Winston Sammut runs.
We are of the belief if they can both get to four, the platform providers will add them to their platform, which will give them much greater access to distribution. We would expect, given their strong performance, their conservative nature, and the fund-to-fund approach, that we should see strong growth in that area. I might even add to that in respect to Morrison. We have two 20% equity investments. One is Euree. The second one is Morrison Securities. The Morrison Securities business is also going really well. Despite basically flatline ASX turnover, the Morrison Securities business continued to grow. They have just launched a terrific international offer. They are investing in technology. The profitability of the group continues to be in line with when we divested. I think they are actually set for quite strong revenue growth.
I think both those two 20% investments we hold currently are both performing very well.
Thank you. The company has made a series of structural changes, reduced the number of operating divisions, divested non-core operations. There has been some change at the executive level as well. How is the CEO succession program or activity progressing?
That's an interesting one. The CEO is really enjoying his job now. He's coming out of congestion. We are currently we've got a terrific management team already. The succession of myself as CEO is obviously going to take place at some stage. Whether we employ someone from outside the industry or someone from within this business at this stage has not been determined. The Chairman, myself, and our Head of HR have interviewed around 15 candidates over the last three or four months. We're down to a list of two or three candidates that we are currently looking to consider appointing as a Head of Growth. Who replaces me as CEO and when that actually occurs? The Board will make that decision at the time, but it's not necessarily going to be the next employer. We have a terrific Head of Compliance.
We have a terrific Head of Legal. We have a terrific CFO. We have a terrific Head of Legal Administration. We've got some very good people. We have terrific human resources staff. We have some very, very good people within this organization already that I'm very happy mentoring as I look to transition to a non-executive capacity role that's already within the business. There's no certainty on who that person will be, but we're looking to continue to support the existing management team that we think is now A-class, as well as add a head of SEO that's starting next week and a head of growth that we're in the final stages of determining which one of a high number of candidates that we will select.
Thank you, Garry. Thank you, Lizzie. And thank you to all the participants for sharing the questions with us. I'll hand over to you, Garry, just for some closing remarks.
Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for those for taking up an hour of your time to listen to our presentation today. I'd like to thank again all of our staff. I touched on that executive team before. I'd like to thank Lizzie Tan for her really being an absolute team player and being an absolute great resource. One of the challenges of being a CFO is sometimes you're the people who make the tough decisions, and that can be challenging with an organization like us. Lizzie has stood up, and I really like to thank her, our Head of Human Resources, our Head of Legal Administration business. That business has really taken huge steps and bounds. Our compliance team, our Head of Legal, Sequoia Wealth Management, Sequoia Asset Management, Corporate Finance, Family Office, all doing a great job.
I would like to thank the shareholders for continuing to support me as CEO and hopefully seeing continued increases in net profit after tax, increasing earnings per share, and increasing dividend at that 40%-60% payout ratio over the long term. Hopefully that all results in increasing share price and reasons for continuing to own a share of our great company.