Okay. Well, good morning to everyone in the room and on the call. As per this chart, today's slides will be uploaded to our website this afternoon with the webcast and transcript to follow. We'll also take questions in the usual way after the presentation. Please join us for snacks and drinks once the formalities have been completed. We also have gift bags for the people in the room hand-prepared by our Capsicum chef, so please grab one of those before you leave. Into the results. These are the high-level numbers, which I'll unpack as we go through the presentation. Revenue was up 10% year-on-year to ZAR 9.3 billion, while operating profit grew by 14%, breaking through ZAR 2 billion for the first time. Operating margin improved from 21% to 21.8% year-on-year, while headline and normalized earnings per share both grew by 17%.
We're also pleased to announce that we've increased our full-year dividend also by 17% to ZAR 1.18. This slide captures our 2025 brand portfolio, looking back in time, before a significant amount of restructuring. Looking at the tertiary section in the middle of the chart, managing multiple brands under the IIE was both complex and inefficient. Some of our brand names were also pretty weak with Oxbridge, HSM, and Varsity College being prime examples. We needed to address all these issues and also to settle a 20-year legal battle with the Department of Higher Education. Staying in the middle of this chart, this is our new tertiary structure. It's a lot simpler, more focused, combining six brands into two effectively, and maybe more importantly, it's acceptable to government. We've settled that case.
We've migrated the IIE brand to Emeris and created a second degree-awarding entity in Rosebank International, which in the time that we had to do it was no small task. You'll also note significantly improved new logos for Vega, Rosebank and Oxbridge, which we've renamed the Waterfall School of Business. Finally, on the left of this slide, from this side here, you could also see the alignment of our Makini and Gaborone schools under the new International Schools Group brand, which I'll come back to a little later. I quickly wanted to cover a couple of other recent changes reflecting our forward focus on education. We recently announced a change to our logo. As you can see here, we've created a friendlier, more modern look. Through replacing the V in ADvTECH with a book device, we've created a clear link to teaching and learning.
You saw it nicely animated on the video that we opened with. We also recently announced a change in our internet domain name, moving from .co.za to .com, and that again is to reflect the international nature of our business. When you are looking for this presentation, you'll find it on our new website, groupadvtech.com. We've also created a number of new senior positions to strengthen the organization starting last year with Victor Sobahle Chidongo being one of the most critical. He's been appointed to the role of Group PMO and is already bringing his broad experience to bear on our most complex projects. Victor's with us today. Welcome to him. Taking a look at the current shape of the business. As you can see from the chart, 84% of our revenue and 95% of our operating profit now come from our education business.
Within education, we're also pivoting over time towards our tertiary division, which now contributes 51% of operating profit versus 44% from schools. In terms of scale, it's also worth noting that our rest of Africa schools business now contributes nearly double the profit generated by resourcing. Running through performance at divisional level. Schools South Africa's revenue was up 10% for the period, with operating profit up by 13%, while rest of Africa schools grew revenue by 28% and operating profit by 33%. Tertiary revenue and operating profit were up by 13% and 14% respectively. I think it's also worth noting that we broke through the ZAR 1 billion operating profit mark in tertiary for the first time last year.
Finally, for the reasons shared at our half-year results, we had a marginal decline in resourcing revenue and operating profit, down 6% and 9% for the full year respectively. Then moving on to 2026 student numbers, the latest cycle just completed. For the total group, enrollments are up by an all-time record 13,487 students or 13%. This breaks down into increases of 5% in schools and 19% in tertiary, where we are seeing exceptionally strong growth. If you look at the compound annual growth rates, they're also looking very strong. Then looking at a further breakdown of the 5% schools growth. In South Africa, enrollments are up by 1%. It was just short of 1.5%, but 1% there.
In the rest of Africa, we are up by 14%. Our international performance remains strong, but the SA growth was slightly muted, driven to a degree by tighter financial controls. We're also experiencing capacity constraints in some of our South African sites and addressing an emerging trend where financially stretched parents appear to be prioritizing private education at high school over the earlier grades, but we are addressing that as a matter of urgency. Looking at the compound annual growth rates, we're also seeing consistently strong growth over a 5-year period. Breaking down the 19% tertiary enrollment growth, our contact student numbers were up 17% year-over-year, while in distance we were up 34%. Looking at the 5-year trends, you'll note the significant acceleration here in total and on both the contact and distance splits.
Though we are pleased to report such strong numbers, the outperformance of Rosebank at distance at lower price points continues to have a mixed impact on revenue of around 3.5%. Just a reminder, Rosebank and distance fees are roughly a third of what we charge for contact in Emeris and Vega. Then getting back to 2025 financials at group level. This slide gives the five-year context for the 10% revenue and 14% operating profit increases I shared upfront. Looking at the compound annual growth rates, I just point out the consistency in the numbers with revenue and operating profit compounding over five years at 12% and 16% respectively. Then looking at group operating margin, we've moved up to 21.8% from 21% last year, driven by operating leverage efficiencies and a mixed shift towards our higher margin education businesses, which Hanus will expand on later.
I'd also mention that our margin improvement is net of significant investments into people, systems and facilities, as well as setup costs for our new university in Ghana. Looking at the high-level margin breakdown between education and resourcing, education is showing a significant positive shift from 24.2% to 24.7%, while we saw a small decline in resourcing driven by the USAID impact that I covered again at our half-year results. Breaking down the 24.7% education margin, schools improved from 22% to 22.8%, while the tertiary division increased from 26.6% to 26.8%. It's worth noting that the tertiary number was tempered by around half a percent due to those start-up costs in Ghana. Further breaking down the schools numbers, South Africa posted an improvement from 20.5% to 20.9%, while Rest of Africa jumped from 32.4% to 33.7%.
Contextualizing the normalized earnings per share growth of 17% I shared upfront, this chart shows the growth trend over the last 5 years. As you can see, NEPS is compounding at 18% and has nearly doubled since 2021. Looking at NEPS in U.S. dollars, we delivered an increase of 33% year-on-year. While rand strengthening, which was good while it lasted, undoubtedly bolstered our 2025 number, it's worth noting that we're compounding dollar earnings over the longer term at a very healthy 17%. Moving on to the schools division. This slide summarizes our major brands. We're currently in 4 countries with 122 schools and just short of 48,000 students. It's also worth noting that 20 of these schools operate outside of South Africa. Returning to how we're strengthening the organization.
Effective 1st January, we appointed Maurice Rupram to the new position of Managing Director, House Schools. This was an internal promotion and followed the splitting of a larger grouping into two divisions to enable greater focus on both operations and growth. We also appointed Tasneem Abid in January as the Academic Head for Crawford International. After an impressive 28-year career in education, Tasneem has been brought in to take Crawford's already strong academic performance to even greater heights. Going back to the numbers. This chart covers the schools division in total, and revenue was up 13% versus last year, breaking through ZAR 4 billion for the first time, while operating profit grew by 16% to ZAR 914 million. Looking at the CAGRs over five years, we're compounding at 13% on revenue and 19% on operating profit.
Moving to schools, South Africa, revenue was up 10% with operating profit up 13%. Looking at the CAGRs, again, we're seeing consistently strong numbers growing by 12% and 15% respectively over five years. Moving on to rest of Africa schools, as covered earlier, revenue and operating profit were up 28% and 33% respectively. Looking at the picture over five years, our international division continues on its very strong growth path. Taking a quick look at our academic performance last year. We improved our matric pass rate to 99.7% as the national IEB number actually went backward slightly. 94% of our students achieved a bachelor's pass, along with 3,371 distinctions at an average of 2.1 per student, which is again, significantly ahead of what the IEB achieved in total.
Three of our co-ed schools were also ranked in the top 10 in the country, which is an outcome we're very happy with, and 30 of our students were recognized for outstanding or commendable achievements. I think it's fair to say that these strong results reflect our ongoing investment into the best teachers, facilities, and systems available. Returning to the theme of simplification. This slide shows how we're aligning our mid-fee African schools under one brand, and Makini and the Gaborone International School have already transitioned, with Flipper due to follow by the end of this year. This slide shows how the change has been celebrated in Kenya and Botswana, where the new branding has been very well received. Moving on to real estate. Our newest Pinnacle College, Ridgeview, which opened at the beginning of 2025, continues to perform very well.
Our next building phase will start in July this year, taking our capacity up to just short of 600 students. A quick reminder of the geography of our operation in Nairobi, Kenya. Marked with a star in the middle of this chart between our existing Makini and Crawford schools is our latest acquisition, Regis Runda. How's the Runda school performing? Well, the short answer is very strongly. Post-acquisition and rebranding under Makini last September, enrollments have grown by 17% to nearly 1,400, which is well ahead of business case. We also plan to introduce the Cambridge International Curriculum later this year, which should give the school an additional boost. A quick update on Crawford International Nairobi, where building work has now been completed on the new classroom blocks I mentioned at interim.
The picture on the one side here shows the plan, while the other shows the completed buildings, as well as some recent renovations to our sports facilities. The new block takes our capacity up to 1,300 students, which gives us much needed space for further growth. A quick word on Makini Statehouse. This is a school in a very prime location in Nairobi, but it was scheduled to close at the end of 2026, losing us nearly 300 enrollments. After some excellent negotiation from our Makini team, we've managed to secure a new long-term lease on the site that will allow us to completely rebuild the school and increase capacity from around 280 to just short of 600 students. Moving on to Flipper. Here we continue to run at full capacity with a sizable waiting list.
We're investing significantly in IT, teaching and learning support systems, and academic training for staff in the schools, while our business development team is very focused on creating additional capacity to capitalize on strong market demand. Then moving on to built and utilized capacity. This slide shows how the numbers have moved across all schools, so South Africa and international, from February 2023 to February 2026. It then gives our 2026 SA international split in the last two columns. Overall, looking across the third row down, we're maintaining a healthy 84% utilization of built capacity. If you look at the splits, we have reasonable headroom in South Africa, but a lot less internationally, where utilization stands at 93%. This makes our international schools very efficient to operate, you saw those margin increases, but limits further enrollment growth.
We're working hard to expand our existing facilities and to add new sites. Moving to tertiary. This is how the division looks under our new brand structure. We currently run 32 campuses, down from 34 last year, having absorbed the hospitality school into Emeris. As we grow enrollments and simplify our operation, we're also driving greater scale in fewer locations, with 2,230 students per campus this year versus 1,766 in 2025. That's moving in the right direction. Student numbers now stand at nearly 71,500, up 11,400 year on year, as you saw on the enrollment charts earlier. Returning to my people theme. We're also strengthening our tertiary organization. We created the new position of vice president of our Ghanaian university last year, appointing Dr. George Asamoah to the role.
George Asamoah has a wealth of educational and commercial experience and is doing an excellent job for us in Accra. We also appointed Tumi Nkosi to the new position of Marketing and Business Development Executive at Rosebank. Tumi's broad skills position us well to gain further market share in a highly competitive environment. Further strengthening the Rosebank organization, we also recently appointed Dashni Singh to the new position of People and Culture Executive. Dashni has been brought in to manage the rapid pace of growth at Rosebank while also strengthening our employee value proposition. Hopping brands to Emeris. We also appointed Dr. Andre Abrahams recently to the new position of Executive Academic Dean. Andre's role was critical to our successful transition to full university status and ideally suited to his experience. Staying with Emeris, Thabang Buthelezi has been appointed to the new position of Marketing Executive.
Thabang has been central to the launch of Emeris and will have a key role to play going forward. Last but not least, in this section, we have the very experienced André Lubbe. André's appointment as Senior Campus Head has reduced the Emeris Managing Director reporting lines from 18 to 8, which allows significantly greater operational and strategic focus. Going back to the numbers, tertiary revenue is up 13%, affected to a degree by the mix shift I mentioned earlier, and despite significant investments to prepare for university status and to strengthen our brands, operating profit is up 14%. Looking at the compound annual growth rates, revenue and operating profit are compounding at 12% and 14% respectively over five years. This chart shows the academic performance of our tertiary division, where we are delivering sector-leading module success rates.
As you can see, our numbers also improved significantly from 2024 to 2025. This chart maps the qualifications offered under our simplified brand structure, which span from skills development to PhDs in a range of delivery modes. We're still covering every important commercial base, but in a much cleaner and more efficient way. Then covering the where are we with university status question that I'm sure is coming, this chart shows our best guess at the forward milestones and timing in the absence of final information from government. As touched on earlier, the restructure of our tertiary division is now complete, rebranding the IIE to Emeris and creating a second degree awarding entity in Rosebank, as you can see at the bottom of the slide there. We expect government to publish the final criteria and the application process later this year.
When this happens, we understand both brands will immediately be recognized as higher education colleges, but we'll ignore that from a branding perspective. We'll then apply for the interim step of university college status for Rosebank and university status directly for Emeris, given that we are further down the track there in terms of research outputs and postgraduate qualifications. Moving on to tertiary real estate. Our existing Emeris and Vega sites in Sandton have both been relocated to a new 4,700 sq m mega campus on Grayston Drive, doubling student capacity to 9,000 in the process. First-year enrollments are up 20% year-over-year, so we've started very strongly, and ultimate capacity on this site is north of 11,000 students.
Then as per our recent press release, we've also acquired 10 hectares of land southwest of the Cornubia Mall near Umhlanga to build a mega university campus in KZN with capacity for 10,500 students. This will consolidate our existing sites for Emeris and Vega in the region and also includes significant residential accommodation. Phase one we hope to open in 2029, with full build out due to be completed in 2035. We also relocated Emeris Nelson Mandela Bay to new purpose-built premises in Walmer Park, as pictured here. This facility increases capacity from 3,000 to 4,500 students and opened in January. In many ways, we've mirrored what's been built in Sandton, including the world-class indoor sports center that you can see on the bottom right of this slide.
Staying with Nelson Mandela Bay, but hopping brands, we've moved our local Rosebank College site into the old Emeris campus in time for the 2026 academic year. This move represents a significant upgrade in facilities from the previous CBD location and increases student capacity from 1,400 to 2,400. 2026 enrollment growth here has been very strong, up year-on-year by 54%. We also acquired the recently vacated USAID building in Parktown, Johannesburg for ZAR 55 million in June last year. This was our one useful gift from Donald Trump in 2025. We used the new building to relocate the Rosebank central support office and call centers from Braamfontein to free up teaching space, and that transition is now complete.
Moving back to the Rosebank Braamfontein campus itself, phase three of our redevelopment project, increasing capacity to around 15,000 students, will be completed in Q1 of 2027. Significant new recreational spaces and a distance contact center have been added, some of which you can see on this slide. Enrollments in Braamfontein are up 25% year-on-year. Moving to Polokwane. A third building has been acquired for Rosebank that will increase capacity from 3,700 to 4,600 students, and again, enrollments are growing strongly on this campus. Moving to the south of the country. The relocation of our Rosebank Cape Town campus to a prime central site was completed in August last year, doubling capacity from 3,000 to 6,000 students.
In the new building, we've added a distance contact center and again significant recreational facilities, and growth on this site is up over 30% year-over-year. Moving to our first international tertiary venture, Rosebank International University College in Ghana. Our first enrollment season has gone well, running slightly ahead of target. We also expect to be awarded full university status in 2027. Things are progressing positively in Accra. A quick word on resourcing. As I touched on earlier, the overnight closure of USAID meant that our African payroll management business lost around 10% of its contracts in February last year. I credit our management team with pivoting quickly to minimize the impact on full-year performance, but we did end 2025 marginally down. On the plus side, however, through a big focus on efficiencies, we did return the SE business to profitability.
These are the numbers, down 6% on revenue and 9% on operating profit for the year. The underlying component growth rates are more positive, but we have some work to do to fully recover from the USAID shock. Then I'd like to invite Hannes to the podium to cover some group level financial analysis.
Good morning everyone. To everybody in here and also all our stakeholders online. I plan to cover and take you through a tour of a lot of the capital and balance sheet trends, and then end off with a little bit of an investor dashboard and everything that we've done in the past 14 months. Let's maybe get started with the enrollment growth that we've seen in the past enrollment cycle. Graph I always put up, as you can see, the 5% growth from year-on-year on our total schools business, and then a comparison of all the reasons that we have for each of them at the top compared to 2024, 2025.
As you can see, the matric leavers are increasing, and that is just again a testimony to the amount of high school students that we have and a greater focus that we must place on our academic outcomes for matric leavers and especially those high school numbers. The whole trend around immigration and relocation, that's trending down by nearly 200 students. We are seeing a bigger trend coming through on the financial side. This is partially also driven with the choiceful decisions that parents are making, but also our enhanced credit control processes that we implemented during the year. I'll give you some feedback on the impact of that and on our balance sheet and income statement a bit later. I think the controllable aspects is definitely within our other leavers, and this talks to our service and product components.
That number is quite stable year-over-year and a testimony to the teams and what they've done and all the brands working on exactly the servicing that is required. When we then move over to the growth elements, our acquisition numbers this year, just over 1,100. Less, of course, than the Ethiopian acquisition we made in 2024 of 3,000. You get to the final amount of new enrollments that we've got in the group base, still healthy at over 10,000 students. I think, that again, there's choiceful decisions that we've made on the academics, especially in the higher high school grades that we've had. As we have focused significantly on our trade receivables, I'm pleased to present the progress that we've made in this environment with a few key metrics and trends.
Before we get there, I think it's important to say, what does a good recovery process look like? When do we say we've got good debtors' health? It starts with that first contracting that we have with a student and being able to bill them accurately before you actually start getting into even a debtors management process. The quality of that debtors management determining our loss allowance percentage, even our credit losses, and then a healthy student and a happy student is always prepared to pay already for services in advance. These would not be possible without all the investment we've made in our systems during the year. The policies that is driving a lot of this consistently across all brands, and the processes we're giving our staff to adhere to still implement credit control with due care and with a customer focus in mind.
Just looking at the debtors breakdown. At the top, we've got the total group revenue increasing by 10%. I've then put the chart down for the education revenue because that's where most of the debtors are actually sitting. You've seen that increasing by 13%, and then our group debtors increasing by 5%. A good, nice difference between the revenue growth and the debtors growth. On the right-hand side on the bubbles is what I'm looking at a lot, is the long-term trends on the CAGRs. Education revenue growing at 12.6%, but then debtors increasing only by 10.6%. That 2% variance is definitely trending in the right direction from what we're seeing with regards to recoverability of the fees. I think this great trend, we still applied a fairly prudent approach to our loss allowance provisioning and kept that at the 49% level.
As you can see, the result of all of that is now a 10% debtors balance compared to revenue. Let's maybe go and have a look and see what is the impact of all of this debtors control eventually at the bottom line. Some of the same numbers that you've got in terms of the debtors balance, the loss allowance, but now I've added in what is the income statement impact of provisioning, bad debts write-offs, bad debts recovered. As you can see, we've made a ZAR 37 million pivot from the prior 2024 number to the current ZAR 158 million number in 2025. Just put that in context. Due to debtors control, that's contributed about 5% of our headline earnings per share.
Where we're standing now with regards to credit losses in terms of our revenue, we are now at a 2% level, probably for the first time. That represents that for every ZAR 100 that we are billing, ZAR 2 eventually becomes unrecoverable, which I think is a very commendable number considering the service industry that we're in. My favorite number to look at, especially at year-end, is definitely our fees in advance, because this gives us an indication of how are parents and students experiencing the product and the service they've got, and they're willing to already pay in advance for the next year. Most of our fees in advance is SA schools. You don't get too much on the tertiary side, maybe second, third years that are paying towards that level. An impressive 7% increase on our fees in advance.
Again, the follow-on impact now into the 2026 year, making our cash flow, debtors management, and capital management so much easier, starting with this balance that we already have banked for the full year. Just on a capital structure, we'll be looking at a few cash flow items and then group borrowings. As you can see, the cash flow from operations increasing very much in line with our profitability. For every rand that we put down to operating profit, we're actually putting that down to the cash flow levels at 13%, and that's ZAR 2.5 billion. On the long term, the CAGR is also trending in that exact line of about 15%. This is cash flow from operations.
If we had to bring in the working capital impact, because we've been looking a lot into the trade payables and that whole cycle, the operating activities cash flow is actually 20% up year-on-year. When we now start looking at cash generated versus net borrowings, we can see that the ZAR 2.5 billion has resulted in our debt actually reducing from year to year, and this includes even an acquisition. Group borrowings at this stage is 50% less than what our net borrowings to cash generation was in 2021. When it was 1.1, it's now 0.5. Again, I think, a good testament to the operating leverage that we are able to manage and experience with the businesses that we're growing.
I think this is demonstrated a bit later with the diversification we have in terms of our higher margin businesses contributing towards this cash flow generation, and that will be at the end of my presentation. An aspect we all get a lot of questions on is, of course, the debt-to-equity, which we have a challenge, because the debt-to-equity is keeping on reducing because we're generating some good cash. With that reduction in debt is trending 3%-4% per annum less, even if we are leasing a lot of our other properties, which we include in our total debt.
For context, I've also added some of the big projects that we invested in the past year and, say, would that have made a significant impact or not, whether you spend ZAR 300 million or ZAR 400 million in some of these, and I must say, we must start spending more. I think that's been indicated on some of the investment projects that we are tracking, which you've seen that there's a lot of sites that will be coming on board, from the 2028 financial year. We've been quite busy in the past year with our investment committee in approving quite a lot of projects. Maybe just a few slides on capital structure. This is one that we've always shown, just the categories of what we spend money on.
I'm not gonna dwell on it for too long, but you can see the three major graph bars are indicating a lot of expenditure on increased capacity, whether that's on sites, whether that's acquisition, whether it's the new tertiary sites. To maybe give you a bit more of a strategic allocation, I've split it up in a bit of a different way. That is to just take it down to capacity increasing, maintenance, and product enhancement. When I refer to capacity increase, that's actual classrooms, bums on seats that gets created at our schools and tertiary sites, which we can bill additional revenue for. That's what I refer to as capacity increase. Maintenance is maintaining our ZAR 7 billion worth of fixed facilities and replenishing those assets. That's not just the hard, can I say, property, plant, and equipment.
This is also replenishing of IT equipment, vehicles, et cetera. There's a third category that I call is product enhancement. These are improving our current facilities for better extracurricular experience, better academic experience. You don't always get additional income for that, and that is to sustain your brand and your product. Examples of these could include AstroTurf hockey fields, under-roof swimming pools, et cetera. The bottom line I'm trying to make is that in the past two years, we're spending 60% of our total CapEx on increasing capacity for the enrollments that you've seen is growing through. It's important that we spend that money well in advance, being able to absorb the capacity. Last year, shareholders asked us to start evaluating ourselves on the return that we get from all capital providers through the ROIC principle, return on invested capital.
I'm pleased to announce that we've got a 16.4% measurement on that, which is an approximate 4.5%-5% premium on our weighted average cost of capital. I think my biggest achievement, I think, for the full year is definitely the return on equity now getting above the 20% level, and I think really on par with some of the higher performing listed companies that we have in South Africa. Dividend. Yeah. Our dividend policy has always been to pay 50% of our normalized earnings per share, based on a 40/60 split at interims. We've exactly aligned to that dividend policy, with a full year growth of our dividend of 17%, which is very well in line with our interim increase of 16% that we published in August.
However, when we maybe just look at a 5-year trend, important to note the change that we had in the dividend policy going from 2022 to 2023. You see that big jump there from a full year dividend of 60 to 87. That's mainly driving your CAGR, as at this stage, of 24%. Our current increase of 17% less than the CAGR, but there was a big change in the dividend policy two and a half years ago. Maybe just on the investor dashboard. Some questions we're getting, I thought maybe just put a slide together and look at a few aspects that's coming through. I think the first prominent aspect has been diversification. What is that gonna yield for our group margins? I thought of setting down the operating profit for the last 5 years, as you can see, per division.
Let's see if we can get a view on a trend of where that's going. The SA schools business, of course, very stable at a 35% level. Again, a foundation, because these students we have in our family for a lot longer period. Then you see the emergence of the schools rest of Africa doubling in the last three to four years. Of course, tertiary again on the up in the last two years. We've got a stable contribution from SA schools, increasing contribution from rest of Africa and tertiary. Let's maybe just map that to the operating margins that we have in these divisions. The increasing contributing divisions have got the higher margins of nearly 34% in the Africa schools and 27% in the tertiary side.
Just based on this trend, I do see that we are going to be increasing our group operating margin because of that's the growing businesses that we have. Linking it back to our capital structure, there's currently no limitations that we have on investing in any of the industries as long as it meets our internal benchmarks and hurdle rates. Getting to the investor metrics, how have we been able to make ADvTECH attractive for our prospective investors? I quickly went back and looked at our total shareholders return as at 28 February, probably 27 February. A lot has changed from the 28th of February. 24% on a full year, one year basis. You look back three years, 140%. Who would remember that 36 months ago, our share price was still ZAR 18?
Market cap at this stage is ZAR 22 billion, and depending on where the pound exchanges, we are already on a ZAR 1 billion market cap. One thing that makes me proud is definitely our liquidity. Again, looking at the volumes of trade on our share, quarter four 2024 versus quarter four 2025. Even as of yesterday, we're now at close to 500,000 shares per day trading, which is a 36% improvement on liquidity and representing nearly ZAR 19 million worth of shares traded daily. I've covered return on equity at 20.6% and then also cash flow at 0.5 on the cash generation to borrowings, as well as the debt equity currently sitting at 39%. Thanks, and back to Jeff.
Okay. Thank you, Hannes. I'd just like to close with a couple of slides before we move to the Q&A. As shared previously, we have two ambitions, to lead in every market segment in which we choose to operate and to become the employer of choice in the education and resourcing sectors. Today's slides have hopefully demonstrated that we're making good progress on both fronts. Regarding our second ambition, I'm delighted to report that our Emeris division has just picked up a national Top Employer award, and we intend to make this the first of many. Then a quick reminder of our strategic imperatives. I won't run through them all, but again, I think we're making solid progress on all fronts. Finally, from a prospect's point of view, this slide remains as relevant as ever to our market position and priorities.
Let me end the presentation here and invite Hannes back up so we can take some questions. Is there a question in the room? I just need to get a microphone across.
Sorry for sitting on the other side of the room. Keith McLachlan from Element Investment Managers. Two questions. The first one's perhaps a little bit softer, but I just want to understand the Emeris brand. Why Emeris, what does it mean? That's a big rebranding or consolidation of brands and understanding the thinking behind the brand would help. Second of all, if you have a look at your enrollments, the number of enrollments leaving for financial reasons has also gone up. First of all, congratulations on the good debtors management. That's been a challenge going back about since the start of COVID. If you have a look at your enrollments, the number of enrollments leaving for financial reasons has also gone up. There's an interaction between those two things. How much are you chasing away potential enrollments in order to manage these debtors? Where is the optimal balance between the two?
Okay. Well, I think the combination of six brands and that complexity with the IIE that I mentioned earlier, we needed to address. I think we have taken those six brands down to effectively two. Emeris, I think, is a much better name than Varsity College, which I guess was the lead. It is a wordplay, but suggestive of academics and aspiration. There is a longer story behind it, but that's the essence. I guess from the other point of view, in terms of chasing enrollments, I think we've done a lot of work to try and balance effective collections and maximizing enrollments. We think that's in the right space. There's no point having enrollments if parents are unable, under any circumstance, to pay. I think Hannes has done some really good work, particularly over the last year or so in that area.
I don't know if you want to comment on that, Hannes? Fair enough.
Keith, yeah. That difference of about 300 students and representing about 1% of the base. We looked at a trend and saying, what is the carryover balances that parents do have from the end of the year, and what is their ability to pay that high fee then in the next year? We did have to have a cut-off point. I think it is a big step change that we have now for 2026. I think the parameters are now set, and I think parents will now be able to be guided by that in the year coming. I'm not too concerned about it. I think we're more than able to now manage our total group of debtors much better by giving some good guidance on what are carryover balances.
Thanks. Will we take an online question? Yusuf, go for it.
Thank you, Jeff. The first question, and perhaps a few of them may have had similar questions. Can you elaborate on how ADvTECH intends to counter the 1% growth in SA schools and slight 2% organic growth in rest of Africa?
Okay. Yeah, I mean, I touched on this in the presentation. I think we are being tighter on debtors, but I think that's the right decision and that's not going to change. I think the issue, and this is a market-wide issue, of parents who are under financial stress prioritizing private high schools over the pre- and the preps is something that we're looking at. Hannes is actually leading a team across the business to look into understanding that better and addressing it, and that's something that we will do. The other problem is, and you look at aggregates, and we have an 84% utilization of built capacity, but that's obviously a mix of some schools where we are out of capacity and some where we have more. There are a small number of schools where we have excess demand that we can't accommodate.
We are looking to build where we can to address that problem. In Africa, and again, I mentioned it in the presentation, we are running almost full in our schools. That 93% utilization includes the headroom that we've got in Runda, which we just acquired. We are very tight. The challenge there is to acquire more schools and more space, which on the one hand is a good problem to have, but something that we're very focused on. Capacity increases, addressing this trend in South Africa towards prioritizing high school education, and I think continuing on the track that we've established, in terms of debt management.
A question on the capital commitments. There's a big increase in capital commitments from ZAR 1.29 billion to ZAR 2.78 billion. Could you give us an understanding of some of the larger projects? Following on from that, is there any need for refinancing of the debt facilities? Do you want to share that one?
I'll take that one. Yeah, as mentioned, 2025 was quite a busy year in terms of our investment pipeline. We approved in excess of 5 new school builds. We approved the Emeris KZN, just some of the bigger projects. A lot of that capital expenditure for the school builds and as well as the Emeris KZN is only coming through in 2027. You're gonna start seeing quite a lot of CapEx being spent in 2027 and 2028. We're not always able to approve a project and immediately start investing on it. You buy the land, you build phase one, and you only spend two-thirds of your total investment on a school in your first three to four years. That's just the pipeline that you're building up. Yeah, that's definitely the demand that we see in a lot of our brands.
With regards to financing, I think everybody agrees that our debt to equity ratio can definitely be more geared. We do have adequate facilities for that over the period. It's not that the debt is incurred all at once. It is actually incurred over a period. At the same time, we're probably generating, at this stage, in excess of our current capital expenditure, ZAR 5 million-ZAR 600 million anyway. Yeah, I think go for it, Yusuf.
This is also quite a follow-up question, but is the group still having appetite for additional acquisitions? What markets or assets are likely to be of interest?
Yes, we are definitely in the market for acquisitions, obviously subject to a pretty lengthy list of criteria. That applies to South Africa, but also to our African markets. Our strategy in Africa is to build out our mid-fee brands. The International Schools Group that I mentioned with the new branding, Crawford as the premium schools brand, and Rosebank as a university brand. We would like to expand those three in Ghana, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Botswana.
Hi. Kumo from FNB Wealth and Investments. Firstly, congratulations on another set of strong results. Just two questions from my side. What's been the biggest drag on the resourcing business in, well, specifically in South Africa over the last few years, and what has changed? What have you guys done? The second one is just your building of your residential offerings in the tertiary space. In the foreseeable future, do you guys have that offering across other campuses, or currently is it just in KZN? Thanks.
Yeah. I think the biggest challenge in the resourcing SA business, which is admittedly a very small part of the total company, has really been the economy. I think last year we had the overhang of the election the year before, so we've had two very tough years. GDP growth's been under pressure, interest rates have been increasing, and businesses have been reluctant to hire. It's been a tough set of market conditions to navigate. I think they are possibly improving slightly, but the team have done a great job of driving efficiencies and cutting costs, and that's helped us to bring that business back to profitability. In terms of residential offerings, what that does for us in the tertiary space is it effectively extends the catchment area for a university campus. It's attractive from that point of view. We want to focus on education, not running residences.
I think partnerships, especially where we own suitable land, are of interest because it should allow us to expand student numbers. That's the focus going forward. It hasn't been historically. We're very light on residences generally, but we do see opportunity in the right circumstances going forward.
Maybe a follow-up on the resourcing division. It's looking increasingly strategically misaligned. What are the future plans on that division?
We've never had that question before. Listen, our forward focus is most definitely on education. It's 95% of our operating profits and where we expend most management time. That said, I think we've had a very well-run resourcing business, particularly the Africa resourcing payroll management business, and it continues to make a significant contribution to operating profit. Let me leave it at that. Our strategic focus is education, and we'll look at all options going forward regarding resourcing.
Question on the ROIC. The past two years, we've heard about 60% of CapEx focused on capacity increases, and therefore ROIC hasn't increased as much. Can you please share what the incremental ROICs we can expect in the long term and the key drivers of that?
We'd love to know.
I can't give you my forecast, but it is positive. Considering our operating leverage that we have in our current business, at the end of the day, you've still got to look at 119,000 students and that growing, and we're getting operating leverage on it. A lot of your CapEx is now for the 13,000, 10,000 that we're adding on. I do think that our base is big enough to absorb a lot of the J-curves that we're investing in. I can't give you exact number, but I am positive that ROIC will keep on improving. The only time it really, I think, is going to have a big impact is when you start getting to significant acquisitions or builds like an Emeris KZN. Something significant, ZAR 1 billion plus. You've got to go quite big, considering the base that we're in.
Yes, there will be small blips on a school, maybe within a division, but at the group level, I think we're now at a fairly sizable size that the J-curves doesn't impact us so much.
Can you give an indication of the average fee increases for schools and tertiary?
For this year just passed, we'll assume. We're averaging around 5%-5.5%, varies a bit by brand. Having done some post-analysis, it looks as if we've taken below-market increases, and that's our intended position.
Okay. The rest of these questions are more or less unrelated, so I'm just gonna run through them. The Star Schools JV, can you give some insight on the challenges in that segment resulting in the impairment?
Thank you, Neil. The Star Schools business is mainly focused on matric rewrites. As you've seen in the trend with the public sector as well, matric pass rates increasing and improving over time. The public's also offering that matric rewrite service anyway. Finding it very difficult to build a private business in that market. For that reason, we were prudent to rather start looking at what is the realizable value of that investment. It's a small ZAR 6 million impairment that we raised in the current year.
This question goes back to a previous one. The SA Schools fee growth appears to be in excess of inflation. Have you looked at how that is potentially affecting the enrollment growth?
Yeah. Inflation's obviously been on a fairly sharp downward track, though let's see what it does with the oil price spiking. We have taken increases that are below education inflation, somewhere above CPI. CPI is maybe not wholly representative of our cost base, but we are endeavoring to make our fees as affordable as possible to drive enrollments. Just balancing exactly where we sit in the cycle between when we set the fees, when we collect them, and what the official inflation rates are.
Next question is, given the strong growth in the rest of Africa segment, can you help us understand how the group looks at currency risk across the African operations and whether there's any hedging employed?
Yeah. I'll maybe just cover that quickly, and then we'll pop to you, Hannes. I think in this last year, we have had an adverse currency impact in the Africa division. In rands, we performed very well. In local currency, we performed extremely well. We managed to absorb that currency impact in 2024. I'm sure you want to expand, Hannes.
Just to repeat on some of the previous principles we've covered. Our Africa business is all funded and incurred in local currency, whether it's the capital expenditure, teachers, revenue, et cetera. When you're in country, you don't have that significant risk, only once you start consolidating it back into the South African rand for the group reporting purposes. We've also kept a lot of the cash in these African operations, although they might be changed into dollars. All of that cash was made available to buy our Regis group acquisition. We are currently treating the whole Africa portfolio as a bubble on its own. If there is an opportunity that's big enough and it needs funding from South Africa, we're happy to contribute as well, but very cash generative and not extracting those funds, theoretically, to South Africa for payment of dividend.
It's used for the expansion of our Africa business.
Could you give a bit more color on the strategy behind the Waterfall School of Business?
Okay. Oxbridge, which we transitioned to Waterfall, is a vocational, and it was a paper-based entity doing generally short courses. We looked at whether there was equity in the name, and there was very little. In fact, there was a view possibly that there was negative equity in the Oxbridge name. We wanted to give it a clean sheet and a fresh start. We've digitized all of those paper-based courses, and that's a big step forward for us. We've overhauled the marketing, and I think the Waterfall name is far better than Oxbridge, and also a much better fit with our Rosebank brand and our future plans. That was the thinking there.
Thank you. Can you please discuss the competitive positioning across the brands and how competitors are reacting to the new brands and capacity increases?
Well, if we look at reported numbers and we look at our own growth, then it's pretty clear that we're gaining significant market share. I guess the competition will be aware of that and reacting to that. Those brand changes and simplification are definitely benefiting us. I guess if we really want insight into what the competition are doing, we should go and ask them.
Okay. Will the Middle East war, if it persists and results in inflation increases, have an impact on the business, perhaps a shift towards lower price distance learning?
Yeah. I think the oil crisis could drive inflation. Hannes actually had a very interesting stat looking at the possible impact there. I don't know if you wanna share that one, Hannes?
Yeah, I think as we all saw the article, maybe in the last week in News24, for every rand that the petrol price increase, we have a 0.4% CPI increase. It looks like we're heading for 2% CPI increase, if I look at the petrol price increase for next week.
Yeah. I think if inflation racks up, then that puts pressure on interest rates. I think we were all looking forward to an easing cycle that may not happen. It may need to go in the other direction, and that puts the whole country under economic pressure. We've never had a demand problem in our education business. What we have is an affordability challenge, and anything that puts parents under strain is clearly bad from that point of view. We hope that that conflict is resolved quickly and the short-term impact unwinds. Any negative economic impact will affect our business.
Thank you. The question is, what sort of margins do you consider sustainable in tertiary?
Yeah. We're going through an intense growth phase and some pretty big J-curves on new builds. On the one hand, you've got operating leverage, and on the other hand, you've got a number of new sites. I think balancing those, it's having a mitigating effect on margin improvement in the short term. I mentioned the half point impact of the new Ghanaian university in the presentation. I think as that unwinds, we definitely have potential to further grow our tertiary margins.
Thanks. This should be the last question. Have you seen or do you foresee the emergence of AI having a positive, negative, or mixed impact on education in general?
Yeah, we think it's positive. I think we're using it to support better teaching and learning, and through proprietary systems to edtech like AdVilla. It's driving better experiences for kids. It's allowing us to communicate in different languages and to give better support. There are a huge number of streams of work happening in that area. Generally, I think it allows us to provide better and more differentiated support to our students and also more efficiency in our operations. We embrace it.
Yeah. There's no further online questions. Thank you.
Okay. Anyone else in the room?
Hi, Geoff and Hannes. Congratulations on a very strong set of results. This is Frank Thompson speaking, a former CEO. I just thought I'd observe on your last comment regarding the achievement of the maximum or optimum margins for tertiary. It's always my view that the ultimate margin comes just before you go X growth. You always need an appropriate percentage of entities that are marching up the J-curve, and therefore, not yet achieving optimum growth as you continue to roll out new investments. I think that question about the maximum margin for tertiary is a double-edged sword because achieving a maximum might mean you are X growth and no longer achieving further growth into the future.
Yeah. No, I think that's a very fair description, Frank. As I mentioned, we're balancing the growth impact with the operational leverage impact. Ideally, we'd like to see those in harmony as we continue to grow our student numbers aggressively. Okay. Are there any other questions? Okay. In which case, thanks for your attendance. We have drinks and snacks outside. Don't forget those Capsicum goodie bags before you leave. Thanks very much.