Capital Markets Day.
As the welcome has already been covered by the opening video, my job then is just to say good morning to you all in the room. Good morning to you here, as well as the stakeholders, of course, who are joining us online. My name is Fifi Pieters, and I am truly excited to be here at Remgro's Capital Markets Day, for the very first time this year as your MC. I have had the opportunity to make a couple of friends in the finance and the Investments industry in the past 15 years that I have been a Journalist, a Financial Journalist here in Africa.
When they have invited me to their various offices, a common thread and feature amongst all those offices are the various TV screens and computer screens in which, of course, they monitor all the market-moving headlines that are impactful on investment decisions, headlines from the CNBCs and the Bloombergs, as well as Reuters. I think you'd agree with me that there was a time when being away from the office for the day to attend a Capital Markets Day in the week of a holiday, particularly the Easter holidays, was not seen as very much of a big deal. I mean, not much was expected to happen in those times. I think you'll agree with me and say that things have changed and things move quickly nowadays.
I don't know about you, but I'm certainly struggling to keep up with the news headlines that are coming out from all over the world, especially from the news machine that is the White House that seems to be generating content faster than ChatGPT generates responses to any questions that you may give it. Ladies and gentlemen, I have taken it upon myself to not only be your MC for this morning, but also to be your guard of breaking news, and especially the kind of news that can move markets and particular stocks, the kind of news that perhaps maybe the management at Remgro might not be too happy about, or even yourselves as investors may not be too happy about in terms of what it does due to the discount net asset value that the stock currently trades at.
I'm saying this so that you guys can essentially and comfortably concentrate on all the market developments here, because the breaking news, I've got you, so you don't need to worry about that. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to just point out to some housekeeping rules before we begin. Many of you would have seen the lavatory ladies on the left and the gents on the right, except the seating is quite difficult. And if you haven't been, I don't know, but if you don't mind being that person who, you know, makes everyone's face turn as in the airplane and when asking to go to the seat, be that person. Can I just ask you that you do it quietly and in a manner that's not too disruptive?
There will be a couple of breaks, as you know, and I just would like to point out the smoking area. It is a designated smoking area. It is outside. You will identify it by where the black bin is, and the black bin has a particular smoking sign. Please, can you relieve yourselves there should you need to smoke during the breaks? Also, I've been told to let you know that the presentations that you will be seeing today will be uploaded online, so you can take comfort that you'll have plenty of nighttime or weekend reading should you need. On that note, there is a safety briefing that needs to happen and essential signing of an indemnity form should anything happen. This place is covered. I would like to welcome Ms. Siswa, who will be taking us through that safety briefing before we officially begin. A warm applause, please.
Thank you so much, Fifi. A very good morning to each and everyone. Once again, welcome to Erinvale Estate Hotel. My name is Ms. Siswa. For those guests that are returning, I just want to say, welcome home. You all know who you are. I just want to go through the safety briefing. As you came in the front door, that is our main exit door. Please do not run, as they always say, and I will be here to make sure that you do not. On your left, you have the first exit door. All the doors do open up to the outside. You have the middle door as well, as well as the one on the right-hand side. Assembly points are at the parking lot on the left-hand side. We also have one where the smoking area is designated.
Our team members will be on standby, should anything happen. Thank you. Enjoy the conference.
Okay, now that we all feel safer, I hope that we do, let's get on with the conference. I'd like to welcome on stage the first representative from the Remgro team who will be addressing us today, a lady whose career has covered quite a number of significant corridors in the investment landscape since she qualified as a chartered accountant. During the height of the pandemic, she indirectly, in my view, answered the Thuma Mina call and followed the then chair, Jabu J.T. Ferreira Mabuza, to the utility to act as his chief of staff. May his soul continue to rest in peace, of course. Shortly after that, she would embark on a new chapter in her journey here at Remgro as an Executive of Investments and Stakeholder Relations. It is in this capacity that she will be addressing us this morning.
Can we give another warm welcome, please, for Ms. Lwanda Zingitwa?
Thank you, Fifi, for that kind introduction. Is that good? Good. Good morning to everybody. Firstly, again, a very warm welcome to all of you that are in the room here at Erinvale this morning and to those that are joining us online. We know that days like today are a significant time commitment on your behalf, so we are truly grateful for your interest, not only in Remgro, but in our investee companies. I must say we are even more grateful given all the very colorful, captivating, and some anxiety-provoking events of the last week or so. I must admit, I worried a bit about whether we would have everyone's capacity to engage today. I am very relieved to see such a good turnout this morning.
Fifi spoke a little bit about fast-moving headlines, and I think, you know, we can all appreciate the amount of uncertainty that corporates have to operate within or against. In spite of that uncertainty, we as a Remgro team have deliberately chosen to focus on the controllables, and this is something that Jannie spoke to briefly at our results last month. Of course, we are not blind to potential risks. In fact, we are very acutely aware that the world we live in today is not just volatile and uncertain. It's certainly explosive. I want us just to focus on what we're about today just for a few hours and hopefully we'll achieve our purpose. Maybe just to set the scene, I'll ask us to look at this short video clip.
Remgro was started by Dr. Rupert as a tobacco company. He was one of the first successful South African businessmen that actually enabled the company to expand overseas. It was built on a few principles that are still enduring today: partnership, you can't do some of these things alone, integrity. How did it evolve today? We actually run a list of portfolio investments. Yes, things change, time changes, but we are still very much based on those principles.
This has been, I suppose, two features to the portfolio transformation, and both of them were aimed at creating more scarcity in the portfolio. The first feature was that we unbundled our exposures to RMH and RMI, and no question that unlocked a huge amount of value. The second feature was taking private, a number of our larger exposures with partners. As we have moved from mostly listed portfolio to mostly unlisted portfolio, it is much more possible to be agile and nimble and pivot to make quicker changes.
Someone said that a stamp, the old-fashioned stamp, has got a unique characteristic in the sense that it sticks to one thing and one thing only until it reaches its destination. I think that's been our experience with Remgro as a shareholder. In terms of us walking this journey of a turnaround process, they were there with us. They identified, I think, a team that they could back. We obviously got them, they got us. On the back of this journey, we found success with Remgro as the partner.
Over the last three years, we've really been on a process to bring the focus closer back to our core, to simplify our business. I think Remgro has been very supportive in this process also to exercise capital discipline to either dispose or discontinue some of the ventures which weren't that successful. The amazing thing is through this simplification and the focus on our core business, we were not only able to revitalize and reignite the growth in our core businesses, but we were also able to get a much stronger top-line to bottom-line conversion.
We started off pretty much from scratch 14 years ago, and Remgro was our partner. Remgro had the foresight to identify infrastructure as a key area for future investments. Nowadays, we see infrastructure being so topical wherever you go. We made a calculation the other day of up to about ZAR 15 billion we were able to mobilize into infrastructure in Africa.
We know how tough it is to be an entrepreneur. Our full focus is to be a great business partner to the leader of each of the investments that we're involved in, to help those guys scale their businesses as effectively as they can. An example is fieldbar , which is a high-growth young business in the outdoor living space, where we've helped the founder and his team to address all the typical challenges. In particular, we've helped them from an IP perspective in fighting scam sites and cheap copies coming in from China.
We think that Africa has really incredibly strong entrepreneurs. What Remgro brings is patient capital and a real ability and a desire to partner with entrepreneurs to build and grow businesses.
As Remgro, what excites us the most is the earnings momentum that we're delivering at this moment. Overall, I think the portfolio is well balanced and giving us good growth exposure. Especially for your shareholders, I think the earnings momentum and the dividend growth will be quite exciting in the next few years.
As you've heard, our theme for the day talks to how we reignite growth in our portfolio through various partnerships. You've heard on the video earlier and the one that just played, and you'll hear throughout the day how we think about the concept of partnership. Some examples have already been shared by some of our management teams on this video, and we'll continue to share more examples and demonstrate why we see partnership, in fact, active partnership as a key ingredient to our growth story. Maybe to outline the agenda for the day, which you would have received, and that should be on our screen shortly, the agenda is divided into three segments. The first one will be the Remgro team that will take us through a number of topics that should hopefully give us a good view of our strategy and investment thesis.
The remaining two segments will be taken by two of our key investments, Mediclinic and CIVH. Ronnie and his team at Mediclinic will unpack their strategy and do a deep dive into their business, which should hopefully answer some of the pertinent questions that are already in your radar. After lunch, Pieter and the CIVH team will do the same for CIVH. You will recall at the last Capital Markets Day in 2021, which happened to be our inaugural one, the team provided detailed insights into the business at the time. Of course, this was three years ago, so a lot has happened since then.
Today, the team will give you a brief update on some of the outstanding corporate actions before they share with you how they're thinking about the business now, the scale of the opportunity, as well as how it hinges or does not hinge on the said outstanding corporate actions. To end the day off, Jannie will come back and give us sort of a run-through and summarize the day. After that, we will get to experience for ourselves what we mean by a multi-category strategy for HEINEKEN. I hope you agree that it is a bar that has been set very high, pun intended, of course. Without further ado, let me introduce the Remgro speakers who do not need much introduction, honestly, Carel and Jannie. Carel joined Remgro in 2022, Carel, and is responsible for investments.
As you might know, he's an investment banker by trade. Although more recently, those of you who were at the AGM and followed the newswires would have known that he has been likened to a movie star. Something about his hairstyle, I'm told. I'm happy to report that even though he might be a movie star, I think the jury's out on that. His investment acumen is definitely good hair diagnostic. On to Jannie. Now, in planning today, we did some of the more customary things like creating short CVs for everybody. Interestingly, when I asked Jannie for his CV, all I got was five, if not three lines. I remember thinking, surely that can't be it. I mean, we're talking about an entire chief executive of a listed company.
Off I went to do a bit of research for myself, and I must say I did not find the CV I was looking for. As I agonized about how we would introduce him and capture some of the achievements and accolades, it suddenly dawned on me that the very brief nature of his CV is probably signaling a man who needs no introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, after all of that, please join me in welcoming a man whose reputation speaks for itself, the Chief Executive, Jannie Durand.
Thank you, Lwanda. We were not prepared for this introduction. You did not warn us beforehand. Thank you. Let me just get my things ready here. Can you all hear me quite well? It is all fine. Okay, I do not have to. Okay, welcome everybody. As Lwanda mentioned, the last Capital Markets Day that we had was in 2021, and I just got reminded this morning that it was raining quite a bit. Luckily, it is not like this today. What we have here today is our three green chairs, and that is in honor of Rory McIlroy that won the Masters last night. That kept me up quite late. Thanks for coming. What we will do is let me just find, get my picture away here. Okay, there.
Just to setting the scene for the day, what I will do is I will actually unpack Remgro's evolution to today, especially focusing on the last five years. Then Carel will talk about how we think about the future, particularly our strategic priorities going forward, and that is commanding our attention at the moment. Maybe just a brief snapshot of the portfolio, just to say why are we actually focusing on CIVH and Mediclinic today. If you look at our portfolio, our total NAV is about ZAR 158 billion. If you look at financial service, comprised 50% of that is really consisting of OUTsurance, Discovery, and FirstRand, and you know those investments well, so we're not covering them. They speak for themselves. Then the industrial portfolio consists of 8%, and that's quite straightforward and simple.
We do not get many questions at the analyst presentations from you, so we thought we might actually focus on them another day. Cash and diversified investment is about 10%-11% of our portfolio. I mean, that is straightforward. If we get to the consumer portfolio, that really consists of RCL, Siqalo Foods, and HEINEKEN. RCL is listed on its own. Sequoia is a monoline business, so that is pretty simple to understand. HEINEKEN, unfortunately, they are in a close period. We would have loved them to be here today, but unfortunately, they cannot. They are actually releasing their quarterly results, I think, later this week. You will probably pick up some of the things that happen in the South African market in that respect.
If we look at infrastructure and the two companies that we're focusing on today between CIVH and Mediclinic, that is actually two-thirds of our unlisted portfolio. I think we're getting a good coverage here today on the unlisted side. Also, what we see a lot is we get a lot of questions on the valuations of those two, CIVH and Mediclinic, and we'll unpack that today, and hopefully we can answer some of your questions regarding the valuations that we're carrying on our books on that. That sets the context. In our presentation, I'll cover points one, two, three, and four, going the journey that we've been on, and I'll talk a bit about our portfolio evolution over the last few years, as well as give you a performance snapshot.
I think, and I'll also try and address some of the questions that you might have in anticipation on the discount and how we see that and how we see that going forward. Carel will address point five and six and look at the work going forward on that side. Our purpose, let's start with to shape the future and partner for South Africa's prosperity. Sometimes these things can be a little bit fluffy, but I think this is really close to us. Throughout the day, you've heard themes as Lwanda has said that link back to our purpose, which we articulate as follows, to shape the future and partner for South Africa's prosperity. I'll just touch on a few words, and I shape the future.
It has always been in our DNA to focus on what we as an organization can do to influence a better outcome for our stakeholders. We believe in being proactive and view these challenges sometimes as opportunities. CIVH is something challenging to South Africa, the digital divide. We saw opportunity and we partnered with people there. Partnership. In 1967, Dr. Anton Rupert wrote a book titled Progress Through Partnership. This philosophy of partnership remains in our DNA today. You'll also see that it's a big part of our theme for the day, and you'll hear it from the current management team. You've heard it from the founding partners on the video, and you'll hear a lot about it more today as we're carrying on. We've got our partners in the room, from Mediclinic and from CIVH. Just on South Africa, future on South Africa.
We are unashamedly Africa-centric in our investment approach. It's a home market. We understand it, and that is where we think we've got a competitive advantage. Then prosperity. We really think if you look at South Africa, there is lots of green juice happening. We really think if we can partner here in South Africa, we can actually give superior returns. A lot of people say things sometimes cannot be done, but we believe things can be done. If you look at the things that we've actually created over the last 77 years as a company, we can show that as a Remgro company can actually deliver on some of these things. Just to break it a little bit down, partnering for South African prosperity on this slide. Remgro was founded in 1948, as you all know, by Dr. Rupert.
In that book that I mentioned earlier, it called us a club of entrepreneurs. We acknowledge that Remgro looks totally different today when it started off as a tobacco company and as a liquor company. We are looking different today, but I think that is we move on with the times and we change with the times, and you can't just be stuck in your current paradigm. We still believe that reinterpreting his vision of a club of entrepreneurs is still valid today. Even in our mature businesses, we actually like our management teams to be entrepreneurial, looking for new ideas, looking for new opportunities. We just don't look for a safe pair of hands. We encourage our management teams to be entrepreneurial in their thinking. That gets us to our partnership. Over our 77 years of history, we have been a founding partner in many successful businesses.
Some of them have been greenfields. Some of them have been brownfields. Great examples is the creation of Vodacom that we started in 1992 or 2003, I can't remember, but one of those years together with an entrepreneurial team consisting of Alan Knott-Craig , Leon Crouse, and Pieter Uys is here today as well. We've also did the development of FirstRand together with the founding partners at RMB. Alongside that, founders of the business, we've also created a lot of value. As we've looked out for the portfolio, we unbundled it. We collapsed control structures. We did it in partnership with our founding partners. Mediclinic, that was incubated at Remgro by Dr. Hertzog as when the first board to hospital to Leipoldt and Panorama was created, some of the first hospitals in 1984. Some of the things that actually we sold, so sold with you. Probably remember Tracker.
We started Tracker as a greenfields operation. CIVH, we really as dark fibre, we started as a greenfields operation. As well as eMedia, it was quite a critical point in time in 1999 when we invested into that because we wanted an independent voice and an independent news channel in South Africa. I'd like to think that over the years, we've been very good at managing this business through their cycles, from our startups through to mature businesses, incubation, value creation. In some instances, when we actually did the right point in time, we also realized some of these assets. Over the years, our portfolio has transformed quite meaningfully. You probably remember when Rembrandt was split up between VenFin and Remgro in 2000, and then it was put back together in 2009 again.
The unbundling of our tobacco interests in 2008, and then the collapsing most recently of our banking and insurance asset in 2020 and 2021, and the unbundling of our larger stake of our FirstRand stake in 2021 or 2020. We believe that illustrating our ability to adapt and respond to the maturity profile of our portfolio has been a defining business feature of ourselves. We have never been dogmatic in thinking about our assets. As I've mentioned many times in the past, sometimes the children have to leave the room. Sometimes they have to leave your house. They have to go to university. They have to actually go and work for themselves.
That is why we do unbundle assets when we do not think we can add any more value to them or they reach a certain profile that we think they are big enough to stand on their own feet. Of course, this has not always been easy, and we had our ups and downs, but we are confident that we will continue to successfully interpret and tweak our model to create long-term value for all the stakeholders in our ecosystem. I am not going to elaborate too much on this slide in detail, but I think if you look at this picture and all the timelines from 1948 until today, you will see a lot of household names on there. The underlying principle in all of that was built on partnerships. Partnerships with co-shareholders, partnerships with management team, partnerships with international companies, as well as with entrepreneurs that we started at.
Important, there are no passive investments there. They're all investments that we actively manage and that we actively manage, as I said. We never made a portfolio investment just for the short term. I wanted to do some opportunistic investment. All of those investments were done with long-term value in the mind as well as being actively involved in them. Let's just look at Remgro, the diversified investment holding company. We got a multi-sector focus. As I've explained, 35 commercial investments in the broader Remgro portfolio. It sounds like a lot, but 10 of them actually accounts for 90% of the value. We always talk about the tail investments. Yes, we are a bit slow, but we want to clean up that tail, and we've committed so publicly, and we will continue to do that. We must find the right time and the right spaces to do so.
I also want to elaborate a little bit on InVenFin. You saw Stuart on the screen there. We have 15 venture capital investments in InVenFin currently. They are mostly in the technology and consumer spaces. We believe that this strategy gives us an important lens into a space of the market that we do not normally operate within, and that is why that team is so important for us. Looking at opportunities, looking at entrepreneurs, getting to know that spectrum, and maybe we might find some of these jewels or gems coming out of that. We have already been very successful in some of them, and we have exited some of them at good IRRs. These investments are relatively small, and although they might not move the needle, one might move the needle eventually.
We don't speak about them often, but if you look today, you'll see BOS outside when we go for some refreshments. Stuart spoke in the video about fieldbar and the value that we've added there. On your desk, you'll also see that I think there's Amajoya sweetsa on there. Just be careful. They're quite addictive. We also believe that we've got a responsibility. The VC market in South Africa is very underdeveloped, and we want to play a role in that, especially to help young entrepreneurs in the South African context. You'll hear a lot about our impact investments. We've got four. Mainly really looking at historical homes, preserving historical homes in not just Stellenbosch. We've got things in Graaff-Reinet, in Tulbagh as well. On the sports field, we've got the Stellenbosch Academy of Sports, Boland Rugby, the Bulls, and the Stellenbosch Football Club.
I just want to elaborate a little bit on Stellenbosch Football Club. In the words of Nelson Mandela, when he said, "Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to the youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair." This club is actually operating on a break-even basis, bringing the communities and people of Stellenbosch together, and we're already producing some international players that are playing for Bafana Bafana. It's a stable club. We're lying third in the Premiership. We've won the Carling Cup late last year.
We're actually playing, I think it's next week, we're playing in Tanzania against Simba in the semifinals of the Confederation Cup of Africa for a team that we've only been involved in five years. I think that is a remarkable achievement. I want to just assure you that we are very careful how we dedicate our people and financial resources, not to dilute our focus, but this thing has been part of our portfolio and our DNA for a long time, these impact investments. Business Partners was also one that we can talk about. I think it's important to know that it's been a part of our DNA. ESG and all of these other things have come later, but this has been part of us for always, and hopefully that will continue like that.
Maybe just to talk about the wider group, if you look at the Pienaar in the South African economy, the Remgro group of companies, we have over 80,000 jobs, and I exclude the portfolio companies from that. We are paying about ZAR 40 billion in annual taxes. Maybe also mention about Business Partners. It's a company, the old KSOK, Small Business Development Corporation. Every year, they create about 10,000 jobs. If you take out the lifespan, they probably created about 400,000 jobs in the South African economy over the last 40 years. Okay, let's just talk a little bit about what is happening in the world out there in South Africa specifically. We're going through some volatile times and a lot of changes. We've got a government of national unity at the moment. One day it's on, one day it's off.
I think what is critically important there is that our democracy is working, that we've got a healthy democracy. Who would have believed in South Africa that we were the coalition government in 2025, starting in 2024, 2025? Who would have believed that we actually voted down nearly a budget, and it's still actually not in place? We will see what happened with VAT. I've said many times, I mean, I don't believe in the increase in VAT. You can just do certain things like stop illegal tobacco smuggling, stop illegal copper smuggling, and you can collect a lot of money. You do not need to increase the VAT. I think it's actually, if you think about it, you compare South Africa to the rest of the world. We've got a healthy democracy, and we can be proud of that.
Yes, we've got our challenges, and we should not be naive and blind about that, but things are happening in the country. I'm quite involved in three work streams. There's a three work stream between South African business people and the government. The one is, as you're all aware, logistics. The other one is energy with Eskom. The third one where I'm more closely involved is crime and corruption. Maybe just on the crime and corruption side, we're running two projects. The one, what we call it, the digital evidence unit, and that will help the NPA to actually analyze cell phones, computers to actually prosecute people. At the moment, as we sit here in South Africa, they can't do it.
We are actually busy establishing a unit with private capital that will actually, on an arm's length basis, contribute to the NPA and actually help them prosecute these cases, preparing the dockets and also briefing the prosecutors. That is going to be critical. The other thing that is critical is on what we call a work stream is to get ourselves off the gray list. They have been visiting South Africa last year, last week. By October, we are fairly confident that we will be off the gray list. What do we do there? We are looking at prosecuting 20 cases. We have already identified the first four of them. I think the first four have already been identified, and they will be prosecuted in the next few months. Hopefully, by October, we can show to the world that we are prosecuting these cases.
We will be off the gray list in October. That was one of the things that they needed. I think just to focus on some of the macro data momentum, interesting enough, as you can see, the tourism numbers are picking up. I think that's because of the reforms on the visa requirements that Minister Leon Schreiber is putting in. Yes, there are green shoots. As I said, we're not naive. We're not blind. We acknowledge the challenges that we face, but we'll now navigate through that. We always take a long-term view. I think at the end, only what I want to say, we are proudly South African, and we're actually proud to invest into South Africa. Okay, let's look at our vision. This is the next slide. Our purpose is the reason we exist.
Our vision is what we aspire to achieve. Our purpose is to shape the future and partner for South Africa's prosperity, as I said. Our vision is to be the trusted investment company of choice that consistently creates sustainable stakeholder value. I know this is aspirational, and we have not always delivered on it. We acknowledge it, and we take it on the chin. I will touch on a few of the ingredients that I think define our end DNA. People always ask us, what does Remgro stand for? I think if you look at this, this is what we stand for. This is what we believe we stand for. This is the message that we want to communicate to you today. We are engaged in active business partners. We are not passive portfolio investors.
Our portfolio is diversified, and we've been on a journey, as you will see for the last five years, to improve the scarcity of our portfolio that you can't access directly. We like to think of our portfolio as defensive, and that requires high barriers to entry. We acknowledge that a lot of our investments are capital intensive, but that also creates barriers to entry. I've mentioned before of our proud history of trusted partnership. To us, this is a very important risk mitigant. We can't do these things on our own. Being able to invest alongside partners or behind a management team helps us navigate our risks better. It is a deliberate part of our investment philosophy. We've got patient capital. You'll hear that quite often today. Perhaps we have time to be too patient, but we've refined our thinking here.
We're happy to be patient for our returns, but we're not happy now to be patient for performance. Performance is a big aspect that we'll be driving. Carel will talk a lot about that later. I think what is important for us, we have a stable shareholder of reference founded in family values with uncompromising priority on our reputation and integrity. I know you've seen this many times, but I just really want to touch upon our portfolio evolution, especially over the last five years, since 2019, when we deliberately started to create greater scarcity in our portfolio. At that point in time, our portfolio was 75% listed. And so you could easily replicate the Remgro portfolio. That had limited appeal to investors. What happened then? We collapsed the controlling structures in our banking insurance assets. As you can recall, that was RMB Holdings and RMI.
We have partnered with two global investors to take private two of our anchor investments, HEINEKEN and Mediclinic. Today, as you can see on that slide, 63% of our portfolio is now in private assets. In 2019, 5% of our portfolio was owned in partnership with global investors. Today, it is 38%, almost 40%. The partner now, as I have said, is MSC HEINEKEN. We often get the question, people ask us, what does a company like MSC bring to the party with Mediclinic? I think the biggest thing is that they actually live in Switzerland. They have a deep understanding of the Swiss market, a deep understanding of the regulatory environment. I must give them credit for, since they have been involved in partners, they have studied the health landscape, they have studied the regulations in Switzerland, and they have contributed a tremendous amount of value for us.
You can see, and we'll talk about Hirslanden later, but you probably saw we had an announcement this morning. We actually gave some guidance on the results for March 2025. If you haven't seen that, you can quickly pick it up on the internet. HEINEKEN, yes, things are not going according to plan. What happened was not what we anticipated. The regulatory environment actually put us in a dark period for 18 months. We scored some own goals, but we think we'll turn it around. It's not when. We'll definitely do it. I can't give you exactly when, but I've got confidence in the management team. I've got confidence in our partners that we'll turn the HEINEKEN situation around. Just to recap, in 2019, we had ZAR 14 billion of gearing. Today, we've got nothing. We have repaid all our debt free at the center.
Yes, look back, portfolio's got greater scarcity. We've got more access to the cash flows. We've got no debt. We think we've also unlocked value through collapsing some of these controlling structures. The downside, and that's what the red arrow is for. Unfortunately, the discount to NAV has increased. I'll deal with that later in a couple of slides later on. Interestingly, just look at our portfolio evolution over the last five years. We've allocated ZAR 80 billion of capital, which is roughly what our market cap is today. More than half of this, actually, 58% of the capital that we've allocated, the sources of that came from the realization of assets, or we unbundled some assets, about ZAR 25 billion of that. What did we use it for?
If you look at it, 32% of that, if I could correctly, we've actually returned to shareholders by unbundling, really FirstRand and Grindrod. We have actually made investments of about 20%, and the majority of that, 95%, was follow-on investments, especially amongst HEINEKEN and Mediclinic and so forth. We have 19% of that we have paid out as dividends, or we did share repurchases. If you think of that, we think it's a quite efficient way of allocating the capital. 50% we've returned to shareholders, 20% we've made for investment, and 20% we use for de-gearing, reducing the debt. 90% of the capital we allocated has actually gone back to shareholders or to the banks and into investments. Just looking at the performance, and we will first acknowledge that this is not always a great slide, but maybe just to put it into context, not many.
If you start comparing ourselves or IRR to peers, if you look at that 14.1% over a period, and you compare it to the rest of the market, 22.3%, 19%, and I think about 18%. I think what's important to notice here on this slide, the only point I want to make is unbundling is actually what they when they actually calculate those IRRs. I assume that you take your FirstRand share, you sell it, and you reinvest it into the Remgro shares. That's not what happened. Nobody does that. They actually keep those FirstRand shares, they actually keep those Grindrod shares. If you do the calculation, then our IRR goes up to 20.5%. Short term, we're doing quite well, but I think over the long term, we acknowledge that we're not where we want to be, and we need to rectify that.
Just the next slide quickly on dividends. You can see a steady dividend growth. We're quite happy about that. What you will see for it is that the increase in the dividend, as we get more cash generation at the center, we actually want to increase the dividend yield. We're confident that we'll be able to do that, and we'll become a good dividend player going into the future. Let's call it the elephant in the room. The NAV remains quite stubbornly high. Interesting to note, if you look at those two things when the discount widened was when we did those unbundlings, and when we also did the unlocking of value at RMI. The discount closed, and as soon as we did the unbundlings, the discount went up to about 30%, 40%.
When we did the collapse of the RMI structure, also the discount increased. Sometimes you do these corporate actions, and you do not anticipate the outcome. Clearly, what we can see when we did those things, yes, the discount widened. Maybe it is because people do not understand our portfolio and so forth. Let us just face the fact that is what happened when we did those two corporate transactions. Just on the right-hand side, people say our discount is high because we overvalue some of our assets. We thought it is quite useful just to give you an idea of when we compare it to the peers in the market of how we value the businesses. I will not spend too much time on Mediclinic. I will do a little brief introduction when Ronnie comes up and when we will actually unpack our valuation a little bit more.
If you look at it from a CIVH point of view, as you can see, the multiple has come down. The peer multiple, that's those red arrows that you can see there on the screen, is actually higher than what we value CIVH at. Similar for Siqalo. InBev, as you can see, also a little bit lower than what we value the peer multiples. I think I always talk about we're growing into our valuations, but what is important to realize, remember what we use is what we do in a bottoms-up approach. We use DCFs. What it shows you is that our models are working, that our models are accurate, and that we're actually performing according to our DCF models. That is why we think our valuations are fair and reasonable in that respect.
Also, maybe important to notice, the peer set at this stage doesn't actually put a premium on for control or access to the cash flow. You would anticipate them to be a little bit higher than ours in that respect. Okay, my last slide before I hand over to Carel. Why do we think there is still a discount? We spend a lot of time thinking about it, and people can talk about it. Tax or head office cost. We're not actually producing the right valuations. What we think is it boils down to performance of three assets at this point in time. HEINEKEN, Hirslanden, and CIVH. At this moment, they contribute nothing to our earnings. They don't pay dividends. They're actually not helping our earnings profile at this stage. That is why there's such a huge focus on that.
Twenty percent of our portfolio is not contributing. As we sit here today, it has changed now if you probably look at some of the Hirslanden results this morning. That is the bottom line. On top of that, we have two investments. FirstRand, a portfolio investment, and Discovery, also a portfolio investment. Discovery contributes a little bit on the dividend side, as well as FirstRand. We do not account for the earnings as we have done in the past. Immediately after the unbundlings and treating them as portfolio investments, that had a negative effect on our earnings profile. I think we must realize that. The other thing that we must also take into consideration is all three of those businesses have a lot of gearing. We are not uncomfortable with the gearing. We are aware of that.
We've got firepower at the center to support them, but they've got a huge amount of gearing. The operational performance doesn't always translate into the bottom line earnings because of the interest that they're paying at that point in time. I think that is that on the discount. We can discuss it at Q&A. As I said, we're not happy with the discount, but we're not actively managing it. The shareholders determine the discount. All that we can do is make sure that our underlying assets perform well, generate the cash flow, and generate the earnings in that respect. Okay, I'm going to hand over to Carel now, and he can take us going forward.
Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Jannie. And good morning, everyone.
I'm very pleased to have a morning slot before President Trump wakes up, and I have to compete with him for everyone's attention. As Jannie mentioned, I'm going to talk a little bit about looking forward, what our strategic priorities are. You might remember that we used to have five or six of these. In the most recent interim results, Jannie sort of whittled them down to just three, or we sort of distilled them down into these three. The first one of these is active performance optimization. Sounds like a mouthful, but this is really about continuing the path of really active involvement with our portfolio companies and driving performance.
It's about partnering really closely with our management teams to unlock the performance that we know those businesses are capable of, and really sweating the assets that we have, the businesses that we know, and the management teams that we trust. The second strategic priority is strategic capital allocation. Again, this is about the continued disciplined allocation of capital, understanding the trade-offs between different options for allocating capital. We've refreshed our business development capability and focusing on where we have a right to win. Lastly, also, as Jannie mentioned, thinking about the opportunities to simplify the portfolio. The third strategic priority here is continuing our drive to run sustainable businesses. Lwanda is going to talk about this one. It is really our ESG journey. It's something that Lwanda is really passionate about, particularly the G for governance.
We've got Lwanda to blame for bringing all of us together here today, or to give credit for bringing all of us together today. We hear from Lwanda on that third one. To jump into it, the first one, driving active portfolio performance. Jannie explained the evolution of our portfolio over the last sort of five years. With the move from mostly a listed portfolio to mostly an unlisted portfolio, also came the opportunity to change the way that we thought about managing the portfolio. Historically, we've always said that Remgro has a decentralized management style. This is not unusual. If you think about the large global investment holding companies, they often have a decentralized style, including companies like Berkshire. That's a sort of a household name.
Also, I remember reading about John Malone, one of the great asset or capital allocators out of the U.S., and someone once described his business style or his corporate style as being decentralized to the point of neglect. I don't think anyone would have accused us of being decentralized to the point of neglect. There certainly was scope for us to reflect on the fact that with a more private portfolio, the opportunity for us to partner differently with management teams where that's required was possible, and it was possible to make quicker decisions and have a more agile style. For us, this firstly meant somewhat of a change in mindset. Certainly required for us to change some of our internal processes and how we thought about measuring performance. Also meant bringing in some skills that we didn't have, changing some of the structures internally.
I'm not claiming that we've perfected any of this, but I would like to think that we're at a place where we've got a bias for action, and we can move more swiftly to get things done. Maybe the easiest way to illustrate this is by talking a little bit about Rainbow Chicken. If you step back about five years, then Rainbow was a poorly performing business. Revenues were declining year after year. The margins were erratic. If you look at it now, sort of over the last four or five years, there's been a really pleasing recovery in the performance of Rainbow. I want to caveat two important things here. The first one is that I'm really careful not to jinx this and count our chickens before they're hatched.
I think it's fair to say that Rainbow is in a very different place today than where it was five years ago. Chicken is always going to be somewhat of a cyclical business, but this business has fundamentally changed. That brings me to the second caveat, which is that as Rainbow, we deserve absolutely no credit for the operational turnaround in this business. I think what we deserve some credit for is creating the environment within which it was possible to achieve that turnaround. Practically, what does that mean? The partnership initially with RCL to confront with the management team and the board there, the reality that Rainbow and the rest of the branded consumer business really didn't belong together. Competing for mind space, competing for capital, really didn't bring out the best in either of those businesses.
Making the decision then after their strategic review that these businesses need to be separated. That was the first part. The second part was where Rainbow took the lead on recruiting a team that could turn this business around and lead the process of developing a new long-term plan. That was a plan that would need to bridge across the change in ownership from the RCL stable. That led to the appointment of Marthinus and his team. Taking some or supporting that team in some bold decisions, including changing the breed. There were capital requirements. There was increasing the capacity at Hammarsdale and also putting in place some incentive structures that would survive the transition ownership from RCL. There were a lot of things that were required to give that team the support to unlock the value that we believe existed in Rainbow.
Initially, it felt like daily calls and meetings in navigating also the separation itself. Later, those became sort of weekly meetings. I'm sure my colleague, Pieter Low, who's the Chairman there, he still has daily and weekly meetings. For the rest of us, that's sort of now evolved to two hours every month to talk to the team about the KPIs and how we can support them on continuing the path and that turnaround. Again, not saying that we're winning or deserve the credit, but we think this is a good story in illustrating how you really can make a difference by partnering differently and being a sort of a thinking partner to the management team and not just a capital partner.
The second slide I want to talk about, or the second priority I want to talk about, is how we think about the different priorities in our capital allocation waterfall, if you like. At the year-end results last year, we spoke a little bit about this, but we continued to get questions, and understandably. We thought we'd try and shed a bit more light on how we think about these various priorities and how we think about the trade-offs between them. The first one, and I think this will always be the first one on the list, and this list is mostly quite dynamic and things will move around, but I think the first one will always be the top-ranked priority for us when it comes to capital allocation. That's about being able to support the portfolio to provide resilience.
Maybe just to give context to the current posture, Jannie mentioned that we've got a few exposures where we've got a combination of still challenged performance with a relatively healthy dose of debt. Beyond that, we've got the Vodacom transaction that is still unresolved, and that will have capital structure implications. Thirdly, I'm sure you would all agree that the world is upside down, and it doesn't feel like the sort of time when you would push the boat out on capital structure. Those things inform a really quite a conservative sort of posture for us at the moment when it comes to capital allocation. Why is this so important to us? That's the third column that we have there. What's the reason why we prioritize this?
Quite simply, the value destruction, if we were not able to support the companies in a situation of distress, would be really massive. Whether we had to do a capital raising on the back foot or have to sell some assets in a fire sale process, we would destroy a huge amount of shareholder value that would erode a huge amount of trust. That is why that is really important to us. Second on the list is cash dividends. We have always maintained that Rainbow is a solid dividend payer, hope to be a growing dividend payer. Jannie also spoke about that. I think sometimes people ask why we do not prioritize repurchases above cash dividends. I think certainly we feel that cash dividends are important to some of our shareholders.
It might not be important to all of those, but those to whom it's not important can, of course, take the cash dividends and reinvest them, and you can pretty much recreate the exact sort of mathematics of a repurchase. That is why we prioritize cash dividends. Again, if we were not, we think that would be a betrayal of the fundamental sort of tenet of the Rainbow thesis. I think between three, four, five, we probably get into a category where it is less easy, and one should not be too dogmatic about how we rank these. For what it is worth, we gave you a ranking there about how we currently feel about those next three. The third one on the list there is follow on in strategic investments. These things are often situation-specific, and you have to act with sort of the greater strategy in mind.
A good example is Mediclinic. We committed ZAR 4.5 billion, ZAR 5 billion to the take profit of Mediclinic when there was an opportunity to do that. If we did not do it at the time, there might not have been that opportunity at a later time. Again, very specific to the situation. Of course, we were taking into account that strategic component in deciding how we prioritize that. Third one on the list is repurchases. We understand people often would like to probably see this higher up on the list. This is clearly attractive. If you are trading at more than a 40% discount to your NAV, as Jannie has explained, then the opportunity to accrete value by buying back shares is very, very compelling. We put some numbers to it to make sure that we understand the opportunity cost of not pursuing this more actively.
To give you those numbers, the difference between buying back shares at a 40%+ discount, I think it was 42% that we used, relative to, let's say, doing it at a 20% discount, which we think is sort of a normalized discount, translates into roughly 0.3% INAV per ZAR 1 billion that you spend. If we had to do a bumper repurchase of ZAR 5 billion, as some people would like us to do, that probably translates into sort of 1.5%, 1.6% of INAV accretion that we leave on the table. We think that's meaningful. We are very conscious of that. It is sort of not very much beyond the sort of movements that you would see in our share price at any given day.
It is not that big that we feel we can compromise the items that are higher up on that list of capital allocation. We often also hear people say to us, it is not only the impact on INAV accretion, it is also the signaling that is important. We are entirely conscious of this, and we understand the signaling would be really constructive. To us, it is worth pointing out, signaling is a transient thing. It is a temporary thing. The only way in which we believe we will improve on a sustainable and a long-term basis, the rating of the Rainbow share is through underlying performance improvement. That is why that is such an important focus of ours at the moment. Fifth on the list is new investments.
Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that we are not excited about new investments for it to feature this low down on the list. I assure you that we are. We've refreshed our new business development capability. We've invested in research. Certainly open for business. Again, it's a function of the items earlier up on the list being as important as they are, that it only features at number five. This is dynamic, so these priorities will change. Last on the list is the easy one, is debt repayments. The only reason it's last on the list is because we've got no debt at the moment. Jannie explained that this was about 20% of our capital allocation over the last five years. If we had debt, it would have been higher.
You would know that we've said before that we believe in optimizing debt at the operational level. At the operating companies where we can access, we have closest access to the cash flows and the most efficient and cost-efficient way of gearing up. Yeah, ordinarily, if we had debt, that would be higher, but we're certainly not afraid of debt, but we would look to whittle that down when we have used gearing. The next slide, we try to shed a bit of light on where and how size-wise we think about investments. We almost try and articulate here a little bit of the case for investment holding companies or patient capital vehicles in South Africa. We don't think that it's necessary or useful for us to be overly dogmatic about the size of investments that we wish to make.
If you just think about our top 10 investments, then you'll be reminded there are two that are really large, so in Mediclinic and OUTsurance. If you exclude those two, then the next eight all fit within that band of ZAR 5 billion-ZAR 15 billion. Again, not suggesting that's the only place where we would look for investments, but I think it's fair to say that at that sort of level, we feel that it both moves the needle on the one end, but doesn't introduce meaningful more sort of concentration risk at the other end of the portfolio. If you consider that sort of band of opportunities then, and you look at the graph here at the top right of the screen, and you consider the two alternative sources of capital.
We have private equity as a source and then the listed market as the other source. That graph at the top right, what it shows you is that over the last five years, there has not been a single private equity deal greater than ZAR 5 billion. Just to be clear here, we are talking about private equity deals outside of the real asset category. Infrastructure, real estate, renewables or energy, and also mining is also included there. In the more conventional sectors, not a single deal above ZAR 5 billion. If you go back 10 years, sorry, 15 years, in the five years from 2006 to 2010, there were a handful of deals that were bigger than ZAR 5 billion.
Even if you make that cut of ZAR 1 billion, between transactions bigger than ZAR 1 billion, in the last five years, there have been four. In those five years leading up to 2010, there were 11. In my previous life in banking, I actually watched this evolution happen over time. What happened very specifically and very obviously was there was a move down market by the private equity players. If you now speak to the meaningful players in South Africa, they will tell you that the check size is sort of maxed out at around ZAR 750 million. If you double that up for gearing, which is probably quite aggressive, you get to ZAR 1.5 billion. If you say they would club together and do deals in partnership, you can probably get to ZAR 3 billion.
That sort of explains why outside of those categories that I mentioned, there are almost no private equity deals that's happening in the sort of space where I think we could usefully play. If you consider the second sort of source of capital for entrepreneurs and founders, it's the listed market. People are mostly familiar with these numbers. Since the turn of the millennium, the companies listed on the JSE reduced from 650 down to 380. There has been lots of commentary and sort of navel-gazing around why this is. We think it's relatively simple. We think it's an issue of liquidity. No doubt people in the room would have their own views.
If you look at the liquidity of the top 40 companies listed on the JSE, the average daily trade for the average company is just short of ZAR 500 million, so ZAR 450 million. If you look at the companies between that ZAR 5 billion-ZAR 15 billion, that liquidity drops to roughly ZAR 14 million. Again, less than $1 million of trade per day and a very, very meaningful difference in liquidity available in that size of the market. Certainly not enough to attract international investors and arguably not enough to get in and out of meaningful positions. We think there is not a lot of love for companies of that sort of size on the JSE. What we are saying is that within the Rainbow portfolio, there is a lot of love for companies of that size.
That is sort of where we think there is an opportunity, sort of a no-man's land in the South African capital market. The last slide I want to talk to is about sort of where and how we invest. This is quite a colorful slide, but I will ask you not to get too caught up in the different shades of green and gray here. It is sort of meant to be directional. There are three principles that we want to convey here. The first one is that we prefer organic growth to inorganic growth. Marthinus Visser always says this well. He says, "Why would I pay for someone else's goodwill when we can create our own goodwill?" We cannot agree more. The second part is that we prefer investing close to home rather than further from home.
We believe we've got a right to win in countries that we understand, where we've got a network, where we understand the regulations and the whole landscape. The further we go away from home, the more we will rely on partnerships and people that have expertise in those markets. That gets us to the third principle: we value very deeply the risk mitigation that comes through partnering with experts, whether those are people that understand certain regions better than we do or certain industries better than we do. That's a great risk mitigant. Jannie also spoke about that earlier. If you apply those two sort of principles to the blocks on the left-hand side there, we've got investment through investee companies. On the right, we've got investments that we do at the center as Rainbow.
You will see that we feel strongly about organic growth. At home is the strongest value proposition to us. As we go further away from home, we rely on partnerships. You will see the strongest risk-mitigated returns we think is in our home market through organic growth. The weakest risk-return trade-off is doing M&A in sort of far-flung markets. With that, I will hand over to Lwanda to talk to us about our ESG journey.
Thank you, Carel. Good morning again to all our guests in the room and online. Mine will be short and really talking briefly to our third strategic priority, as Carel said, which is really centered around our continued journey of how we want to lead sustainable businesses and invest responsibly. I think before we get into it, we can start by agreeing that ESG as a term and a phenomenon has suddenly become less fashionable than it was perhaps a year or so ago. For us at Rainbow, though, it's never been about fashion. I think we can all agree we are many things but fashionable. It's probably one of the few times I'll ever agree that being non-fashionable is a good thing. In this case, it is. What is it about? For us, it's really about doing the right thing. It's not about acronyms.
As Jannie said, this is something that we've been doing long before the term was coined. We continue to be committed to doing what we believe is right to achieve sustainability in our business and through the portfolio as a responsible investor. What does that actually mean practically? Simply, it speaks to what was spoken at length about a short while ago as being the anchor of who we are. That is our purpose of partnering for South Africa's prosperity. This is essentially what informs our objective and our vision of making ESG and sustainability an integral part of not only our strategy, but our business. Now, with that in mind, our strategy is anchored on these three Pienaars. The first one being sustainable investment stewardship, the second being how we implement ESG across the group.
Lastly, I think it speaks for itself, but how we look to unlock shared value for South Africa and her people. Briefly, I just want to give you a sense of how we think about the Pienaars. Our first Pienaar speaks to being a responsible investor, not only from a Rainbow investment philosophy and criteria perspective, but how we drive and lead sustainability through investment stewardship in the portfolio. Building on that, the second one speaks to driving execution and performance against our stated focus areas throughout the group. Of course, a reporting framework to support that. Lastly, the final Pienaar, as I said, speaks for itself. This is how we unlock shared value through empowering the communities within which we operate. More generally, how we drive socioeconomic development through various partnerships.
Now, these Pienaars are, of course, underpinned by the key focus areas which we have previously shared with yourselves as our shareholders. Over the next slide, I just want to talk through how we then distill all of this into our, call it short to medium priorities as a management team and as a group. On sustainable investment stewardship, I hope that our commitment and efforts on improved and active stakeholder engagement have been evident. Maybe a few proof points that most of you will hopefully attest to. We now have an established cadence of management roadshows with yourselves, not least twice a year. Our non-executive members of the board are now also hosting an annual governance roadshow to meet with investors and discuss areas related to governance. We do believe that this has resulted in some tangible changes as it relates to, for example, alignment on remuneration philosophy.
You've just heard about our commitment to impact investing. As mentioned earlier, this is something that is core to our DNA and really predates the ESG and impact investment trend. I also hope our efforts at better communication and greater transparency, not least through a day like today, but also through our more regular reporting and voluntary reporting, if we look at how we've continued to report Mediclinic results. This morning, we released a trading update, and one of the investors in the room actually came to compliment the level of transparency. It is good that that's being recognized, and hopefully, it's helpful to yourselves as shareholders. When it comes to ESG action across the group, we are partnering with our investee companies to monitor the implementation of different initiatives across the group to improve performance in the key areas I spoke about of focus.
We also have now embedded progress on these in our performance measurement processes, and we're working with our investee companies to roll out a set of key indicators and to improve reporting and disclosure on those. Now, I think we'll be the first ones to admit that we're probably not where shareholders would want us to be in terms of getting to quantitative targets. This continues to be an area of work in progress and a priority for us. The last Pienaar, as I said, speaks for itself, and this is one that we continue to invest our resources and energy towards with a bluffment through different social initiatives. As Jannie mentioned earlier, here we continue to actively partner with all social partners on initiatives and solutions to drive growth and development with the view of alleviating the multiple threats of inequality, unemployment, and poverty.
This is work that we're extremely proud of as a group. On other elements, however, of the social Pienaar, we probably have a little bit more work to do, for instance, on driving transformation of our talent pool across all dimensions of diversity. Again, this is a priority that the leadership team is fully committed to and is being driven in partnership with our diversity and culture team. Before I hand back to Carel, I think the key message here for us is we have a long-term ambition and objective to be a responsible investor and investment steward. Whilst quantitative data and numbers are important and something that we all have a good appreciation for in this room, we believe that the substance is equally important. There will always be more that we can do. Of course, we're committed to continue to do more.
Ultimately, what we believe is that the philosophy of doing the right things and having that embedded in our overall business strategy is what is key. I'm sure that we'll have more updates for you when we engage later this year as part of the governance roadshow just on some of the progress that we've made in the ESG area. Hopefully, what we've managed to do this morning is give you a sense of really how we think about it and what our commitments are, which really speak about responsible investing as a priority. Thank you very much, Carel. Back to you.
There. That just gets me to this last concluding slide to sort of pull together what you would have heard from us. The theme for the day is Partner, Reignite, Grow. Partner, you would have heard that being a trusted business partner is absolutely fundamental to our DNA. To use that quote again, partnering for prosperity, that is part of who Rainbow is. That partnership means partnership with colleagues, with entrepreneurs, with founders, with management teams, with co-investors, with government stakeholders. Partnerships across our businesses is important to how we operate. I hope you would have heard and got a sense for the reignited energy in the team. I think we will be the first to confess the last number of years has been difficult. The corporate actions that we undertook is, to be blunt, it is a distraction to our lives.
I'm sure Pieter didn't mean for me to quote this, but I think he said to me yesterday that he thinks in certain weeks and months, it's taken as much as 80% of the CIVH's management team's time to respond to the regulatory things that they were dealing with. That's just an inexcusably high tax on a business. Hopefully, most of that is almost behind us. You would have heard that we have revitalized the way that we managed our businesses, reignited a new energy bias for action and urgency. We've deployed skills and resources to back that up. Growth is something we feel is obviously super important. You'll hear more from the CIVH team and the Mediclinic team on this later. It starts for us by driving the performance and the growth that's available in the portfolio. Secondly, we prioritize organic growth.
We think that's the best risk that's available for the best returns for the risk that's out there. Lastly, we will continue to consider M&A opportunities. We think there's a really attractive unattended space in the market for us to look at also inorganic growth. That is sort of the story. I'm sure there would be questions for us. I think we're happy to take those now. Lwanda, you can join us.
Can you switch it on? Okay. Can you hear me again? I got a reprimand. I got one in my actually the presentation, the number of jobs created by Business Partners, not 400,000, 720,000. I apologize, Neville, for getting that one wrong. Okay. We can move on to questions.
Thanks, Carel, for joining me.
For the presentation. I think it was a lot to digest for everyone in the room. I think people definitely have a greater appreciation for what our focus is and some of our thinking on partnership as a catalyst to unlocking value. Maybe we'll have a couple of roving mics to take questions in the room. Maybe to start off, Jannie, you invoked Dr. Rupert's Club of Entrepreneurs as a description for what is at the core of Rainbow. I just want to maybe pick your brain on how still true this is of Rainbow today. I mean, it doesn't look like, if I look at what Carel spoke about new investments and the focus there, that there'll be another Vodacom or Mediclinic in the making. Is that label still relevant?
I think it is. As I said, we like our management teams, even if they're operating mature and let's call it sometimes unsexy businesses. We still do be entrepreneurs thinking about growth, thinking about new opportunities. Even entrepreneur, I mean, what does an entrepreneur do? He actually takes risks. He actually willing to take risks. And we actually want our management teams to take risks. Otherwise, they just are safe bearer of events, and that's not what we want. I think on the other side of entrepreneurs, that's why we think we've created that in 2007 in Ventfinn, because we'd like to find the new entrepreneurs out there. Aaron Knot Craig's here. The guys started DFA, so we're looking for them. And that was a big part of Stewart's job at Invent for that. So let's put in those two buckets.
I think we like our management teams still to be entrepreneurial, but we're also looking for the new entrepreneurs in South Africa.
Thanks, Jannie. Maybe linked to that, before I take questions on the webcast, Carel, you spoke about new investments as not having been the most capital allocated to in the recent past. Part of the theme today is growth. How should we be thinking about growth in new investments, new industries? What is next really for Rainbow?
Yeah. I think on that last slide, I sort of touched on that to say that for us, the most exciting growth is the growth that comes from sweating the assets that we have. It is really the first growth that's available to us, and it should be the greatest priority. Across our portfolio, there are really good growth opportunities. Again, you'll hear from two of those today in CIVH and Mediclinic. Absolutely open for business. I think we've articulated that there's a space in the market that's underattended. We think there are lots of assets out there that fit into that space, particularly relatively sort of stale assets that sit in the private equity sort of portfolios. For us, it starts with finding the right teams and finding the right entrepreneurs. If we think about sectors, then we prefer the sectors that we have.
Those are the ones that we feel strongly about. We do think it is more important to pick the right team than it is to invest in a sector that we think is particularly hot or attractive right now. I think if you had to cast your mind back a number of years, I'm not sure how long ago it was, probably 20 years if someone asked you what would be a really hot sector to invest in. I'm not sure anyone would have said, "Why don't we build another bank in this really concentrated banking market?" Yet, 20 years later, they're all Capitec, absolutely amazing business. Maybe it was 10 years ago, if you asked someone that same question, they'd have said, "Secondhand cars, that's where there's a really interesting business." Again, I don't think so.
I think if you have the right team backing and executing on an idea in a differentiated way, I think that's where the really exciting opportunities are to be found.
Again, speaking to partnership, I have a question that I want to take on the webcast. This is relating to insurance. Jannie, David at Fairtree is asking, "Insurance can stand on its own two feet. So what's the rationale for keeping it in the portfolio? How do you view this holding?
I was afraid I might get that question when we talk about unbundlings. I think we still think we can add value to our insurance. I think if you talk to the management team that are our partners there, they think we can add value. I think it's a journey that we've come with them over the last 5 to 10 years. I mean, we were there when they invested into Australia, into the UAE, we were there when they actually divested out of New Zealand. Helping, as Marthinus explained, helping them for some of those capital allocation decisions as a shareholder of reference for them in that business, we think we still add value. I think the journey that we are now with them, specifically in Ireland, is also going to be exciting. We like to be part of that.
Critically speaking, we are also in the business that is out there, actually simplifying those businesses. We are on a journey with them. We are actually looking at some of the business that we are closing down on the life site and things like that. I would never underestimate your own value add. We think we still add value. We still think we are on a journey with them. Some of these things might come to an end. I cannot just say when.
That, Lwanda, to say, I think we can also be candid and say that insurance plays a very important part in our portfolio. We have a number of businesses in different sort of stages of the maturity profile. We believe in our long-term thesis. Insurance plays an important part in generating cash and cash that is available for us to reallocate. I think we can be candid that it is an important part for us in our portfolio.
Thanks. The last one on the webcast before I come to the room, Carel, strategic priorities, you talked about following investments. This is from Raven. Could you maybe talk a bit about the potential opportunities to take RCL private?
Wouldn't be the same if you didn't get that question. Yeah. Lwanda, I think the answer sort of remains the same, that we think that RCL and the minorities in RCL is not a burning platform for us. The question behind the question is really also, is there not a bigger opportunity to combine RCL with Sequoia and to operate that as a single platform? To be honest, the management contract that we have between RCL and Sequoia is really great for both parties. It's great for Sequoia, but it's really also great for RCL. I think through that contract, we achieve much of the synergy that's available between those two businesses. In time, it's probably not perfect to have a 20% minority with very, very low liquidity.
If you had to ask us if that's a huge priority in our lives or something that keeps us awake at night, then it's not. We always think it'd be quite difficult to find each other on valuation there. For the time being, by far the biggest priority for us is working with Paul and Rob and the team on driving the performance at RCL. I think that's gaining great traction. We'll continue to walk that path. We're excited about where we are with RCL. The minorities there, they've been good partners to us for a long time. Yeah, no sort of burning platform there.
Thanks, Carel. Maybe if we can turn and take questions to the room. If we can see a hand, there'll be a mic coming to you. Can we get one over there, please?
Is this working?
Yeah.
Okay. Cool. Thanks a lot for the time, guys. Much appreciated. My name's Dino Constantinou from Investec. And yeah, I've got one question, but it's kind of long. Just kind of listening to the story this morning, it sounds like management of the view that the primary drivers of the discount are the gearing in kind of the three large unlisted assets and the lack of a dividend stream to shareholders, right? If that's fair, we can take the question further. Now it's working. Following on from that, if you're sitting on net cash at the center, is not the best use of that cash to recapitalize these heavily geared businesses? Just how do you think about that would be my question.
I'll start, and maybe you can add.
Yep.
I'll start, and then Carel can add to that. I think what we say, I think, as I said, the biggest reason what we think, in our opinion, is the underperformance of those three assets up till today because of Hirslanden not performing, not contributing earnings. HEINEKEN actually came through some very difficult time. CIVH probably is more a gearing issue in terms of the earnings get diluted through the gearing. I think it's a combination of both the gearing and the operational performance of that. Let's be on that quite clear. That is why it's such a huge focus on actually turning those assets around in terms of the operational performance. I think in terms of the gearing, yes.
CIVH, we can't actually at this point in time, we can't do a capital call-in specifically because we're not sure what's happening with the Vodacom transaction. Let's see how that plays out. I think Pieter and the team will touch upon that quite in their presentation. I'll leave that to them. I think in terms of HEINEKEN to put some more capital into that, we've got a partner there. They must drive that. We've only had an 18.8% shareholder in that respect. I think if you look at the overall gearing profile of Mediclinic and Jurgens, he'll also come back in his presentation on that. We will see the gearing rate actually coming down quite significantly across the group. That is quite positive news in that respect. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Carel.
Yeah. Maybe just one or two comments. I think the first point, Dino, I would make is just maybe we ourselves have been quite loose on talking about those being underperforming assets and they're not generating any income. That is because of the capital structure. Maybe just to be really clear, each of those businesses have different challenges and perform varying sort of performance. Certainly, CIVH has got lots of, it's a very competitive market and competitive challenges, but confident we'll get that right. In the case of CIVH, it probably has more to do with the capital structure and the ramp-up profile in that business. Again, later we'll unpack that story in a lot more detail.
I think we should be careful of talking about performance challenges and distinguish those from sort of a ramp-up curve that was always going to be in that business overlaid with the capital structure. The third one on Hirslanden, again, Ronnie and team will unpack that in great detail. Hirslanden as a hospital is not underperforming or as a hospital business is not underperforming. It provides fantastic clinical care, but the financial returns are not what we would like them to be. Jannie will touch on that again later. I think the more important point we make here is that because the portfolio is relatively complicated, Jannie mentioned 30-odd investments or 35, there's only so much capacity that people have to unpack some of the parts and figure out what all these things are worth.
If meaningful components of the portfolio are not contributing earnings, I think some of that value gets overlooked. We are not saying that accounts for the 20% of the portfolio that does not generate earnings, that accounts for the 20% too wide discount. We think in the end, it certainly contributes. If those businesses were all contributing their pro rata share of earnings and cash flows, we think that discount would be a lot narrower than what it is. Jannie answered the question on why do we not just recapitalize it again. There are options to rebalance gearing within Mediclinic. That would certainly be the first port of call. In the case of CIVH, we have got a Vodacom deal that is live. In the case of HEINEKEN Beverages, that is obviously in the hands of HEINEKEN. I hope that sort of adds up to more color.
Any other questions in the room? Yes, Caitlin.
Thanks. If I can just ask about your thoughts on return on capital. If I look at how you've used your cash in the last year around paying down debt, it would almost imply debt which has cost you sort of 7%-8% is a good return to use cash to pay down debt. I know that's all very theoretical, and there's obviously a risk element to that. I would think the same with Mediclinic and Hirslanden with the very low debt rates and recapitalizing and what it actually means and what using cash, which shareholders otherwise could have gotten a dividend, what that means for improving returns. It seems like there's more just a risk element to it than an actual return calculation. You would think that the gearing would be a very good thing to keep on your balance sheet.
If you could just talk about how you think about the gearing for the group.
Yeah, happy to talk about that. I think it comes back to the principle where we started that we are comfortable to be long capital in this market. We are absolutely conscious that there's a drag on our earnings because of the fact that we are long cash. That is a conscious decision. I do not think it is that unusual. I would be very careful to compare us with the likes of Berkshire Hathaway. They sit on $330 billion of cash on a trillion-dollar market cap. That is proportionately speaking a lot more than ours. I agree, it is complicated because of the insurance business and so forth. Just to be long capital, I do not think is an unusual feature in this market. We think it is important to us to be long capital. Yes, does it create a drag on our returns? It does.
We're conscious that for equity investors, they expect a return from us that probably sounds like a 14% or a 15% to pick a number. If a meaningful portion of your capital sits in stuff that generates 7% or after tax even lower than that, there's a drag. We're completely conscious of that. The way we also incentivize means that that drag, we feel, and we need to make up for it in other assets that then outperform that. It is, as you say, it's a risk allocation thing and needing the resilience and the capital in the portfolio at this point in time.
I think maybe just to add, it gives us optionality as well. I mean, for instance, when the Mediclinic Dr. Carel mentioned it, we had the cash available to follow on the privatization. It gives us optionality, especially in difficult times. Banks always want to lend you money in the good times. In the bad times, they do not.
Thanks, Jannie. Another question at the back?
I'm [audio distortion] . Jannie, can you just give us a yes, a long time ago.
Sorry. I apologize. The lights are very bad here.
All right. Can you just give us a bit of color on what went wrong at HEINEKEN without talking about numbers, obviously, and then why it's not going to happen again?
Effectively, what happened when we concluded the deal, we really went in what we called an 18-month dark period. We could not exchange information. We did not know what was happening in the business. I am just talking now specifically on the HEINEKEN side, on the beer side. They created a few, scored a few own goals. The first thing that happened was they increased prices on some of their products, and they were ahead of the market, so they started losing market share. When we actually did the deal, their market share was growing quite significantly at that point in time. They increased price ahead of the market. Secondly, what happened, huge supply chain issues. What happened there is I think only one of the breweries was working. Two of the boilers got, Pieter, was it two out of three actually broke down. They could not supply.
Suddenly, the volumes in the market, they could not supply in that. They overestimated the market. Once the things got up and running, they overestimated the market of imports. Now they were actually short on local production. Now they are importing things out of Holland, HEINEKEN beer in bottles. Because their market share went down because of pricing, they were sitting with overstock. The more they were selling of the imported beer, the more they were losing because it was cost. What they were selling in the market, the price was higher for what they had to import and what they had to buy HEINEKEN in the Netherlands for that. If you put all of these factors in there, that had a huge impact on the business, on the supply side as well as on the market share side.
Those two combinations actually created that huge losses in that 18-month period. We were shocked when we came out of the dark period, what was actually happening. Why do we think it's not going to happen? Supply chain is actually working quite well. I mean, they've won a prize now for the best supply chain business, I think, in the HEINEKEN stable. The breweries are working well. I mean, record outputs per month. On the whole supply side, Jiaan van Zyl that came out of SAB and worked with Distell, he's in charge of that. We're confident that that is sorted out. Clearly, on the front end, that is where the challenges are. It's not just I think it's a market challenge. Everybody's going for it. It's discounted beer at the moment.
If you walk into the liquor stores, you'll see a lot of promotions happening at the moment. It is a tough market on the front end side. We need to be very astute on that, on the pricing side, on the promotion side of how we compete against some of the AB InBev , or even some of the smaller players on the wine side and the spirit side on the cider side. That is a dynamic in the market that is there at the moment. It is very difficult to predict how it's going to play out forward. We are very close to that.
Thanks, Jannie.
Sorry. You haven't had a dividend for, I think, five years.
Yep.
I think there's still an 80% payout policy. When do you think you're likely to see a dividend resumed?
I think it's difficult to say exactly when. I would hope as soon as possible, but I can't. I want a dividend tomorrow. There are certain challenges in the market in terms of what's playing out in the front end in terms of discounting. I think if you ask me for a while, I would rather reduce the debt sitting in that business as well. I think prepaying the debt as well. I think it's a bit overgeared at the point in time. I would rather postpone the dividend and look at the capital structure of HEINEKEN on that side. The last dividend that we had was out of Distell before it was delisted, unfortunately. That is why it's on the red dot on my underperforming assets. It's hard work for us, and we're going to fix it. Hopefully 2026, 2027.
It is very difficult to predict it at this point in time. It is a very dynamic market out there.
Thanks, Jannie. We have another question from Mikhail.
Hi, everybody. If we hone in on those three loss-making entities that you've called out, thank you for putting it up there and drawing a line in the sand. By when do you think they should contribute profit that you'd be happy with from a perspective of return on equity or price-to-earnings multiple based on what you're valuing those assets at? That's number one, sort of a timeline. Number two is how much of that turnaround is actually just business as usual? It's a function of the business scaling, profits, a bit of debt pay down that happens organically versus something that you'd actually have to do to orchestrate it. It sounds like things are tracking in the right direction in Hirslanden. You've referenced HEINEKEN, the sort of front end or the momentum in the supply chain at least.
Maybe you can just give a sense for how much of it is actually just business as usual versus what you need to do over and above.
Maybe I just want to correct something on Hirslanden. I think if you look at the announcement this morning, what we can confidently now say is Hirslanden is not actually making a loss. It's actually making a profit. And Jurgens and the team can go into that. The momentum is there for sure. I don't want to steal their fun. Let them talk about that later in their presentation on Hirslanden specifically. On the HEINEKEN side, I think I've answered it's very difficult to predict. I'm confident that the infrastructure, to say the supply chain is sorted there. It's just at the front end that we're actually experiencing. You'd rather be a consumer than a producer at this point in time on the beer side. Not just on the beer side, also on the cider side, on the wine side.
You see across the portfolio, you'll see deep discounting happening on the front end. The building blocks are there. It's just a matter of what's happening on the front end side, how that's going to play out. We can talk about CIVH.
Yeah, I was just going to add. I think, Mikhail, we should listen to the CIVH and the Mediclinic presentations to understand the sort of specific things that get us to improve profitability. The stories obviously, they're quite different. In CIVH, a meaningful part of it is the sort of saturation of the network that drives profitability. That is in a meaningful way a timing thing. Of course, there is a degearing element to it. The part that I think is less performance-related but more ramp-up related is the saturation. Ronnie and Jurgens and Bertrand will comment very specifically on the sort of tangible interventions that are happening at Hirslanden that are giving us confidence about that turnaround.
I think maybe the CIVH and Mediclinic commission, let's leave that for after those two presentations. If there's something still that's unclear, we can answer it there.
Thanks, Jannie. I'm conscious of time. Thanks, Chris.
Thanks. Thanks a lot for a great presentation. I think it's very thought-provoking. The historic examples are great. Just my question is, you talked about Dr. Anton Rupert saying Remgro started off as a club of entrepreneurs. Some of the best times in Remgro is when you've had a high weighting of entrepreneurs or founders, for instance, when the RMB guys were really creating a lot of value. Against that backdrop, don't you think you could do more to actively create an owner-manager mindset in some of your underlying investments and at Remgro itself? Some companies which do do that, I think Berkshire, the only two things they keep in-house is capital allocation and incentives. If you look at a company like Amazon, Bezos goes out of his way to instill an owner-manager mindset through how they reward their people.
If incentives determine outcomes, surely you should spend more time on that. I take the point that South Africa is far behind. Isn't there almost an opportunity here for you?
I think you're spot on, Chris. Incentives is critical. One of the things that we're actually going to plot deeper at the center is where we can add various incentive structures for our various companies. Yes. I think in the video, you'll probably see as well alignment. If we can get alignment between the management teams and the shareholders, that's when you're successful and we think about the same thing. It's very difficult if you're not a founder of a business like the Capitec founders to have huge shareholdings. I mean, you need to create other mechanisms in place. That's what we're working on, the incentive structures. I mean, RMB always had this owner-management culture.
It is more mindset things, not just always by giving the shares and things, but also the mindset of how you operate the business, giving the authority, the accountability, and all of those things from that perspective. Yeah, point taken, incentives is a very big part of that. How do we actually create that ownership through the incentives as well is a critical ingredient to that.
Thank you, Jannie. Can we check with the operator if we've got any questions on the chorus call?
There are no questions on the [audio distortion] .
Thank you very much. Maybe a last one on the webcast, Carel. Is it at all possible to unpack your plans for optimizing the portfolio and maybe a few practical examples that you can share?
I think difficult to share practical examples. I suspect we're talking here specifically about that simplifying the portfolio. I think I made the same comment at the year-end results last year. We cannot have the sort of messaging front run the actual doing. I think it's safe to say that it's important for us that we have a portfolio of investments where we can add value, where we have positions of meaningful influence. I think as to the specifics of the things that we think don't belong in the portfolio on the longer term, I think we'll need to gain some further progress on those specific deals and then talk about it further. It is. I will say that it is frustrating that it doesn't move more quickly than it has. It's for no lack of effort that's going into it.
If you just judge by the rate at which the public deals are progressing, you can imagine it's equally slow and painful in the private space. There is a lot of effort that goes into it, unfortunately, not yet too much to talk about.
Thanks, Carel. That brings us to the end of the segment. Thank you, Jannie and Carel. I think there are some things that we can maybe agree not to or rather agree to disagree on, like maybe the discount or our view on outshoring. Maybe we can tease that later over a HEINEKEN or something. With that, I think we'll take a short tea break. If we can please be seated at 11:30 A.M. Just to mention that the presentation that you've just seen and the ones that are coming for Mediclinic and CIVH are now live on our website. Thank you very much.
We see that our audience who are online are promptly back at 11:30 A.M., as we had said. Just in the interest of keeping time, some of your colleagues who you were seated with, obviously, some may still be outside.
All I would ask is that when they do their excuse mes, excuse me to try and get into their chair, that you just try to be mindful a little bit of the noise and the speakers that are addressing you on stage. Okay, perfect. Carel mentioned during his presentation the fact that Mr. Trump was possibly still sleeping at that time. That was two hours ago. Of course, I have just checked the time in Washington, and it's after five, and we don't know. Mr. Trump could be part of the 5:00 A.M. club. He strikes me as a kind of individual, a high-performing individual, and we do know that he does have an update to mention regarding the exemption on smartphones and computers and all of that.
I can tell you I haven't seen anything at this present moment in time, but I'll certainly be on the lookout for that. What's trending right now is that it seems, you know, some have the view that the rand is currently pricing in the fact that VAT may actually be removed from the table. Quite a headache because my insurance company has already told me to prepare for higher VAT, but in any case, we'll keep you posted on that as well. Jannie, I wanted to say thanks so much for sending or spreading a little bit of color regarding HEINEKEN and what was going on there. I was telling Lwanda earlier that under the previous dispensation with Richard, a very engaging guy with the media, when results were good, when results were bad, would always know because he'd come out and address it in public.
I remember that when the deal was finalized, Dolf came through to South Africa, and we had a nice conversation with him, and obviously, he was quite excited about the fact that the deal had finally passed the hurdle. Even Jordi invited us over to one of the distilleries here in the Western Cape, again, excited that things were happening, and then shut down for 18 months. We as the media also did not hear from him, and now it makes a little bit of sense. With your 18% stake, I am hoping that when you do have conversations in private, just say that let them not forget about the media. We are kind in good times and also in bad times. To that point, I would like to invite Jannie back on stage this time to address us on something different.
He mentioned Mediclinic, and I think that you'll be teasing to what we can expect there. Thanks.
I think HEINEKEN's got a bigger problem with 66% than our 18%. Just quickly, as I said in my presentation, I'll give just going to introduction to Mediclinic, and I know you're getting tired of my voice by now, but Ronnie and his team will get into the nuts and bolts of it. All I want to make is why do we actually, as Remgro, still like the healthcare industry, and why do we specifically like Mediclinic? Let me just change the slide there. We are the founding shareholders of Mediclinic, as you know. People say, is this a holy cow asset? Is it a legacy asset?
Yes, you can probably say all of those things, but we still like it, and that's why we still got it in the portfolio. We actually spend more capital behind it, as you all know, so we spend additional about ZAR 5 billion behind it to increase our stake from 45% to 50%. Just to put it into perspective, and Ronnie will go into some of the details, 10% of global GDP is spent in healthcare. There is a tremendous amount of money being spent in the industry, and we think private operators got a role to play. Specifically on Mediclinic, why do we actually believe in Mediclinic? It is a leading, and we're using that word specifically because the data is not always available.
It's a leading provider in each of the markets that it operates in, in Switzerland, in the UAE, as well in South Africa. At the beginning of March, three of us, my colleagues and I, myself and a couple of my colleagues, we actually spent a tremendous amount of time on the road in South Africa, in the UAE, in Switzerland. What we do each year, we go through the budgets and the forecast and the five-year plans and the long-term plans of Mediclinic, and I was impressed again by the depth of the management team, their knowledge about the business, and how they actually see things going forward. They've got a clear strategy, which I'll explain to you today, not just improve efficiency, but what is more encouraging for me is actually getting closer to the real customer, the patient, and they will unpack that later for you.
We know Hirslanden gets a hard time. I mean, there's a huge focus in my presentation on Hirslanden. We've got a lot of questions, and you can still ask that for the team there. We think Hirslanden is an amazing operation from a clinical point of view, but what we need to get now is right, and what they do, they've got a tremendous job also from a financial point of view. If you can get the clinical side, we're the leading clinical from all the indicators in Switzerland, and if you can combine it with the sustainable good returns from a financial point of view, we think it's going to be a great asset for us going forward. Just quickly, why do we actually like the healthcare industry? Ronnie will touch upon it in more detail, but just look at the macro trends.
It's expected that with advances in health and wellness, the number of people over the age of 65 will double by 2050. So I think we're getting into that category now, some of us, not there yet, but an increase by 150% by 2075. Then you just look at the South African point of view, the statistics on the incidence of disease between 2010 and 2023, if you can see on that graph, the incidence of type 2 diabetes and cholesterol-related diseases increased by more than 100%, and for high blood pressure and coronary artery diseases by more than 50%. So the people are getting more sicker and sicker as we go on. Of course, we're not naive. There are challenges in healthcare. We know, as I said, it's a capital-intensive business, a business with skilled workforce changes across South Africa and Switzerland, less so in the UAE.
It's heavily regulated with policy risk and pricing, disruptions. Innovations happen all the time. You get new technologies. Quite some of them expensive, some of them not viable to roll out. But I think what is important in that respect is I think we've got a team here that can navigate that well, that are up for the challenges, and that is why we're backing this management team, and we believe they're entrepreneurial, and they are partners in this, and they're going to take this business forward. I think just to get the elephant out of the room, it's our valuation. And this is a perspective from a Hertzog point of view. We value Mediclinic as a DCF. We're using a bottoms-up valuation approach, I've said many times. So we value each business separately, and then we add them together as a sum of the parts.
We don't use multiples, but we use this as a reasonability and a sanity check. We think people, when they do the same exercise, they reference Mediclinic only to the South African business or the South African operators' life and Netc are. But if you can look at that graph, only 32% of our EBITDA comes out of South Africa. So I don't think you can do that. You need to have a more sophisticated approach when you start valuing Mediclinic. So if you look at the bottoms-up approach, our multiple when we do this comes to 9.7%. June 23rd, it was over 12%, and now it's 9.7% at December 24. And hopefully, that will multiple will come down. As I said, we ground our valuations.
It shows that our forecast that we're using on our DCF is working, that they're playing out as we anticipate, and that is why you see the multiples coming down. Yes, we acknowledge that it's difficult to compare. We can't find a peer group that operates exactly where we do, so that's why we're picking them. We've got them in the bottom. You can see some of the companies that use a peer group to actually establish the multiples. You can go and see if we do our numbers right. We're confident. We trust these numbers, and we're confident about that valuation. Finding the peer group is sometimes very difficult, but let's leave it at that, and you can check our reasonability. At least we gave you that transparency for how we do this.
We can't give you the forecast and the numbers, but at least we can give you the historical multiples and how that is playing out. Just before I want to hand over to Ronnie, just GT Ferreira always tells a story when he goes buffalo hunting. He doesn't wear hunting boots. He wears takkies. And the reason I say it's a very challenging thing hunting a buffalo because it can be quite dangerous. And I want to make a similar anomaly to Mediclinic. It's a challenging environment. It's a dynamic environment, and there are challenges. But I think we've picked the right hunters. They've got their takkies on. And as I said, in each and every region that they operate, they're running the fastest, and they're the leaders. So good luck to them. Thank you.
We really appreciate the time that you've given us to discuss Mediclinic.
We're very passionate about Mediclinic. We're passionate about healthcare, and it's great to be here today. Thank you very much. And it's also really quite nice to see old familiar faces again, people who've spent countless hours asking us also the very difficult questions, Jurgens and myself. Now we have a third team member here as well called Bertrand Levrat. He's a French-speaking Swiss citizen who used to be the CEO of the University Teaching Hospital in Geneva, the biggest hospital in Switzerland, a combined portfolio of over 2,000 beds. He has been our Chief Operating Officer for the Group now for almost the last year. So we've strengthened the team, Jurgens and I, to be ready for the questions that will follow today and tomorrow, especially on the Swiss part of the business. Great to see you all. Thank you very much.
Let me quickly talk about the agenda. So I'm going to do, under introduction, I'm going to give an overview of the business quickly just to refresh your memories again. Some of you know the business very well on what we are all about, and then focus on clinical delivery, which is really the core of what we do. We thought it was very important to just set that scene as well. Move over to strategy, what we think, how we think about the future, what's bothering us, and so forth. And then over to divisions, which will be done by Bertrand on Switzerland, Jurgens on South Africa and Middle East. And then Jurgens will do financial and capital allocation. That's the part he does best. And I will come back for conclusions.
Bertrand will in between also talk about the operating model, which is a short-term project we're busy with, and he will specifically also focus in the Swiss division on the turnaround project that we're busy working our way through. Very important two projects. I mentioned it in the beginning, and I want to mention it again later. It's very important. Starting off with three key messages before I get into the overview. We think we're a great business, a leading international healthcare provider, not a hospital provider anymore, healthcare provider. We are well invested. We are well diversified geographically. We are diversifying in terms of care settings, and we have very well-established clinical services from highly specialized right through to the more generic work that we do, and we're performing well considering the circumstances under which we operate. That's the first key message.
The second one is the healthcare environment, which I will unpack a bit again later. The environment's rapidly changing. It's very challenging, but it also offers up all sorts of opportunities. We understand it very well, and we think we are very well positioned to deal with all of those. And then thirdly, in terms of adapting to future-proof the business, we've got several short-term initiatives and medium-term initiatives on the go in order to improve the performance of the business and to position the business for the future, which is really quite important in such a fast-moving environment. So over then to the overview that I want to give, I'm going to just share four slides on those. This is the first one. This depicts the care settings we find ourselves in. Obviously, the hospitals are the core of what we do.
We operate in four countries on three continents, and we are well invested in different care settings. One key message I want to just point out is that our revenue streams are quite well diversified, and that positions us very well for the future. We structure the business in such a way that we have three divisions: a Swiss, a Middle East, and a Southern Africa division. They have their own management teams, and in the middle, we have a small team called Group Services. Group Services does the following. They sit in Stellenbosch. They do the following: oversight, limited shared services, and they coordinate collaborative efforts between the three divisions. We want the divisions to have the full benefit of belonging to a group, a group that functions in different countries. That collaborative effort is something we've been developing, and we keep on taking it further.
It's really important. Otherwise, there's very little reason to be a group. Just quickly to remind everybody, we have different models in the three divisions. In South Africa, the one division you know very well because you make use of the services here. We don't employ the doctors in South Africa. In Dubai, Abu Dhabi, we employ almost all of them. In Switzerland, we have something in between. The hospital-based doctors we employ, and the others, all the different types of surgeons are in independent practices like in South Africa. The pricing structures are also different. In South Africa, mainly fee-for-service with some variation. Middle East and Switzerland, DRGs for inpatients and various types of fee-for-service models for outpatients. The revenue streams of the three divisions are also different in terms of the mix. South Africa and Switzerland, mostly 80% inpatient, 20% outpatient in day case.
UAE, 25% inpatient compared to 80% for the others, 10% day case and 65% outpatient. So very much a system that we've developed over there, and we've got a lot of experience in that now. So that was the first of the four overview slides. The second one is the principles we use as we lead the business. Very important for us in communicating that to our staff and explain to them what we are all about. So the first one is the purpose of the organization. The purpose is what really brings our people to work in the morning and makes them excited about being part of Mediclinic, and that's to enhance the quality of life of our patients and their families. That mobilizes and inspires our 37,000 people, but especially the almost 25,000 nurses that we have. The vision is our future view.
It's part of the strategy, really. That's to be the partner of choice that people trust for their key healthcare needs. And this is where we are working towards. It's an aspiration. The mission is the task we give ourselves every day. We always explain it to the staff to say, "This is what we come to work to do every day. We deliver clinical quality care and outstanding client experiences." And in order to do so, we live our purpose. Or by doing so, we live our purpose. And then lastly, the values. Values are also very important, as you know. This is about what we do and how we behave. This is at the core of how we want our people to really behave and how they want to conduct themselves or should be conducting themselves.
And you'll see in the five values, two of them concern our clients: patient safety and client centered. Right then, how did we get to this point as Mediclinic from 1983 when it was first founded by Hertzog ? We started off as a pure-play hospital group in South Africa, and we actually defined ourselves as a healthcare infrastructure provider. What does that mean? We provided hospitals, equipment, and nurses, and the doctors came along with their patients, and they treated their patients in our hospitals. And we had a standoffish type of approach towards what was going on in the hospital. Then we transformed ourselves into becoming more involved in partnership with our doctors and becoming involved in the care processes and jointly started working through the standards of care and the processes of care and all of those things. It was a great evolution for us.
We then started looking at diversifying abroad, and we diversified into the divisions that we are now. And we started to diversify in different care settings, which I will explain a little bit in a minute, in a couple of slides from now onwards. So that diversification was a further phase of thinking for us. We then spent the last two years transforming from a listed environment to a private environment, which is really quite interesting. It's been very dynamic. And we are now in the phase I, now that we've bedded down that part to become more of a systems operator, developing a healthcare ecosystem in each of the divisions. And we do that for very good reasons. So that's the evolution. And we are quite conscious that we're going to continue to evolve over time.
We will never stop evolving our thinking, and we will never stop transforming the business to keep up with what's going on around us. We gave a trading update this morning via Hertzog . These are the numbers that's in the update: 5% revenue increase for the year ending March. It's still preliminary results. It hasn't gone through the year-end process yet. Jurgens is confident that this is more or less what it looks like. Every one of the three divisions had volume growth. We grow. We're busy. However, as you will hear later, we do these things at lower and lower prices. We'll describe that dynamic later on. In spite of all of that, we've actually increased our margin from 14.7% to 15% at a group level. And we feel it's quite a satisfying result given the tough environment that we function under.
So that concludes the overview part that I wanted to quickly just discuss now. Over to the clinical delivery part, which is obviously something I like to talk about because in the previous life, I was a clinician. Four slides, very important matters, key messages that I just want us to think about. So the first one is the care continuum and the different care settings. Now, remember the days when we were still just in South Africa, we were just running hospitals. And look what we do now: 74 hospitals and a whole lot of other things. For instance, 20 day case clinics. In other words, in and out the same day surgery. 25 outpatient or 28, actually 28 outpatient clinics, most of them in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, with a couple of million patients a year that we see in those facilities.
We are very well invested in radiology and lab and in cancer care, especially cancer radiation care. We have a whole lot of retail pharmacies now, and this is getting more and more prevalent for us. Our ambulance services bring us in South Africa alone, bring us 22,000 primary response cases to our hospitals a year, which is really quite important for us as well. And then branching out into mental health and dialysis and so forth. And we're doing this in all the divisions now, not only in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and in Switzerland. So well diversified in different care settings, which is really important in healthcare to be a dominant player. The second one, which is probably even more important, is the highly specialized medical services that we provide. Now, why is this important?
This portfolio of highly specialized medicine gives you an idea of the sophistication level at which the company functions. Why is that important? Because those are competitive advantages. It takes long to build up such a portfolio. It's not an overnight thing, and it creates competitive advantages. And if you do it very well, like we have in some of them, it actually creates a high barrier to entry for other entrants in that particular domain. So what we have is 23 cardiovascular centers throughout the organization in all three divisions. We've got quite a few of those. We have 29 neurosurgical units spread across. We do a lot of robotic work, both ortho and non-ortho, and it's basically growing exponentially. These are fantastic new inventions. Forty neonatal ICUs, which specifically in South Africa is quite important, and also in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, not so much in Switzerland.
There, it's done by the government hospitals. We have 12 cancer centers. Some of them are focused. Some of them are comprehensive, and various others, as you can see. Now, the one other thing I just want to mention is on orthopedics, joint replacements, the large joint replacements. These have become more or less bread and butter cases. It's no big deal anymore. We'll discuss a little bit again just now. But look at the market share. 13.5% of all replacements in Switzerland is done by us. And that's quite remarkable. So a very good, highly specialized suite of services that we've built up over many, many years. Then getting to clinical performance, which is the science of what we do, sort of adds up with what was said in the previous slide. For the last 25 years, we focused tremendously on improving our clinical performance through various initiatives.
One of it is clinical indicators. I'll give you an example of the DNA. In 2001, we signed ourselves up with the Vermont Oxford Network of Critical Care, Neonatal Critical Care. It's a U.S.-based organization, but it's a worldwide participation. A couple of thousand of these ICUs participate. We send in our data. They measure our performance, and they compare us with international standards. And we are doing very well. After we've done it, our competitors had to start doing it, and now everybody does it. But the point is we started it the first time. We also started not soon, not late, not much longer after that to develop and implement in our adult ICUs methodology to predict mortality. So predictive scoring for mortality, which really brings about a whole new way in which ICUs are run. We did that, I think, about 20 years ago.
We were the first in South Africa. We never stopped developing new indicators and methodologies. Now we track over 150 of these indicators regularly throughout our organization, and we're busy developing more. The focus is, or the approach is, a clinical performance system that rests on a foundation of clinical governance with a ward-to-board accountability as a cornerstone. That is how we've developed it over many, many years. These things also do not come about overnight. Right. The last of the four slides in terms of clinical services delivery is client experience. This is more the hospitality part of what we do. You can be clinically very good, but if people do not really enjoy the interaction they have with you, that becomes a bit of a problem. Our nursing staff and everybody needs to be very highly skilled in terms of also the client experience.
We have measured the client experience through Net Promoter Score and other measures for long periods now, for many, many years. Bain & Company, who created Net Promoter Score, says if you are 50 or above, you are excellent. We look at the healthcare benchmarks. We are doing quite well compared to that. Just based on the Bain & Company assertion, you can clearly see we are not doing badly at all. We keep on building it and developing it further. We measure it in every single one of our care settings. We have a lot more way to go. We are very excited about that. Okay. That concludes the Clinical Service Delivery part. Now onto the strategy, the strategic part, which you are really thinking, "Okay, now what are these guys going to do?" Let us start with the industry.
And the industry, if you read megatrends, trends, microtrends, all sorts of things, you can get completely confused in the way that it gets depicted. So I try to be very simplistic here. The first is population factors. And Jannie already showed some really good slides. Mine is not even, I only have this one slide, so you must now think back about what Jannie just showed. The world population is getting more sick or less healthy or more unhealthy. It doesn't matter how you put it. More chronic diseases of lifestyle, hypertension, diabetes, coronary artery disease, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, and all of those. It's on the increase in absolute numbers. Cancer is also on the increase, especially amongst younger people. Nobody knows why. And then there's mental health issues that you also know, especially in South Africa, but in many other countries in Europe as well.
Mental health issues or conditions are on the rise in absolute terms. So that, plus the fact that people are getting older as a result of better medical technology, and the fact that in many countries, the fertility rates are lower by choice. Therefore, the proportion of the population that gets older or are older are also increasing. Those factors, those population factors put a lot of pressure on healthcare systems, and it increases cost. It also, obviously, has the effect of new opportunities, but we will talk about that just now. So that's the one driver that I thought it's important to highlight is the population factors. Then on medical technology and medical knowledge, that's the green block in the top left. What I want to highlight there is there's an exponential growth in medical knowledge. Medical knowledge doubling time in 1950 was 50 years.
In 1980, it was 7 years. And in 2020, it was more or less 73 days. We don't know what it's like now. Maybe 60 days, but it's very fast. It doesn't matter. It's immaterial, really. So there's a huge growth in medical knowledge. Similarly, there's a huge exponential growth in new technologies being developed, medical technologies. If you add those two together, you can assume there are new treatment plans, treatment plans becoming available to patients on a daily basis throughout the world. It's incredible. It's fantastic. Hip replacements, 15 years ago, they were staying in the hospital 6, 7 days, maybe 8 days, depending on which country. Now it's a one day. Some of them go home the same day. My mother-in-law is 91. She had a hip replacement two months ago. She's walking around again. She's absolutely fine. And she couldn't walk prior to the operation.
Now, 20 years ago, we wouldn't even have touched somebody beyond 80 for a hip. It was too risky. Now it's not so risky anymore because of technological advances in terms of how it's done, as well as the anesthetic techniques. Now, what does this bring us to? Those technological advances and population-based factors together put an enormous amount of strain on healthcare delivery and on cost. Governments don't know how to deal with it. What happens is everybody's competing for a piece of the pie. Prices go down, especially hospital prices. Governments don't know how to deal with it, so they regulate. It's usually the first response. A lot more regulation and a lot of pressure on pricing. However, just before you all get very depressed, there's a green block at the right left. There's a lot of opportunity. New revenue streams.
We can develop healthcare ecosystems, all sorts of things coming our way. And that's the part that makes me very excited. So what is it that we want to do? How do we position ourselves in this world? There it says, "Our ambition is to become a client-centered healthcare ecosystem in each of the divisions." Ambition is really another word for a vision. So this is a further crystallization of the vision that we explained a few slides ago. We depict it in a circle because you've been to hospital. Those of you who've been to hospital, you are now in the post-hospital period. But most of you, like me, we know we're going to go back to hospital at some point. So we're already in the pre-hospital period as well. There are many, many different care settings that people move through all the time.
We believe the best way to position for the future is to be involved in all the key ones, not all of them, but all the key ones, and then to link those up so that patients can move along seamlessly across that continuum. There are so many new techniques that we can use in order to coordinate that kind of care. That safeguards us against outmigration, so-called outmigration. Bertrand's going to tell you there are too many hospitals in Switzerland. But 10 years ago and 15 years ago, they were not too many because people stayed in hospital eight days after a hip. Now they stay one day. So there's an overcapacity because people are treated in different ways. We need to deal with it.
We need to understand that the hospitals of the future will look different than the ones that we have today, and they will function differently. And there's a lot of action in the other care settings as well, and we don't want to not participate in those. So this is what we intend to do. How do we want to get there? Three goals. Strengthen the core, focus on care, which is the scientific part, and differentiate on services, which is really the hospitality part. So I'm going to quickly talk you through each of those by highlighting a few points. And then the target operating model will be discussed by Bertrand after that. So strengthen the core. What this goal is about is growing our revenue streams, the ones we have, developing new revenue streams, adapt to outmigration of care, and pursue operational excellence and operational efficiency.
My firm belief is only the super efficient will survive in healthcare. I think some of you might remember we kept saying that. Only the super efficient will survive. So what does that mean? First of all, just to highlight a few things on operational excellence. Productivity. So if you look at our P&L, by far and away, our biggest expense is people. So workforce optimization is absolutely essential to us, both on the front line and on the back office support. On the front line, nurses work in shifts. If we have too many nurses on the shift, we waste the money. If we have too few nurses on the shift, we immediately run into patient safety problems. So predictive models, because shifts are always different. Hospitals are not always busy.
Sometimes they're very quiet over weekends, and some days they are very busy, and it depends on many factors. So now predictive modeling to figure out how many people to put on a shift is of absolute essence to us. And this is the kind of things we do. On the back office, shared services, sharing services amongst 50 hospitals in South Africa with a shared services center sitting in Stellenbosch. That's how we increase productivity. We measure the staff productivity increases by way of EBITDA per FTE or full-time equivalent. Very important part. Just another quick point on operational excellence. If you look at our CapEx, most of it goes into buildings and equipment. The productivity of the assets, especially the buildings, and now we're looking at Dubai, Abu Dhabi. Occupancy levels tell you part of the story.
But in Parkview Hospital, which is the one that Jurgens will talk about just now, great hospital. Some of you have been there. 25% of revenue is inpatient. So I could tell you the occupancy is 65%, but it tells you a very small part of the story. So how do we know whether that place is performing well? We can also look at the occupancy of the theaters, but even that tells you half the story. What we do now is revenue per square meter. It's 58,000 sq m, the entire building. And we benchmark our revenue per square meter from the small to the large facilities to try and understand how productive that facility is. And then all the expensive equipments, like MRI, CT, PET, SPECT, all of those radiation therapy machines, all of them, we measure the utilization on a daily basis.
It's the best way and the only way to really understand your asset utilization. All of that's part of this goal. Plus the operating model, which takes us through looking at the entire organization, especially the corporate offices of the divisions, whether we have the necessary number of people and whether we don't have too many of them getting the layers sorted out and so forth. And then the turnaround project in Switzerland, which encompasses a lot of what I said now and more, is also part of this goal, but Bertrand will unpack that for you. One quick element that I want to just explain is we think AI and automation is going to play quite a big role in operational excellence into the future. So just a couple of pointers here. AI needs good data. So we are busy sorting out our data structures.
Automation needs well-defined end-to-end business processes. We'll be sorting that out. We have a multidisciplinary team under what we call the Chief Data Officer now, who does all of that for us. And quickly, just to show you what we've been able to do, now the important thing is we've been able to get going. Of course, this is new concepts for everybody. And you can see there under operations optimization, we have a tremendous amount of consultations on a daily basis in Dubai. We have many doctors there. They're all on our payroll. We must ensure that those doctors are productive. They must see patients. And to optimize that scheduling is of vital importance. There you can see the AI model has been helping us with that. Then we have a bot under procurement there who's doing quite a lot of man hours already.
In clinical documentation, again, an AI model to help us with clinical coding, which is really an important aspect. It's got revenue implications. So we automate that through AI. And then we have a bot or maybe a few bots already deployed in revenue cycle management. You can clearly see that the bots are doing great work. So this is new stuff, but it's going to make a big difference in the future. We just wanted you to know that we are also busy working on those. Then future focus on clinical care. This is the science of what we do. Here we're talking about improving clinical outcomes, fostering stronger affiliations with academic institutions in order for us to be able to participate in training of nurses and, to a certain extent, doctors, and also in research. And research because it's important for our doctors.
That's why we are involved in that. But the one that I want to really highlight is the powerhouse concept, the clinical powerhouse concept, which is depicted on this page. Now, it says there right at the top, it's a market leader for a specific condition or service line, which offers excellence across all levels of care and has a strong reputation in research and training. So we have some of those already. The solid organ transplant center that we run together with Wits University in partnership and Johannesburg is the most successful and busiest solid organ transplant center in South Africa. Livers, pancreases, kidneys.
There we have a powerhouse right through from a primary care level to those patients to hospital, general hospital care, specialist care, as well as to eventually replace their organs and then to look after them once their organs have been replaced because that still is very sophisticated work to be done. Now, the cardiac center in Zurich, best in Zurich, arguably the best in Switzerland is another example. Now, I showed you a couple of slides ago, highly specialized centers that we have. Not all of them are powerhouses. But if we can convert some of them into powerhouses, this is where the barriers to entry are. And this is really quite powerful for us to drive us forward into the future. And then lastly, differentiation on services, which is really the hospitality part of what we do. It's about the client.
Now, what we want to do there is, or what we're busy doing, I should say. And it says there, by moving from a transactional service to an experiential service, we are developing long-term relations with our clients. So think about it. You come to a hospital. You spend three days in the hospital. We have a relationship with you. When you leave, the relationship basically whittles away or terminates until you come back. We want to have a continuous relationship with our clients. And we want to build that up over time. And we have now the tools, and we also believe that there's huge opportunity there in also to retain in order to retain our clients. So the important thing on the other side of the slide is we need to understand the clients a lot better than what we do right now.
We need to then, or we can, it puts us in a position to offer more personalized services and care, and then we build up the client loyalty. So that's the idea. What we want to do is a strong direct relationship with our clients, not via the doctors and via the insurance companies, but directly. And we believe this is quite a powerful concept. Now, how are we doing this? We're taking our marketing team. We add a competency of a sales orientation. We're taking our current client experience people to help us with that, put that together with the team of the marketing on the marketing side, and then bring the digital transformation team in, who does all sorts of other things, but to help us also with that client building that client relationship.
And for those, just to refresh your memory, what digital transformation means different than just digitalization, it's the new adoption or radical adoption, some say, of new services and products, methods of engaging with clients and staff and services previously untapped markets. But what it really means is we need to think differently, very much so. It's not a technology-driven process. It's a business process enabled by digital platforms. Now, the digital transformation team does business of today and tomorrow, but we really believe this is going to be a big part of our game into the future. This slide just shows, second last slide from me, a whole lot of things that are being done on the digital transformation side of the business. I'm not going to go through all of those. Just want to highlight one in each of the divisions.
The first is Switzerland's second bullet from the bottom, AI-powered app for patients being treated for cancer. In South Africa, second last bullet, the Baby app. And then in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, in our Middle East platform, a division, the MyMediclinic app that we've got on the digital platform. And I want to quickly just show you a little bit something about this. So this is a great app, and this is really spearheading our effort here. Now, I'm clicking again, and a little video starts playing, and it'll play in the background on how this can be used. What it says there at the top of the slide is MyMediclinic allows clients to navigate through their entire journey within Mediclinic through this single app in Mediclinic Middle East. It's fantastic. And the numbers you'll show is it's a new app that's used quite a lot.
So you can navigate the whole system. If you then combine that with the functionalities of the electronic health record that we have, and this is the top, the very first line there. So imagine the following. We have seven hospitals. We have 25 outpatient clinics, and we have smaller others like retail pharmacies and things like that. In every single one of them, your electronic health record is available, standard throughout the entire place. So whether you're in remote Abu Dhabi or in the middle of Dubai, it doesn't matter. Combine that with the functionality of this app. What you have is the beginnings of an healthcare ecosystem, which has huge potential for us and creates lots of opportunities. And as Jannie always says, optionality, which is really what we want in business is options.
With that, on that, I note with the MyMediclinic app, I'm at the end of what I was supposed to discuss with you. Just to quickly summarize, I started off with three key messages. It's a great business, challenging environment, but we're dealing with it, and we've got great plans in place, both short-term and medium-term. We discussed a little bit about the overview of the business, the clinical service delivery, especially the highly specialized part of it, and the focus on clinical performance. In the strategy, what we want to become, that circle with the continuum of care that we want to get involved in all the care processes, the three goals, and where we want to find ourselves over the next few years. Hopefully that gave you some impression of what our thinking is in terms of the future.
Bertrand's now going to take over, and he dressed himself very nicely for this occasion. He's upping the standards here for us. He's going to talk about the target operating model and follow on. He's going to talk about the Swiss division and especially the turnaround plan. Thank you, Bertrand.
Thank you, Ronnie. First of all, my apologies for having such a difficult name to pronounce in English, but as I could hear Ronnie and Jannie say it, I think it's just a matter of practice to manage to say it properly. And second, I must say that I'm Swiss. When I discuss with Swiss bankers and Swiss investors, I would not imagine not to come with a tie. So probably by the end of the day with the braai, I will be acculturated for sure.
As it has been said, all strategy to be implemented requires a strong and lean organization. That's the reason why we have started thinking and implementing a new operating model that will drive Mediclinic to success. Our business is financially strong, but the healthcare landscape is evolving faster than ever. To keep delivering high-quality care, we need to stay ahead of these changes. New technologies, rising costs, shifting regulations, and a growing shortage of skilled professionals are transforming healthcare. To remain competitive and ahead of the curve, we need to adapt with smarter, more efficient ways of working that will improve both our effectiveness and patient outcomes. By evolving our operating model, we will be able to reduce complexity, speed up decision-making, and build the skills and capabilities we need for the future.
It's about the value chain we create from our corporate office to our facilities, ensuring we deliver the expected value to our clients and our owners. A key driver is taking a more cost-conscious approach. This will help us to use our resources wisely, strengthening our financial position while ensuring we continue to provide excellent patient care. As Ronnie said, patient care is and will remain in the heart of our concerns. We have identified six levers to unlock value, and there's six transformation levers. I'll pass through them rapidly. The first one is simplifying the operating governance. Operating governance is being streamlined to empower facilities with greater autonomy, enabling faster decision-making and fostering an ownership mindset that will enhance accountability and efficiency. To give you an example, we are rethinking the whole organization, starting from the patient and the hospital management, and from there, rethinking the whole value chain.
We have frozen all new recruitments within the group. Not speaking about nurses and doctors, of course, but all new admin staff, the recruitments have been frozen. And in parallel, if I take the example of package, and people are right now in the process of accepting it or not. This will enable us to reduce the administrative costs of our organization and will enable us to simplify operating governance wherever we feel it is necessary. The second one is service delivery enhancement. We are reviewing the service delivery models to boost efficiency, reduce costs, particularly in enablement functions. Just to take an example, in the Middle East, for instance, our drivers, we are thinking of outsourcing all the drivers that we have. You know, if you've ever been in Dubai, whatever you do, you take a car to go somewhere.
And we have several drivers which are employed by Mediclinic, and we're thinking of outsourcing the drivers. It will reduce costs and reduce the FTEs. Simplify the organizational design. It's about harmonizing the organizational design that we have within the group. And again, several divisions have a historical way of designing their organization. What we want to do is to streamline, to be able to harmonize so that we can simplify and improve the synergies. The automation of key processes. I think that's an important point that Ronnie has spoken about. It's about identifying which of the key processes will be streamlined through intelligent automation. We are in the process, actually, of conducting, for instance, robothons within the divisions, which are like hackathons, but about which are the processes that the teams feel we can really simplify, automate, and produce value. We want to improve demand management.
The idea is to better align resources with operational leads by leveraging predictive modeling and nursing hours per patient day metrics. This, again, I've been running, as Ronnie said, a 2,100-bed hospital. The way we plan staff and nurses is very historical, traditional. Now, with the group we have, we can benchmark. We can have the capacity to organize the staff based on data and to have predictive models as well that will optimize the way we organize nursing hours and nursing staff. Simple example. It's not about golf, by the way, because I heard some people were watching golf until 1:00 A.M. in the morning yesterday, but it's about football in Europe. You know, we love football. Your emergency department in a hospital throughout whole Europe during the Champion League football finals will be empty during the game because people watch TV. They're not on the road.
They're not having car accidents. They're not doing anything outside of watching TV. And even pediatrics, that's always quite funny, in fact. Your kid has fever. Yeah, but let's wait until the football game is over. So after the match, you know, you will, and depending on who wins the game, you might have a lot of people in your emergency department afterwards. But during that game, there's no one. And year- over- year, it's always the same story. Now, with AI predictive models, we can think about how we can improve demand management, how we can plan, sorry, and get better into this. Last but not least, the strategic spend and sourcing approach, which is being enhanced to give greater value from external spend. The strengthening category management and optimizing negotiated tariff will maximize cost efficiency.
Ronnie mentioned that we have in Switzerland a 13.5% share of the market share on hip replacement. We don't employ doctors. Surgeons are independent ones. If you listen to them, 20 doctors will come with 20 different hip joints that they're thinking about, which are on the market. What we do is we negotiate prices on a certain number of joint replacements. We negotiate with our doctors so that we have the best value and we have the best quality of hip joints that we want to use. And then we convince doctors to use these ones so that we do have greater value. And of course, the prosthesis that we put is of high quality, but with this, we also deliver a better value for the organization. So we are on a transformation journey, which accelerates the current business objectives and creates a platform for future optimization.
The aim, and you have it here, it's written in big. The aim is a 100 million annual savings to be delivered by the target operating model over three years. It's a goal to which we are committed. And when I say we, I think it's important. It's not just the top management. It's the whole team. It's the divisions. It's the people within the business all the way to the hospitals. We have discussed these targets with each and everyone. We have put these targets into the financial year budgets. People are aware of it, and we're tracking the results and tracking closely the savings that the divisions are doing. Divisions and services are all doing the same type of efforts. And maybe on the graph, you might feel like, why is Switzerland doing much more efforts than the others?
It's just because when you translate Swiss francs into U.S. dollars, well, then it does create a difference. That's why Switzerland has a bigger share. But on the other hand, the divisional savings, all the divisions are doing the same efforts to reach that target. We believe that empowering hospitals, regions, making our employees more accountable and conscious, driving change and making decisions faster and leaner will also bring an evolution in the culture of Mediclinic. It's about empowering our people, making them accountable, responsible for the initiatives and decisions they are taking so that we can be not only today, but tomorrow as well, an organization which is attractive for new generations, entrepreneurial, and ahead of the changes in our environment.
Now that you have a clear understanding of what has been described by Ronnie, our challenges, our strategy, and that I discussed about our operating model, we'll now take a deeper dive into the three divisions we have. I will start with Switzerland, and Jurgens will speak about the Middle East and South Africa. Switzerland, as you all know, is known for the quality of its watches and the quality of its chocolate. What is maybe not as well known as Switzerland is the reputation for having one of the best quality healthcare systems in the world, supported both by public and by private providers. It is true. If you look at life expectancy, for instance, life expectancy is 85.8 years for women and 82.2 for men. It's one of the highest in the world.
The highest, I think, is in Monaco, where you have a sort of bias on people who get there. But 85.8 for women is extremely high. And in this environment, Hirslanden is the largest private acute care hospital group with an outstanding reputation. It has 17 hospitals. You can see on the map there that it's all over the place. Why not in the south of the map? It's because it's the Alps. No one lives there. That's why the whole map is gray. But on the rest of Switzerland, we are everywhere there with an excellent quality and patient reputation. Ronnie mentioned it. Our Net Promoter Score in Switzerland is of 72. It is extremely high.
If I may, on a personal note, when I was approached to join Mediclinic, the fact that Mediclinic in Switzerland is Hirslanden convinced me I would have never joined any other private group. But Hirslanden has the reputation of quality of care, has the reputation of outstanding service, and has the reputation to be treating its personnel and organization the best way possible and the leanest way possible. So the quality and the reputation of Hirslanden is in the Swiss population very high and is definitely an asset. It's not just about hospital. It's about a whole network that we create. It's an expertise you can trust. Nevertheless, as you know, the Swiss healthcare landscape has evolved in a very challenging way over the last years. To react to this, we have been optimizing our business and adapting to change.
The three main challenges in the Swiss healthcare landscape, and I'll stop a bit there. I think most of you have been following this over the last years, but the first one, and it's an important one. There is a huge financial pressure from price decreases. Switzerland is spending almost 12% of its GDP in healthcare. It's a lot. And the number of patients will continue to continuously rise because of the aging population. The people above 65 represent now in Switzerland more than 20%. They reached 20% this year, and it will be more and more in the coming years. It's 1.73 million people out of the nine million that count Switzerland. It's quite simple mathematics, in fact. The baby boom that occurred in Europe after the Second World War made that people, just the number of babies just grew up to the 1960s.
And in the '60s, it reached the peak. A person who is born in 1960 turns 65 today. So it's simple mathematics. It's not going to change. The number of people above 65 will grow in Switzerland, and it will grow pretty fast. Just to give you another example, when I was a child, when someone would turn 100 in our community, there was a press article, and the authorities would go to their home and give them a chair and make a picture and a whole ceremony. Now, it's no news anymore if someone turns 100 in Switzerland. There's no news article anymore and no chair in the government budget because there were too many. So it's something that has changed. And again, for the healthcare industry, it's also an opportunity. People require good healthcare and healthcare for this aging population.
With this rising number, the policymakers and insurers focused on cost containment, leading to a significant challenge because basically, the efforts which have been made were done to reduce the prices. To make it simple, we do the same work, but we're being paid less to do it. We decided to focus on optimizing operational efficiency, maintaining quality of care. And I'll come to it in a minute on everything that we've done in Switzerland to really be with this challenging environment, facing it head-on. The second, and it's a challenging one as well, is the productivity challenge and workforce strains. The shortage of skilled staff in Europe in general, in Switzerland in particular, is a challenge and will remain a high concern as many nurses and doctors will also retire in the coming years. We already import a significant number of nurses.
Switzerland is a bit strange because it has very different speaking parts in Switzerland. So we import from Germany and Austria nurses from Germany and Austria for the Swiss-German part, and we import massively French nurses and Belgian and Canadian nurses in the Swiss-French speaking part. It creates some tensions with our neighbors, by the way, because they also face a shortage of staff. We're struggling sometimes to fill critical roles, especially for specialized nurses in intensive care units. The reaction was for Hirslanden to be as attractive as possible in an environment for healthcare professionals, and we do our best to attract and to retain our staff. Last but not least, there's an increasing state control and hospital consolidation in Switzerland. Ronnie mentioned it.
There will be, in the coming years, a lot of hospitals which will close in Switzerland because the length of stay is shorter and because, as well, the planning of hospital structures in the past was made on a very, very local way of doing it to a cantonal level, very, very local. And we have around 180 hospitals in Switzerland at present. And we think that in the coming years, we will drop to 100 or to 80 hospitals in Switzerland. So it will be a significant change in the landscape. And it's under the pressure for price from government regulation and also from the out-migration of care that this will happen. I will come shortly to our reaction with regard to this, but we are focusing on optimizing our own portfolio in this new system and in these challenges.
So, and you will see it in the numbers to react and adapt to the environment. We launched a significant turnaround plan in Hirslanden that enabled us to stabilize the EBITDA and continue to grow in volumes, both in volumes and in revenue. The prices I've been speaking to have been a challenge in the past years. Cumulated numbers since 2017, and you can see this on this chart, the aggregate impact of price changes since 2017 is above CHF 150 million. And if I take an example that Jurgens gave me, CHF 150 million , you can build three to four brand new hospitals in South Africa with this. So just to give you the measure of the impact on price.
On the other hand, in this challenging environment, Hirslanden has delivered strong volume growth, inpatient admissions growing by 2%, while despite the ongoing price pressure, we have translated into revenue growth at also around 2% and a stable EBITDA margin around CHF 13.5 million, sorry. It's CHF 254 million. So how did we do that? And what has happened in Switzerland? Well, the team, Hirslanden, has made a turnaround plan. A huge effort has been made to organize three task forces, work more efficiently and more effectively with Task Force One, improving the operating model, Task Force Two to strengthen the core business, and Task Force Three to secure the long-term profitability. So the Task Force One and Two are also the operating model I've been discussing about. It's reviewing the way we work. Incisive action has been taken by the team.
We have taken on employee costs, particularly in the corporate office. I would like just to stop there. Corporate offices have, over the last 18 months, diminished almost 100 FTEs. So it has been a significant effort from the team to reduce the number of FTEs. Savings in consumables and supply costs have been reduced as well. Contractor costs have been year on year reduced by 20% in Switzerland. So a real effort that led, as you can see here, in 2025, in financial year 2025, of savings amounting up to CHF 25 million. It was a huge effort by the team to not only optimize the organizational design, but to really reduce administration, to reduce administrative costs, to empower the management team.
Maybe I shouldn't say this, but they suppressed the COO role in Switzerland to replace it by regional directors who have the COO role in regions to streamline and make it more efficient within the regions to optimize our portfolio and to think about how we do this. I will stop on the Task Force Three for a minute, which is securing the long-term profitability. We have analyzed the entire portfolio. And this has led, for instance, to the recent announcement of the future closing of one of our clinics, Rosenberg Hospital, one of our hospitals in the canton of St. Gallen, which we would not see a profitable future for. And we will concentrate and reinforce our activities in the nearby clinic, which is called Stephanshorn Klinik in the canton of St. Gallen. So it was not just about looking at what's going on in this environment.
It's about taking measures, taking courageous measures, and making the change. And for instance, closing of Rosenberg, which will happen in September, has been announced end of March to the teams, has been announced publicly end of March to the authorities. So these three task forces are working. They're focused on optimizing Hirslanden in a challenging environment in order to drive the changes and to be fit for the future. We are confident that Switzerland is a land of opportunities with, yes, challenge on prices, but a sustainable growth in volume and in the quality of healthcare that wealthy Swiss individuals and families are and will be looking for. We're actively shaping the Swiss healthcare landscape as the leading private provider, setting standards in quality, innovation, and patient-centered care. We're tackling the changes head-on, translating shifting market dynamics into strategic action that enhance resilience and long-term performance.
We're transforming and empowering with purpose. We focus on improving quality, driving profitability, operational efficiency, and sustainable value creation. In the coming year, with certitude, the public sector will most probably be overwhelmed by the number of patients, especially by the number of elderly patients. This will result in longer waiting times, and it will give us opportunity to invest in forward-looking models, in specialized outpatient care, innovative insurance collaboration, private health ecosystem, which the wealthy people in Switzerland will be looking for. So to conclude, I started my presentation talking about chocolate and watches. I would like to end with another thing we're famous for in Switzerland. We also created the Swiss Army Knife. Swiss Army Knife enables you to thrive through any kind of challenging environment. And Hirslanden is our Swiss Army Knife.
We use all the tools which are available, and we do it properly because we trust that Hirslanden has the capacity to drive growth as the leading healthcare organization in Switzerland. I thank you very much for your attention. And now I give the word to Jurgens to speak about Mediclinic South Africa. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Bertrand, and good morning, everyone. Good afternoon, I should say. It was good morning when we practiced it yesterday. Speaking of which, so we did do a bit of work yesterday, but it was also the Oxford-Cambridge boat race yesterday. And so when we got back to our rooms last night, Jannie and I were talking about the boat race. We talked about the kind of caliber of person that it takes to be in the boat race. And Jannie said, "No, no, no, these are tall guys like you, but thin." So you've now heard a doctor speak about the healthcare landscape. You've heard about the Swiss guy speaking about efficiency. And now you have to listen to the fat guy speak about the rest. So clearly, we're there with healthcare, but we're not there with wellness just yet.
So starting on Mediclinic Southern Africa, and this is an environment in our no slide that would be familiar to many of you. Mediclinic Southern Africa is one of the largest private hospital groups in the country and in the region with a market share of just over 20%. And on operational footprint, with 47 hospitals in South Africa and three in the neighboring Namibia, it is the largest division in our group. Healthcare expenditure in South Africa comprises approximately 9% of our GDP, and most recent data points to a cutoff of 9% in the post-COVID environment. The estimated population age at 65 and over is approximately 4%. I guess, Bertrand, we found other things to do with our Swiss Army knives, so it's lower than Switzerland. But with the medically insured population, this increases to 9%, so more than double of what we see in the country broadly.
The private healthcare sector in South Africa is well developed with a mature framework of healthcare providers such as ourselves and medical schemes. The sector has maintained a positive, gradual, long-term growth trajectory going back to 2005 to current, giving a cutoff of 4.1%. Furthermore, the weak historic economic environment, dare I say, is gradually showing signs of improvement with growth in GDP projected around 2% in the medium term. With reference to some of the data points that you'll see on the slide that's in front of you, two key changes compared to perhaps the last time we met in our capital markets there in 2018 is that we've sold off two of our hospitals. And this is part of our ongoing effort to ensure that our portfolio is fit for purpose. In addition to that, you'll see that we now have 14 daycare clinics.
When we met in Zurich in 2018, that number was two. And so that signifies a significant change in our South African portfolio that's taken place over this period. In addition to that, we've also established and/or acquired six mental health facilities, to which I'm currently post-hospitalization, Ronnie, and pre-hospitalization as well, given capital markets there. I'll elaborate on this just a little bit later. On the next page, we have the regulatory environment. And from a regulatory perspective in this country, the landscape continues to be dominated by government's pursuit of national health insurance. In May last year, just before the election, the president signed the NHI bill into law, although the funding and implementation thereof remains uncertain. To recap, the NHI seeks to establish a single-payer healthcare financing system in the country to achieve universal healthcare coverage.
It offers access to a defined package of comprehensive health services delivered by accredited and contracted public and private providers. And once fully implemented, medical schemes may only offer complementary cover to services not reimbursable by the fund. Our main concerns, or the main concerns with the Act, are the lack of clarity on how this will be funded and what healthcare services will be procured by the fund, the erosion of medical scheme cover, and the perceived breach of multiple constitutional rights, for instance, the established right of access to healthcare services. So from a Mediclinic perspective, we support, as we always have, the concept of universal healthcare. We continue to engage through industry associations like the Hospital Association of South Africa and Business Unity of South Africa as appropriate. We support the HASA legal challenge to the NHI Act in the High Court application made in February 2025.
And in the meantime, we continue to conceptualize models through which some hospital services could be delivered at a lower price point to expand the client base of private healthcare in South Africa. There are other regulatory developments that you'll see on the slide, which we take note of, but doesn't affect private hospitals directly. In turning our attention to the market landscape, again, one that many of you will be very, very familiar with. But as I mentioned earlier, our private healthcare market in South Africa is relatively mature and well-established. The number of medical scheme beneficiaries, which represents the part of the population with access to private healthcare, has been stable to growing in the post-COVID environment, with 2.1% growth over the period. This is a key data point for us, as it represents some of the robustness of private healthcare landscape within a weak broader economic landscape.
So the advisors were asking me, "Why would you put such a boring slide? What's this boring graph on the slide? The bottom left one." And the key about it is how boring it is. This is a particularly stable environment for us, where the beneficiaries that have access to our services have been robust during what has been a tough economic environment. Within this, we've seen significant growth in the government-deployed medical scheme, which comprises 26% of the overall market. A key feature in the medical scheme environment, however, has been network formation, and this is one that we've continued to face questions on. Broadly, this refers to medical scheme beneficiaries opting for a more limited coverage on healthcare providers and/or benefits in exchange for a reduced premium. The scheme, in return, put these networks out to tender for private hospitals like ourselves at a discount.
The proportion of network beneficiaries within the three largest medical schemes has grown by about 8.9%, so clearly disproportionate to what we've seen the rest of the population grow by. Participation on these networks is and will be a careful balancing act for us between volumes and price, ultimately seeking to drive our absolute numbers. We're currently represented in the GEMS and Discovery networks. Over the page on the financials, the Southern African division has performed admirably in what's been and remains a challenging environment. Inpatient volumes have recovered to well above pre-COVID levels ahead of some of our competitors at a compound annual growth rate of about 3%, delivering revenue CAGR of 7% in FY 2022 to 2025.
Our pre-COVID EBITDA margin of 20.8% proves to be a challenge, as profitability has been impacted predominantly by increases in employee benefit costs, utilities, and investment in technology, with the latter in particular costing us approximately 1% of our EBITDA margin. For FY 2025, as you might have seen in the trading update and as Ronnie indicated earlier, our revenue increased by approximately 7.5%, driven by an increase in paid patient days of around 1%. The Adjusted EBITDA margin is in line with the 18.2% that we saw this time last year. One area that I thought would be helpful to pay particular attention to, and I already alluded to it as part of my introduction, is growth across the continuum of care. The South African business pursued good growth across this environment for us.
And just to highlight a few, firstly in radiology, where we've judiciously—and that's a very difficult word for me, and it's coming later on as well, so maybe I can pronounce it better then—but we have acquired two radiology practices and integrated them into a structured vehicle offering practice management and equipment. Our strategic focus here is to grow organically and integrate the business across the technology platform to facilitate the scaling and differentiate us from our competitors in the market. Secondly, Mediclinic Pathology, where we've established a joint venture with a technology company to provide near-patient pathology services in our emergency care centers as an integrated clinical service. Our focus here is to establish what is right now basically a startup initiative for us and to roll this out to 17 facilities in the current year.
Mediclinic at Home is a virtual care setting for low acuity patients supported by a centralized care coordination center, physical nursing services, and remote patient monitoring technology. Again, this is something that we're piloting at the moment, but looking to roll out to 14 facilities across the country. And finally, Mediclinic Mental Health, where I've just come from. Our mental health platform comprises standalone as well as integrated facilities in our acute hospitals. Here we follow an organic growth strategy looking to build on what we've already established. So that's the Southern African business. And then turning our attention to the Middle East and the UAE. Again, a familiar slide to many of you. Mediclinic Middle East is a well-established leader in private healthcare and environment that continues to experience significant growth.
Since the acquisition of Al Noor in 2016, we've organically increased our presence with the net addition of outpatient clinics and the commissioning of Parkview Hospital in 2018. So that net addition of clinics is exactly that. We've closed a couple of them down, we've sold a couple of them, and we've added other clinics. And this is a very dynamic space that we manage and that we ensure that our portfolio in that environment is fit for purpose in our hub-and-spoke strategy. Looking at the landscape, the UAE population has grown by a CAGR of about 4% since our first investment there in 2007. More recently, this, together with the ongoing diversification from oil to industry, has contributed to GDP growth of 3.7% in this year and anticipated to be 4.1% next year.
The economic upswing has coincided, though, with ongoing healthcare-related regulatory changes impacting technology, clinical operations, and pricing, basically our entire environment, and specifically and mostly in the Abu Dhabi environment. Daman, which we've discussed with many of you, is essentially a government-owned medical insurance firm and represents approximately 70% of the healthcare insurance market in Abu Dhabi and influences not only the pricing dispensation but also enforces fee regulation, leading to a suboptimal fee structure in the Abu Dhabi market. For instance, we've not had inflationary increases since 2012 in that market, and there have been significant reductions in some prices through direct and indirect changes implemented by the Department of Health and Daman that have impacted the revenues in our Abu Dhabi business with approximately 90 million dirhams in just the last 18 months.
So if you add that to the transe number of earlier, we're now up to about four and a half hospitals that we could have built in the South African environment with some of the changes that we've seen in our fee structures. By comparison, Dubai represents a more stable market environment, offering a more predictable financial trajectory, adding to a significantly greater degree of certainty regarding future health policy. This approach is also evident in the insurance market, where there's robust competition and no outright dominance by a single player, leading to a more balanced outcome between insurers and providers like ourselves. Within this broader context, we continue to allocate capital judiciously—there's that word again—in the form of firstly a review of our clinical portfolio as part of the powerhouse concept that Ronnie spoke about earlier, and ongoing investment in areas where we see opportunities for growth.
Onto our numbers in the Middle East. In the post-COVID environment, the Middle East has continued to grow volume, revenue, and operating margins. From FY 2022 to 2025, revenue has increased by a compound annual growth rate of 8%, driven by inpatient admissions and day cases up 11% and 12%, respectively, and outpatient cases, which deliver 65% of our revenue there, increasing by 7%, which drives an EBITDA CAGR of 9% over that period. As we said in our trading update for the year ending 31 March 2025, revenue increased by approximately 5% on the back of increased client activity, offset clearly by some of the challenges that I spoke about earlier, with operating leverage and staff cost efficiencies driving an improved EBITDA margin to around 15%.
And just out of interest, included in that revenue number is outpatient pharmacy revenue, so basically retail product, that has now increased to, let's say, between 800 and 900 million dirhams. So if you run your numbers, a percentage of 5 billion. And that comes at a significantly low margin, but still drives an absolute number. And so the margin needs to be viewed in the context of what the current business is doing, but also what is a growing part of our business in outpatient pharmacy, but a significantly lower margin. We thought it would be helpful to just do a deep dive specifically on Parkview Hospital. Again, many of you would have been around when we commissioned that in 2018, as I mentioned earlier.
The reason why we're deep diving on this is because the UAE represents an exciting growth area for us if we look across our business. As I mentioned earlier, we commissioned Parkview Hospital in the southern part of Dubai, and it's been a success for us. Ronnie spoke earlier about the revenue profile of this hospital. And again, just to compare and contrast it with what you may be used to seeing in the South African environment, 65% of what we do at Mediclinic Parkview is outpatient. And then that profile leads into the 25% inpatient and the 10-day case. What that means is that Parkview is not a hospital. Parkview is a healthcare campus where there's a conglomeration, if you will, of services being rendered in one roof, and now we're building another.
So the success of our Parkview Hospital, which this year, by the way, will exceed 1 billion dirhams in turnover. And again, just to contextualize that, that's approximately five of our Southern African largest hospitals in one. So our largest hospital in the SA would be just over a billion rand of turnover. And so Parkview is now doing five of that. We're going to extend that. We're going to build on the success. We plan to expand the hospital's offering in medical oncology, surgery, obstetrics, gynecology, and outpatient services at a total investment of 360 million dirhams, delivering an IRR of over 13%. That then concludes the divisional overview, and I'm going to jump back into my comfort zone and talk about the financials and capital allocation, starting with our revenue overview.
The post-COVID period has been categorized, because of some of the challenges that we've highlighted before, by volume-led revenue growth across the group. Our revenue CAGR during this period is 3% in USD, 4.3% in constant currency. And you clearly see in FY 2023 that a strong dollar gave rise to a lower dollar revenue number, but the volumes are still trending upwards throughout that period, where we've had consistent volume growth of 4.2% from 22 to 25. The contribution to revenue reflects the growth in the Middle East, compared and contrasted with an improving performance in SA impacted in reporting currency by weakening of the rand. Those of you with short memories like I do, in FY 2022, the rand was about 14 or 15 to the dollar. And so during this period, SA has maintained its contribution, notwithstanding a significant weakening of the currency.
On EBITDA contribution, the impact of the HEFSAN and EBITDAs brought their contribution down, while you can see the Middle East has stepped up by about 5%. Going from revenue straight into the philosophy about capital allocation, our financial strategy, as I would have said to many of you before, is to drive long-term shareholder growth through a combination of, firstly, profitable growth, growing our revenue and operating profit in absolute terms, strong cash conversion—that's converting our EBITDA to cash from operations—continued investment in facilities and technology, maintaining our facilities and investing in medical and other technology to enhance our service offerings, responsible leverage, which is managing the cost of our debt and the refinance risk within acceptable levels, and then expansion, which is pursuing value-adding organic and inorganic expansion, prioritizing our existing markets.
In addition, Anthony, we target a dividend payout ratio of 20%, and we're trying to stick to it as well. And there are many, many people within the room who are stable that remind us of that often. We measure this pursuit to capital allocation and value-add on a dynamic basis using return on invested capital, which I'll discuss in a minute. Just turning quickly to cash flows, this page illustrates our financial strategy and starts with driving EBITDA growth, albeit in our recent past impacted by the pricing pressures that Bertrand and I alluded to in the overview of Switzerland and the Middle East, and allocating capital to maintenance and expansion CapEx.
So to break that down, moving from EBITDA to cash from operations, our working capital is managed strictly across the group, and we continue to target converting 90%- 100% of our EBITDA to cash from operations across the group. In fact, the dirty little secret within Mediclinic is that actually we target over 100%, which is where we want to be, but 90- 100% is our target. Capital expenditure is managed in two dimensions. Provision is made for maintenance and expansion capital expenditure as part of the annual financial planning process. CapEx to maintain our facilities approximates 5% of revenue, and capital expenditure to expand our operations are stipulated by project and approved based on forecast free cash flows and return requirements per division.
For reference, our hurdle rates are based on weighted average cost of capital and is currently 7% in Switzerland, 11% in the Middle East, and 19% in Southern Africa. Looking at our balance sheet, the rare occasion where an arrow pointing downwards is actually a good thing. We generally follow a philosophy of preferring to own our properties. This is informed by our long-term approach, which I spoke about earlier, but also operational and financial flexibility. Ronnie spoke eloquently earlier about the changes that take place within healthcare. And so what do we mean by operational flexibility? Once we've built a hospital, it's highly likely that 10 or 20 years or 50 years later, what you're going to need from that campus is very different from what you originally intended.
You may need less ward beds because length of stays down, but more operating theaters and ICU because your throughput through that section of the hospital is higher. So we need to be able to adapt to that. And for that conversation to hinge upon a relationship with a landlord every time you want to change something, leaves you with less operating flexibility. And so this we regard as being key to us in providing us with operational flexibility and also financial flexibility because we already have a reasonably high fixed cost base. And if you add rent to that, that increases your degree of financial leverage as well. To drive the financial productivity of these properties, and where appropriate, we use it as security to borrow against. As a result, debt funding becomes a long-term source of capital to the group.
To ensure the ongoing nature of this debt, we have to manage the levels of debt within an acceptable level of refinance risk. In addition to this, all our debt is ring-fenced to the division with no cross guarantees, no cross defaults, and it's also incurred in the same currency as the underlying revenue so that we don't run any FX risk. Our current leverage ratio, which includes lease liabilities, is around 3.1 x debt to EBITDA, and approximately 40% of our debt is hedged on interest rate exposure. That 3.1x, you can see it's been trending down, and in the nine years that I've been with Mediclinic, it's the lowest that our debt to EBITDA has been. And that's through a combination of us deliberately reducing our leverage, but also, of course, growing EBITDA over time.
You would have seen our EBITDA profile earlier, and so I made the comment at our group executive committee that we don't have a debt problem; we have an EBITDA problem. But right now, we seem to be having less of both with a leverage ratio of 3.1 times. As I mentioned earlier, we measure long-term shareholder value creation on an ongoing basis using return on invested capital. We continue to target an incremental improvement in ROI through improved asset turnover and NOPAT margins. On asset turnover, we continue to focus on capacity utilization of facilities, with Switzerland sitting currently around 60% occupation and S.A. and the Middle East 68% and 66% respectively. But as Ronnie pointed out earlier, that's only part of the picture. Also, as Ronnie discussed before, we've been severely challenged on pricing, which has impacted the progress made on our asset turnover as well.
Operating costs and its impact on margins are a key aspect of management within the group, and Bertrand has been pointing that out. We dedicate ourselves to the efficient deployment of an appropriately skilled workforce, delivering support to our physicians and care to our patients. This requires a fine balance, and this is one that we're used to managing. In addition to our workforce, as Bertrand said, we use our global scale to drive procurement synergies as well. The target operating model will deliver an improvement on these measures for us. The aggregate of this delivers an incremental improvement in return on invested capital over time. I thought it would be helpful to just very quickly speak about some of the expansion products that we have across our group.
Our flagship hospital in Abu Dhabi is Airport Road Hospital, and we continue to invest in this facility to extend its service offering and underpin its position as a powerhouse, as Ronnie described it earlier, in this region. Our current investment is focused on increasing capacity in labor, neonatal ICU, and theater capacity at a cost of 120 million dirhams. In Switzerland, we continue to execute on the refurbishment and expansion of St. Anna and Aarau, respectively our second and third largest hospitals in the country. The project at St. Anna, which is in Lucerne, which many of you have visited before as well, is aimed at increasing outpatient services capacity and renovating and expanding the theaters, ICU, emergency center, and bed capacity. The total cost is just under 200 million Swiss francs, delivering an IRR of 9%, and is expected to complete in 2028.
In addition to this, we're in conjunction with the University Hospital of Geneva, which is Bertrand's previous employer, forming the largest outpatient surgery in Switzerland with 10 operating theaters, 24 beds, and the capacity of 13,000 surgical cases per year. In Southern Africa, we're in the process of building a new hospital in the town of George, which is where Danie Meintjes lives, and so it's probably no surprise that we're building a new facility there, which we're combining to expand our—we're building a facility to relocate and combine and expand our existing facilities. We're also in the process of replacing our patient administration system, which has reached end of life. It still has green screens, if you don't believe me, with an off-the-shelf product to deliver patient logistics, billing, and pharmacy logistics.
We're leveraging this investment to consider the efficiency of our business processes in this environment, exploring opportunities for simplification and also automation. Finally, I'll just look at the—turn to the outlook for each of our divisions, and then I'll look at that from a group perspective. In Switzerland, we've resolved to meet the ongoing challenges through a combination of volume growth driven by doctor accreditation, targeted investments, and reshaping medical portfolios. And secondly, ongoing and incisive reduction of cost base through a reduction in administrative FTEs, shifting from temporary to permanent employees, and reducing consumables and supply costs through category and spend management.
These measures, together with the optimization of our healthcare portfolio, signified through the recent announcement of intended closure of Rosenberg Clinic, which is referenced by Bertrand as well, is aimed at putting HEFSAN on a path to sustainable profitability, albeit moderated by the ongoing and severe effects of price reductions and out-migration of care. As indicated in this financial year, our revenue growth is approaching 2%, delivering an EBITDA margin of around 13.5%, a small improvement on prior year. Our anticipated volume growth, together with the targeted savings as part of the turnaround plan, should deliver 1%- 1.5% improvement in EBITDA margin in the medium term. In Southern Africa, Mediclinic Southern Africa continues to perform robustly in a challenging environment. In the core business, we continue to focus on volume-led revenue growth and optimizing our business through scale and changes through the target operating model.
Alongside this, as I pointed out, we continue to pursue opportunities for growth across the continuum of care. In FY25, revenue growth was around 7.5%, delivering an EBITDA margin in line with what we saw last year, which was 18.2%. Our anticipated volumes should drive above inflation revenue growth, which, together with the targeted savings, could deliver up to a 1% improvement in EBITDA margin in the medium term. Finally, in the Middle East, Mediclinic Middle East continues to provide an opportunity for growth within our broader portfolio. We have and will allocate capital towards expanding our business where we see the opportunity for profitable growth on a sustainable basis. As indicated, our revenue growth for this financial year is 5%, which is delivering an EBITDA margin of just over 15%, which is an improvement on the 14.6% that we saw last year.
The combination of achieving greater efficiency within our existing business and driving profitable growth will deliver continued revenue growth and drive an improvement in EBITDA margins by 2%- 3%. In conclusion, then, at a group level, we remain committed to driving revenue growth and, through that, improving asset turnover and diversifying our sources of revenue, improving our EBITDA margins by 1%- 2% through scale and the implementation of the target operating model, providing for maintenance CapEx at approximately 5% of revenue, and managing our leverage ratio at between 3% to 4% times debt to EBITDA, incrementally improving our return on invested capital. Mediclinic operates in an industry with rapid change and innovation and disruptive and regulatory forces, creating a need to adapt and the opportunity for investment.
The group consists of a well-invested asset base that is able to, through the adoption of technology and our target operating model, drive the business to improved asset utilization whilst taking advantage of selective opportunities for expansion. We have a sound financial strategy that aims to drive profitable growth and allocate the resulting capital in a disciplined way, prioritizing the quality of our facilities and good growth opportunities. And with that, I thank you very much, and I'll hand back to Ronnie.
Thank you, Jurgens. Just to conclude, a summary from my side. We have a summary there on the screen of where we are, what we've achieved, and what we are doing. I just want to repeat the three messages I gave you at the beginning.
We are a very strong business, a diversified healthcare organization operating in four different countries, well-invested, well-diversified geographically, as well as busy diversifying in terms of care settings, well-established, highly specialized medical services, and performing in a satisfying way, if I can call it that, given the last year's performance. That's point number one. Number two is a challenging environment, an environment that's moving fast, but that also brings up lots of opportunity. We understand that environment, and we believe we are well-positioned to deal with it. And thirdly, very concrete short-term projects, as you heard, to improve the performance and medium-term initiatives and plans to position the business for the future. Thank you very much. It's time for Q&A. Thank you for your time.
Thanks. Thank you, Ronnie, and Bertrand, and Jurgens. Another great and detailed presentation we heard from Ronnie.
It's a great business in a challenging environment, but with significant opportunity. Jurgens, I think the point you made in your introduction as well is quite important on that, despite the market dynamics, this is a sector that we like, and if we had to choose an investment in the sector, it would still be Mediclinic with its great team and a well-run business. I'm conscious of time, so maybe if we can start with questions, I'll take a few in the webcast and then move into the room. Question from Pieter at Iron Group. Jurgens, can you maybe speak on any of Mediclinic's short-term refinancing requirements?
Right. So what I did say was that we have, because of our asset portfolio, we regard our leverage as quasi-permanent form of capital for us.
And so when we do take on debt, we do so on a long-term basis, and we seek to, well ahead of time, start with the preparation to refinance that. And so our near-term refinance is in September 2026 when our Southern African leverage comes up for refinance, and we're already in the process of actually engaging with banks to go through that exercise. And I'm happy to say that, by and large, right now, the feedback has been quite positive. A year later, a year after that, in September 2027, is when the Swiss leverage needs to be refinanced, and so we're talking two years from now and then three years from now. That's our maturity profile. And in the Middle East, we're completely ungeared.
Thanks, Jurgens.
And maybe just talking to the point made earlier about highly specialized medicine, a question from Nedbank: how do you balance that with the constant pressure from funders to bring costs down?
So highly specialized medicine is very necessary and needed in any of the countries in which we operate. The funders understand that what they want from us is to deal with those highly specialized cases in the most efficient way possible, with great outcomes in order for the patients not to be able to, not to, for that, that is needed for them to come back and have further treatments. So get it right the first time and doing it in an efficient way. So that's our responsibility. We have to provide that, but we need to do that very effectively and efficiently.
Thanks, Ronnie.
And the next one, I think we would have missed something if it didn't come up, but can you comment on the investment in Spire and whether the rationale for that acquisition still stakkies up given the performance issues more recently?
Do you want to start? I'll finish.
So we have a 29.9% interest in Spire. It gives us access to a UK healthcare environment that we regard as actually in need of private healthcare. So broadly speaking, the investment thesis of private healthcare in the UK environment is one that we continue to support. Within that, I've chosen Vehicle Spire Healthcare. We've been shareholdered since 2015. We've sought to acquire the minority interests, unsuccessfully so. There was an offer from Ramsay at £2.50, which didn't close.
So we've clearly given an indication to the market of how we think about our investment there, but I think by and large, right now, in this environment, the best thing we can do is to be a supportive shareholder and support the management team through their own target operating model change in the first instance. And secondly, some of the changes that they're seeing in their own revenue composition, which is impacting volumes on the one side and average revenue per case on the other side, some of the mixed changes taking place. And so we continue to support, work through the board, work with the CEO, CFO, and that's our role in the current environment.
Yeah, if I can add, they have, broadly speaking, there are three revenue streams: NHS, insurance, and then self-pay. They call it PMI, private medical insurance, is the middle layer.
Now, the price for a hip replacement for NHS is here, PMI is there, self-pay is there. There's big differences between those, doing exactly the same thing. What we think is spooking the market right now, because after the last set of results, the price took a big nosedive, you all know this. What I think, I should say we, Jurgens has his own thesis, but what I think is what spooked the market is that they are concerned that Spire is entering the same reality of what we used to have in Switzerland, where there's more general insured. We grow volumes, but we grow general insured volumes and not supplementary insurance, and again, a big huge price differential. So we get busier and busier, but we're doing it at an effectively lower price, and that's what's been happening at Spire to a certain extent.
Maybe it's the early stages of that, but the market, I think, is concerned about that. Now, whether that's really or should be a concern is a different story, but the business is well-run, much better run than five years ago, to be honest. It's a very well-run business. I'm on the board. We're very engaged with them, and they've got many different plans in place to grow that business.
Thanks, Ronnie. It's good to know that there's been improvements in the last five years. Maybe we can take some questions in the room. There's one.
Thanks for the presentation. Roy Campbell from RMB Morgan Stanley. Two questions, please.
Firstly, just from a high-level perspective in Switzerland, I mean, I understand all the initiatives in place to get the efficiencies through, but in a bull case scenario, is there a potential here that your aging population and the consolidation of hospitals leads to an acceleration of those volumes that come through, or is that just offset by pricing pressure that comes through in the out-migration? So can we see the operating leverage in that business? And then maybe just from a capital allocation, how will the excess cash in the Middle East be allocated, or is that all going to be absorbed by the expansion that you have? Thank you.
Shall I take the first one? So on the aging population and the reduction of hospitals in Switzerland, I think we all believe that there's a possibility that this could be a very positive outcome for us.
The important thing is we need to survive and thrive through this period of reduction and consolidation of hospitals throughout the entire country. That's where we need to be super efficient. On the other side of that, there will be a far better balance in terms of the demand and supply on hospital beds that's available, and we could very much be in that space that you've just explained.
Yeah, Roy, I would just add to that by saying that if you look at this financial year, 2% volume growth is actually in that market. It's a pretty good number, and so it perhaps already starts to indicate that whilst it's nowhere near what we're seeing in the UK environment, there is an element of demand-supply shift in Switzerland potentially.
And not because the wave of change has really washed through the private healthcare infrastructure or public, for that matter, but I just think that, to Bertrand's point, the demographics are a tailwind for us in that environment. On your question on capital allocation, as I said, in the Middle East, we're debt-free at the moment. We are extending our Parkview facility. We're extending our Airport Road facility. So in the near term, clearly we'd prioritize capital towards that, but the capital generated in the Middle East is capital generated for the group. And whether it be expansion opportunities in other environments or reducing or perhaps rebalancing our debt portfolio, who knows? But it's generated and allocated across the group. But certainly, as I said, 360 and 120 is first port of call.
And there are other opportunities in the Middle East as well, which we're not talking about, but there are other things, certainly in the Dubai environment, that we think could provide good growth opportunities, additional growth opportunities. I didn't highlight it, but the area around Parkview Hospital, which many of you know was desert when they started building that hospital, is now growing at 10.7% in population. That's significant. And so there may well be more opportunities, Roy, in just the Dubai environment itself.
Thanks. Dino?
I think they need to be able to hear on the webcast as well.
Okay. Excuse my ignorance here. I'm no expert on Switzerland hospital regulations or anything like that, but what I would like to know is the hospitals on land and property that's owned, right? So when you want to close a hospital, does it require regulatory approval to close the hospital?
And then when you're looking to exit the property, is it zoned specifically for a hospital, or could it be sold to anyone for any purpose? And then lastly, what difference does it make to Mediclinic's business model when doctors are employed directly versus indirectly? And how do you align interests in that environment? Thanks.
So for the first question, I think it depends on regions. It depends on geographies. But if I take Switzerland, which I don't pretty well, and especially around Rosenberg Hospital, for instance, we are discussing with the authorities, the local authorities, on what we could do with the building. And depending on the possibilities there, first, to respond to your question, in Switzerland, it's quite liberal with this regard.
You can just close a hospital informing the authorities you're going to do it, but you don't require them to approve, which is a freedom of doing the business there. Now, with regard to the property itself, you will negotiate with the authorities somehow to know whether the land is constructible for other purposes or that should remain into the healthcare environment. And if I take Rosenberg, for instance, we're thinking with this aging population of transforming it into an elderly care setting, because as well, the building, if you don't tear it apart totally, is very well made for taking care of elderly as an elderly home, for instance. But to respond, really, it's more a dialogue than an opposition between private and the public sector. It's really more like, what can we do and how to optimize with regard to this?
On the doctors' models, we are agnostic as to what doctors' models should be followed. We basically follow what happens in the countries in which we operate. So in South Africa, we're not allowed to employ doctors. They're all in their own independent practices, all of them. We have limited allowance to the point and employ emergency center doctors, but that's very few. So we are very used to that model. We know how to deal with it. We know how to partner with the doctors. When we go to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, where we have all of them, or the vast majority of them on a payroll, that's the model, the prevailing model in that part of the world.
What we there do is we're obviously very careful in our selection and recruitment of doctors, the type of specialties and the proportions between surgeons and physicians and general practitioners, anesthesiologists, and all of those. We need to make sure that we cover all the bases in the right way. And then we have specific methodologies to ensure that they are productive as well. Because one of the problems you have if you have somebody on the payroll is they might not be as productive as when they are in their own practices where they actually get paid for everything they do. So we have very carefully crafted and developed ways in which to make sure that they are productive, and that's been working very, very well for us in the UAE. The Swiss environment is slightly different in the sense that the hospital-based specialties are usually on the payroll.
So those would be the emergency center doctors, the anesthesiologists, who also then look after the intensive care units, the hospital-based internal medicine physicians, radiologists, pathologists, and so on. So they are remunerated in a specific way, and then all the different types of surgeons, they are in private practice. But we've now have quite a lot of experience on all three of those models, so for us, we're agnostic. If you have a doctor on the payroll, just I need to point out this, we then bill for their professional services. And one needs to be able to track that very, very carefully in order not to get into a situation where you pay doctors high salaries, but the professional services that they render are far less than what we pay them.
So it's a very intricate model, but now that we've designed it, we understand it well, for us, it's not really a problem to run. And if you ask me today which one I prefer, it doesn't really matter.
Thanks, Ronnie. Any further questions? Percy?
Thanks. Thanks for a fascinating and enlightening presentation. You've given us margins, capacity utilization, and cost of capital by region, and then you've given us aggregate, Roy. Could you give us break that breakdown by region as well? Do you want me to repeat that?
I heard the question. The question is, are you asking what we target or where we are?
They've asked me to repeat. Okay. Okay. Okay. Thanks for a fascinating and enlightening presentation. Thank you.
You wanted to hear it twice, right?
No, it's amazing what you do.
You've given us margins, capacity utilization, and cost of capital by region, and then you've given us your aggregate, Roy, which is about 4%. Could you give us that Roy broken down by region? Because I'd imagine there's quite a few different figures there.
I don't have it in my head by region to disappoint you, but what I can safely say to you, which is exactly what you're anticipating, is that in Switzerland, because of the significant property portfolio that we have there, which is highly valued, our return on invested capital there would be below our weighted average cost of capital. It's below where we want it to be. It's a matter of fact. Whereas in the other two divisions, I would say that we would be approximating our weighted average cost of capital in those.
But the 4.2 that you see there is based on the—and I don't want to get too complicated on the accounting—but it's based on the acquisition, the joint acquisition by MSC and Rimgrowth. And so that is the IC. That's the invested capital. And so clearly, we now need to build towards that. But I would say SA and the Middle East approximating with Switzerland deficit, largely because of some of the discussion around what's happened to EBITDA over time, but also the significant property portfolio that we have there.
Thank you.
Jens, maybe to follow on from that, there's another question on the webcast just on the same thing that in your five-year plan, you talk about improving towards work and whether there's a hindrance to exceeding work. It's a question from Gary.
Is the question whether there is a hindrance to exceeding work? Yes, to exceeding work.
Yes, the 150 million damage that we got through the P&L is a significant hindrance to achieving that. The reality of our return profile is that unless we take severe action, both financially and across our asset base, it would be an incremental improvement over time. And so there's nothing in this everything. Everything we've spoken about has acted as a hindrance towards us achieving better results and achieving better return on invested capital. But there's nothing structurally that stands in the way of us incrementally improving it.
Hi, it's Percy David from All Weather Capital. Jürgens, you spoke about volume-led growth. To some extent, that implies more network deals. And if you consider what your competitors are doing, it feels like a lot of pricing pressure still.
I mean, can you unpack for me how you think about these network deals and what do you see as Mediclinic's differentiator around this?
Thank you, Percy. We talk about volume-led revenue growth because, as Ronnie eloquently pointed out, the challenges that we see in the pricing environment. And so when you look at Switzerland, 2% inpatient volume growth, 2% revenue growth. But unfortunately, one of the consequences of that is volume-led growth comes at a cost. You have to stop that volume-led growth, whereas if it comes in the form of price, it goes directly to EBITDA and provides you with great operating leverage. And so the reason why I point out volume-led growth is not because we're bemoaning the fact that we're growing. We're just saying it doesn't give you the operating leverage that you would necessarily want.
In the SA environment, it manifests partly, Percy, due to networking. We spoke about the 150. I spoke about the 90. In SA, it partly manifests as networking. But it's been part and parcel of our environment in SA for the best part of a decade, if not longer than that. Currently, it's probably getting close to—and I said this on the webcast the other day—around a third of our revenue, that's in some shape or form on a network deal. And so that's already baked into the 18.2 margin that you see there. And so what we seek to achieve is to grow our absolute operating profit. And so whether that comes through volume or price, we seek to drive our absolute numbers in the first instance. And secondly, do we have a competitive advantage?
I think part of the distribution that we have across the country serves as a competitive advantage for us. We have facilities in some of the tier two towns where some of our competitors don't necessarily have. And I do think that serves as a competitive advantage for us.
Thank you, Jens.
Sean de Valencia from Ashburton. Ronnie, you mentioned earlier you've acquired two radiology practices already. One of your peers obviously was the first player out of the gate acquiring more practices. I would guess, I think my memory serves me correctly, that market was an 8 to 10 billion odd-round market per annum in South Africa. I mean, I would imagine there's a natural market share that you should gain just given the radiology that comes out of your facilities.
Maybe if you can just talk us through that timeline and your appetite to kind of get to a mature phase in radiology. How do you see that playing out?
Yeah, thank you. Look, we have a lot of experience in running radiology services in the UAE and in Switzerland. We've got quite a lot of installed capacity there that we're running quite efficiently. So it's only natural that in South Africa we're going to start looking at that. And some of our competitors have been talking about it a lot more vocally than we have in the last five years. So the idea is to buy some of these practices, but then afterwards to start developing our own services. We don't force anybody. Any one of our practices that we work with at the moment, they've been with us, many of them in our facilities for many years.
We respect that partnership that we've had. But sometimes they come to us and say, "Well, let's talk." And then we discuss it with them. The ramp-up will probably be quite—how shall I say? Incremental. Incremental is the right word. I wasn't going to say pedestrian. It's not that bad. It's incremental. But it's important for us to maintain good relationships with our doctor community, both in the radiology environment as well as all the others. Because if you go to a town, let's say Kimberley, the radiologist is firmly embedded in the entire doctor community there, and the last thing you want to do is upset all of those relations. So it's usually by way of them approaching us first. But eventually, and inevitably, we think that a lot of radiology will become much more streamlined and corporatized. We already, in the UAE, we do reading of radiology tests.
The reading and the interpretation of that is done centrally in some instances, and we're starting to deploy AI models onto that. So I'm not saying anything that you don't really already know about what happens in other parts of the world, but we're busy doing the same. We believe in time in South Africa, it's probably inevitably going to happen, and we want to be part of that action.
Thank you, Ronnie. Can we check if we've got questions on the line on the call, Scorp?
We have no questions on the line.
Thank you. Maybe to close it off, just a question on the closure of the clinics in Switzerland. What's the impact of that? Is there any cash process coming in, or should we anticipate any payments in terms of just the difference between market value and book value?
It's a little bit early to say. Right now, we've been through the process of informing the staff. As Bertrand pointed out earlier, the question of what happens to the property, do we sell it or do we repurpose it ourselves? That's the sort of thing that we still need to go through. From an earnings perspective, I would say it wasn't a significant contributor to P&L either way, negative or positive. The P&L impact, I don't expect to be material, but from an asset-based perspective, to be determined.
Thank you, gentlemen. That brings us to the end of the segment. I think everyone's heard for themselves the passion of the team for clinical care. I'll stop there, though, as we might have a few Mediclinic clients coming out of this room if we don't eat soon.
We don't mind.
Sure. We'll now go to a lunch break.
Before we do, very important announcement. The HEINEKEN bar is now open. [crosstalk] Please, can we be back and seated by 20 minutes past 2:00 P.M.? The bar will still be open later. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
To leg, as it were, of today's Capital Markets Day. I'm told that there's a backlog there at the coffee station, and so we'll allow the colleagues to get their fix. There are screens outside, so I am confident that they'll be able to hear us even as we do proceed. And I can let Team Mediclinic know that Team CIVH doesn't have an upper hand. The bar was entirely empty this entire lunch break. I was the only one who went there. And yes, my drink is virgin. I'm still on duty.
But what I'm saying is that the level field is, it's even. I don't know if you have been paying attention to the digital capture and the digital summary of today being captured by the mural artist. I learned that word yesterday for the first time, and I don't know if I said it right. If I said it wrong, please, I'm open to corrections. Nick, I believe it is. Oh, is he there? No, he's no longer there. But do pay attention to it. It's an absolutely fantastic summary of what has happened so far. So if I also just deep dive in terms of my own words, I think some of the things that have stood out for me so far is the opening, of course, when Jannie told us that the group is unashamedly, proudly South African.
It is home, and the portfolio will certainly be Africa-centric in terms of its investment approach. But Hunt helped me better understand why our African leaders tend to go over to Switzerland for their healthcare because of the impeccable quality. Perhaps maybe a lot more work will be done to improve the impeccable quality here in South Africa, so we are not having to pay for that exceptional healthcare that they receive at a much higher rate, of course. Ronnie, of course, told us about how, you know, the world is, we're living longer as people and we're getting older. Part of the reasons is that many couples are choosing not to have as many children or not to have children as was the case before. What I would like to say is that it's a choice for some.
It's circumstance for others because gents are not buying in diamond rings anymore. Ours to beers, even though prices have gone down. And some of us ladies who are tired of waiting for a ring are buying our own lab-grown. But that's a story for another day. And of course, we did hear a little bit of a teaser about CIVH and the fact that there are developments on the go regarding the Vodacom deal. I think that there's going to be quite a few questions and maybe even further comments regarding that. So I'm going to hand over to Carel to lead this next section for us as we do a deep dive into CIVH. Thanks, Carel.
I think there are a number of aspects about CIVH, which really illustrates what's core to our business and our way of investing.
CIVH, in many ways, is a poster child for the sort of things that Remgro is good at. It is a good illustration of our ability to partner with an entrepreneurial management team and partners to build a very, very formidable business.
We cover basically 2 million homes at this point with fibre. 16 million homes in South Africa. We basically pass 2 million homes. We are very close to 900,000 active customers on the network. What we're seeing is we're connecting people in South Africa. It's super critical if you look at the digital divide and you get people connected to the digital world. Not just to close digital divide in South Africa, but also to create competitiveness between South Africa and the world. If you look at fibre across South Africa, we've got nearly 60,000 km of fibre across South Africa.
And that's split up between fibre to the home on the one side with roughly 50,000 km and then 12,000 km- 14,000 km of business fibre across South Africa. We're the first in South Africa to drive fibre to the home after the telecom era with Copper Lines and DSL. And I think we took it to the market. We showed South Africa and Africa in a way that it's possible to roll out long-term infrastructure into the continent. We established ourselves as a leader in addressing and getting to the markets first. It started with the high LSM areas, which was more your leafy suburbs. Parkers was our first area, then Sandton, then Randburg, where we saw, listen, this market will saturate in time and we will get to penetration in time.
So we had to go look at the lower LSM areas, and that's where we started in Mitchells Plain. And we picked Mitchells Plain specifically because of the gang activity. And we thought, listen, if we can do it in Mitchells Plain, we can do it anywhere. And we picked Mitchells Plain, and Mitchells Plain was such a big success that it just exploded from there onwards. South Africa's got market challenges. I think we're in a tough market, very competitive market at this point. How we handled the challenges was through the first thing is strong shells. Because of our shells, we had access to capital. And because we had access to capital more than our competitors, we could actually drive the market at scale. This maverick type of attitude, you know, where we just had a can-do attitude. You know, nothing for us was too much.
And I think if you go look at the culture within the organization, that's what we drive to do. And I think that's where CIVH and Remgro plays a big role. You know, it's super strong. Shell is behind us. The market is there, and I think that excites us because we as a company played part in connecting South Africa. And I think that's the Pienaar of closing the digital divide and driving digital transformation.
Good afternoon again, everyone. So like Jannie did on Mediclinic, I want to do sort of a two-minute elevator pitch of Remgro's investment thesis into CIVH. Ronnie spoke earlier of megatrends, and the megatrend for fibre is relatively easy to tune into. The growth in data in the world is exponential.
And secondly, it's an immutable law of physics that fibre is simply the most reliable and quickest and in densely built areas, the most economic way of transporting data. Dietlof mentioned that we're in the business of connecting people, but we are, of course, more basically in the business of transporting data. And when I say data is growing exponentially, that's actually a difficult thing to tune into what exponential growth means. My day usually starts with an email that I read from an ex-colleague and this from one of our brokers, Ian Doyle. And a couple of weeks ago, he had an interesting stat that caught my eye. And this graph showed the growth of data consumption per year in sort of recent history. And it started in 2010 when annual data generation and data consumption was two terabytes, no, sorry, two zettabytes of data per year.
Now, fast forward 14 years to 2024, and that's increased to 150 zettabytes. So a 75 times increase in data generation over 14 years. And that's truly astonishing. But the thing about exponential growth is.At
the start of the curve, when you look back, it looks like exciting growth, but when you turn around, then the curve comes here. And the more interesting thing about that stat was, they say in the next three years, the data generation will be cumulatively more than it's been in civilization to date. So that is the megatrend of why we like to be in the business of transporting data. Of course, these things are driven by trends like AI, by cloud, by gaming, music, video streaming, Internet of Things, and similar sort of trends. But I had my own little experience, not a great experience, of the data intensity of AI. I mean, I've got a postpaid cell phone contract, but it's got a data package on it.
So just about every month, I run out of my data package towards the end of the month, and then around the 29th or the 30th, I start getting those SMSs to say, "You're about to run out of data," and it starts buying you new bundles. But on the 3rd of this month, in the evening, I was sitting at home in a colleague's center, a little link, and he said, "You know, we must experiment a bit with ChatGPT and what it can do with manipulating images." And it's quite a deep hole that you get sucked into very quickly. But after 30 minutes, I got that first SMS to say my data is running low. So the data that usually takes me 30 days to burn through, I literally burn through in 30 minutes, or maybe three days and 30 minutes.
So incredibly data-intensive time that we're going into and technology that we're currently using. The second question, I suppose, is why CIVH. And yeah, the CIVH team will do much of the selling, but I will say that the first and most important thing is that we've got an incredibly passionate and incredibly experienced team. Pieter will introduce them later and go into a bit of the detail there. But secondly, also, you'll hear that CIVH has got a market-leading position in all of the segments that it operates in. So it is a truly remarkable business. And as I said on that video, it is really an illustration of the thing that Remgro does uniquely well, which is to invest for a long time and build a truly formidable business alongside our partners, our investor partners, our management partners, the original entrepreneurs and founders of that business.
So we think now we've got a business that has got a very wide moat and really delivers an amazing service to its customers. A bit like Mediclinic, we sometimes get the comment that it's a very—I never forwarded this slide. It's a capital-intensive business, and absolutely, it is capital-intensive, but I will push back a little bit to say that there's one thing more attractive than a capital-light business, and that's a capital-heavy business where the capital has already been invested. Now, of course, we're going to continue to invest in this asset, but we are absolutely at a place where the saturation and the sweating of the asset will generate incredible cash flows for shareholders. So with that, we've got just a couple of comments also on the valuation. A bit like Mediclinic, the CIVH valuation is one that we often do get questions on.
And again, like Mediclinic, we do a bottom-up build of the CIVH valuation. It's a sum of the part, but DCF valuations for all of the components. The comparison that people make that we think is somewhat unhelpful is comparing the implied multiple that we get to, which is around 10.1, to the MNO operators. And you can see there on the slide, the local MNOs are slightly south of five times EBITDA, African MNOs just over five, and global MNOs at just sort of shy of seven. Again, we think these are the wrong comparators to compare a digital infrastructure business. We think somewhat more appropriate comparators would be global fibre companies at 11 times, or global tower companies at shy of 12 times, or global data center companies at north of 20 times.
Having said this, so you could take some comfort in seeing those digital infrastructure multiples that look more reasonable compared to our 10 times. But we will say that we think a multiple is an incredibly poor way of looking at the valuation of an infrastructure business. It depends entirely on where you are on the ramp-up curve and the saturation of the network. So if you're at 40% or 50% or 60%, the appropriate multiple would look very different. But again, we take some comfort that we can triangulate to similar companies that are at remotely similar sort of valuations. And again, these are observed multiples rather than control-inflated multiples.
The last comment I will make is, if I had to comment on why it is that these multiples for an infrastructure business are higher than for an MNO, I suspect there are many people in the room that are better qualified to comment on MNO valuations and what they should be and what they are. But I will make a few comments. The first one will be to say that I doubt you can buy 57% of any of those MNOs at those multiples that are shown there. The second point I will make is that at a point of sort of steady state, a fibre infrastructure business is incredibly cash-generative, and the conversion between EBITDA and cash flows is extremely high. There's no very, very high ongoing investment into technology as you would have for upgrades from 4G to 5G to 6G, new spectrum purchases, and so forth.
So we think the cash conversion in this business is really attractive at steady state. And then the last comment we would make is that the pricing power in the fibre market is also quite different to what it is in the mobile market. So if you consider that in South Africa, one out of five homes are overbuilt with fibre, whereas in the MNO market, given that you need pervasive coverage by all of the MNOs, every user is three times overbuilt. But not only three times overbuilt, given there are more than double the number of SIM cards out there than there are people in the country, people mostly have more than one option to connect and can arbitrage almost immediately between different pricing options. So we think the pricing dynamics in these two markets are quite different.
But with that, I will leave it and just introduce Pieter, who will introduce the rest of the team. Pieter, thank you very much.
Thank you, Carel. Why did you guys come up here and don't let me do this on my own? I had a beer with Dietlof over lunch at the HEINEKEN pub. Just walk straight. Okay. But Jannie mentioned earlier on the Vodacom story and how Remgro was involved. In the early years, 1992, I remember we had a meeting near Krugersdorp, and the Remgro team was there to really figure out the business plan for Vodacom and also to come up with a name. Remgro was a shareholder then, and it takes my memories back to how wrong we were. We said, "If Vodacom in 10 years could get to 250,000 customers, it will be a great business." And it almost feels like at that point, again, the number of customers that we have, internet users on fibre, how we can multiply that in the next coming years.
And Dietlof, the strategic thinker, he's going to share a lot more about that. But also thinking back to those years, I remember we started in Hatfield, and then one Dietlof, you worked in finance. By the way, one day I walked into the photocopy room, and there Dietlof was making photocopies. And then the story was going on. He was actually employed to make photocopies for the CFO today. I was installing PCs for the company. But things have moved on. And why I want to highlight Dietlof is Dietlof from South Africa went into the DRC and did his tour around Africa. But that's really where his strengths came out, being an entrepreneur. Things were difficult in the DRC, in Kinshasa. There were no banks when we got there.
And so every afternoon, they collected the cash, put it in the boot of a car, put it in the office. Every Friday, I don't know what happened, but every Friday, it was taken somewhere else for the weekend. But that's how Dietlof started. But what he really achieved was, in a difficult market such as the Congo, he figured out how do you make money in a win-win situation to connect the population, to connect the masses. And a lot of that entrepreneurial spirit is what he brought into the massive business today. But also we have Phila. Phila, you joined Telkom in the previous century. That's a long time ago. But Phila recently crossed the line. Last year, he walked over to us, and maybe you can tell us later on why did you choose us over OpenServe. So he's got a lot of experience in products.
He's the Chief Commercial Officer in MAZIV. He's the guy that takes Dietlof's strategic thinking and converts it into products and then revenue. And then we have the good Byron to keep these two in line. Byron needs to convert that into dividends one day. And Byron is also very experienced. He worked at Dimension Data for a long time. Also, the fact that not many people know, he was part of fibrehoods, which was also an entrepreneurial fibre company. And they were entrepreneurial because they were the first fibre company that started with aerial fibre. We were all laying fibres, but Byron, so you're also entrepreneurial. What I'm saying this is we have a really experienced management team here that I wanted to share their backgrounds with you. Then I need to move on to the slides. Just a quick snapshot again of who we are.
Remgro also has the other shareholder partners. We have 57.02% shareholding. But next to us is NewGX and CIH. By the way, CIH, that's where the name came from. So back in the day, in the middle of 2000, CIH created a ventures company, CI Ventures Holdings. And that's where the name came from. And we still keep that name over the years. But on this structure, you can see currently we're the 100% shareholder in MAZIV. By the way, it's MAZIV. Dietlof will explain what MAZIV means. Don't forget. But this is also the level where the Vodacom investment will come in, and I'll expand on that in more detail. But they have the option to buy between 30% and 40% of MAZIV once we get regulatory approval next to us. And we will dilute then to be somewhere between 60% and 70%.
Underneath, over the years, we've done some other acquisitions. You'll see some of them down there. Britelink MCT, that's our maintenance build engine. We also have VumaCam. There's a 49.96% shareholding underneath VumaTel in Heritage. But let me move on to maybe, as Carel said, and Jannie also, there are these transactions that are taking up 80% of our time, and it's been consuming a lot of our energy over a very long period. So the Vodacom transaction was submitted to the regulatory authorities more than three years ago. We've now progressed to a point where the tribunal said no. They published the reasons. We haven't seen the detailed reasons. But on Friday last, everybody that was referenced in the reasons had to put up their hands and say what was confidential.
So the lawyers are now taking all that input from last Friday and converting it into a non-confidential version that we'll hopefully get this week. But in the meantime, we've seen the press release. And if I just read through the press release, they go into a lot of detail. The press release is probably as the detailed document is almost 400 pages. But in summary, there are two parts to the story. Firstly, there's the tribunal hearings that happened last year. So I attended all of them. And when we started, everybody was against the transaction. There were interveners, MTN and Rain. They all said this is not good. But as we progressed, we sat down with them and we figured out what they were concerned about. And we built that into conditions that we then submitted to the tribunal. And they then took those conditions.
And if the transaction is approved, those conditions will become law then, and we have to abide by them. But what's important is on the last day of the tribunal, closing hearings, MTN stood up, Rain stood up, and they said, "If these conditions are then enforced on MAZIV, they are very supportive of the transaction." In fact, they said, "This will be a good transaction for the industry because it will give them access to lots of infrastructure, wholesale infrastructure that can allow them to build their businesses in a better way." So that was the first good news on the last day.
The second good news is the DTR minister's team also stood up, and they said, "If they look at the public interest benefits that will arrive from this transaction, they're also very happy." So we committed to things like we will connect a million lower LSM homes over the next five years. And they quite liked it. And they said, "We are supportive of this transaction." So we were surprised in the end when the tribunal then took all of this into account. But what I've picked up is that they are concerned about horizontal and vertical competition issues. So what that means is, firstly, even though Vodacom's got 2% of the fibre market share, they're concerned that Vodacom, once they're now in the fibre business, and they say we have to roll out fibre in Alex.
Previously, they would, and I think they still will, and they've committed to roll out fixed wireless access. So the tribunal was concerned, and the commission was concerned that if Vodacom is not invested in this, we will roll out less fibre, and Vodacom will roll out less mobile fixed wireless access. And again, Vodacom committed that they will spend X billion in the next couple of years not to do this. In fact, they made a commitment that wherever there is fixed wireless, they will also have fixed wireless. Then the second concern is that they were concerned that we might give Vodacom preferential treatment. So we might design products and services and give Vodacom better tariffs. But again, through the conditions that MTN and Rain then accepted, we committed to continue with our open access wholesale model and that we will never give them preferential treatment.
Whatever we offer them, we have to immediately offer the whole market. So again, I was surprised when this was not all taken into account. But I'm hopeful that when the judges on the 22nd of July are going to consider this, that they will take all of this into account and listen to both sides of the story. And we're expecting to have an outcome probably around September. But in the meantime, we've continued to engage with Vodacom, keeping the transaction alive. And the structure of the transaction hasn't changed a lot. The only thing that it's really moved is the valuation because it's now three, four years after we originally put the valuation metrics together. Initially, it was linked to EBITDA multiple, declining multiple. Then we came up in 2023 with a different mechanism. And again, now we're thinking maybe we should just fix the valuation.
So that's where we're currently with Vodacom. But they will still invest the 6 billion of cash into MAZIV. And MAZIV will still acquire their fibre assets for somewhere between 4 and 5 billion rand. So that will then lead to them being a shareholder probably around 30%. If they come out to less than 30%, depending on the valuation, they have the option to buy up to 30%. They also have an option to buy even more shares. They have an option to buy somewhere between 30% and 40%. The ICASA regulators have limited them. They can never exceed 40%. But as Dietlof will explain later on, we do not take this investment into account when we plan what the business is going to do. So the strategy is not informed by this investment.
And everything that Dietlof is going to tell us about, we're going to do with or without Vodacom. I can say the only difference really is the speed of execution of that strategy. So if Dietlof says we're going to give internet to the lowest of the LSMs, where without Vodacom, it will probably take us five years, with Vodacom, it can be much faster. Or did I say it wrong? It's just the speed of execution of his strategy. And I'm saying that because we're going to spend a lot of time today on the strategy. So the strategy is de-linked from the Vodacom investment. We also have another transaction at the competition authorities, Heritel, almost as old. 2022, May, we submitted it, filed it, the competition commission. This time, they've come up with a different recommendation.
They're recommending it to the tribunal with an approval recommendation, which is great to hear. And I've got good news. I called Janine, our lawyer, just before I came up on stage. And she said to me, "Last Friday was the date that the interveners could put up their hand to say if they are going to be intervening in this transaction like we had with Vodacom." So she said, "Nobody is going to intervene in the transaction. However, we did engage with potential interveners, and MTN is going to be a participant, but not an intervener." Why I mention this is this is actually good news because if there are interveners, there's a legal process that has to be followed with lots of hearings and documents. And so that can all be cut out. And hopefully, that will mean that we can have a much earlier tribunal hearing than.
If there were interveners, this could spill into next year. But hopefully, we can have a hearing around the middle of the year, which is currently the date scheduled for the intervener hearings. I've never given color on what this transaction really looked like. And maybe it's time that I share a little bit. On the first slide, I showed the 49.96% shareholding that Vumatel has in Heritel at the moment. So when we did that investment, all the shareholders, minus one, were sellers. So we couldn't just buy the one piece because then they wouldn't sell. So we had to come up in the open with a structure that would allow us one day, if we get approval, to get the whole of Heritel. So the company created an SPV, Heritel Communities SPV. And CIVH helped fund that SPV. So at CIVH, currently today, there's debt.
I think it's three and a half billion at the moment. A big chunk of that went towards acquiring firstly the 49.96% in Vumatel, but also the 49.93% that is held by the communities was also funded by CIVH. So once the regulator approves it, CIVH will then acquire that stake. CIVH, not Vumatel, has the right to acquire that stake. And CIVH will then most probably sell it down to Vumatel. And Vumatel will have 99.9% of Heritel, hopefully by then 100%. That's just in a nutshell where we are with the regulatory approval process. But maybe it is also good to just put in context who we are again. So it really started in the middle of 2005, 2006, when the then minister changed the regulations.
And he said, "For the first time now, companies other than telecom could provide transmission in the country." So immediately Vodacom said, "This is a great opportunity. Let's build our own transmission. Let's put fibre in the ground." But we forgot that telecom was a shareholder then. And they said at the board, "No, you're not going to do that. You're going to buy our COFLs." What does COFLs stand for? Cellular Operator Fixed Line. Just thinking back now, those were the links, COFLs that we connect the base stations to our switches. And they were 2 Mb lines, 2 Mb . That was like fast. But today it's like no speed. But then, fortunately, there was a company that came out of CIVH, the ventures, and they approached us at Vodacom and said, "We have a solution.
If you give us a chance to build fibre for you, we can be your partner." And we said, "Okay." They took me to the middle of Johannesburg. I remember clearly it was a Wednesday, two o'clock in the afternoon. And it was chaos. They had this monster machine driving down, I think it was Jeppe Street. And this machine was incredible for this long ago. It would drive down the middle of the road and it dug a trench in the road. And as it moved, it put the fibre in. And behind the fibre, it filled it with tar. It was the complete solution. And that really impressed me. And that's in the end what allowed me to get approval to give the business to Dark Fibre Africa, as it was called then.
I'll come back to why it was called Dark Fibre Africa and why it's now DFA and MAZIV. On this slide, you will then also see some of the evolution. We started as Dark Fibre Africa, then became DFA, Vumatel. I don't know if you can remember Park Town, Parkhurst, Parkview. Around 2014, they went on Tinder and they said, "We're not happy with the service that telecom is offering." And they went and they issued a few tenders. We also got one of them. Vumatel was formed. They got the very first one. We tried. We acquired SADV. We were not really successful. Vumatel was just so entrepreneurial. The founders, Niel Schoeman , and you joined them shortly after. Were you already there? Dietlof was there. And then we said, "We better buy these guys.
They really know how to do this, how to roll out fibre in hundreds." Because up till then, we only had a few customers. We initially had the telcos as customers. Then we acquired a business called Conduct Telecoms that became the hub of our enterprise business or the FTTB business. But we only had a model where we sell through ISPs. So we only had a few customers. But through Vumatel, we had to do it very differently. Since then, we've acquired Rise Telecoms. Rise Telecoms provides internet into high-rise buildings, student accommodation. There's VumaCam, SADV. It's become our own ISP. A lot of the reach and key connections come through the SADV ISP. Then Carel said I must also share with you maybe how does the fibre network work. You're still interested in that, Carel?
Let me go into some of the technical detail, how our fibre business works. So Craig, do you still have the fibre here? Maybe I can show them. We're not going to go on a road visit to look at the fibre, but I've brought some of the fibre with me. And I can just maybe show you. Thanks, Craig. By the way, Craig, recently we had a competition at the board. We said, "Let's see who of the directors can connect most reliably two of these fibres together." Craig went on to Takealot and he bought a little device. And he secretly practiced. So he's the board's master fibre builder. But he does a lot of other things as well. For example, he's really the brains behind also the MAZIV and CIVH valuation. He's the guy that does the DCF.
So if you have questions, maybe at the HEINEKEN pub, you can ask him about that. But when we started, we put these things in the ground. It was a dark fibre model. Because up till then, you could only buy these COFLs. And we said, "We need to find a way to differentiate." And we said to Vodacom, "What would you like us to offer you?" And they said, "To future-proof our business, we said to Dark Fibre Africa, give us a full fibre. Because then we know what the cost is going to be for the next 50 years." And we said, "Okay, we'll do it." So one of these, so this is the duct that we put into the ground. So each of these ducts has got one, two, seven micro ducts. In each of these micro ducts, you then have, how many are there?
Six of these strands. Within each of these strands, you have these hair-like little fibres. They're really thinner than a hair. And there's six, in this example, I think there's 16 of them. So this is 16 times 6 times 7. Craig, what's that? Can you quickly check? 672 fibres in this duct. So we put in a few of these ducts. I think initially we put in three and sometimes five of these ducts. But this limits you. Because then if you only have 672 fibres in this duct, you can only ever have 672 customers. Because each of them takes a fibre. And that's when we said we need to start getting smarter at this.
And the only way, and this is where the clever guys came in, they said, "Let's build virtual fibres." So we take one of these fibres, put some clever electronics, active Ethernet switches on top of the network. And that allows you then to create virtual fibres. So now those customers that can't afford a full dark fibre, we could give them a tenth of a fibre. In fact, the product was so smart. We said to them, "Take one of these virtual fibres. You don't know how big is the fibre that you want. But what we'll do is we'll see in the first couple of weeks, once you start using it, how much you use. Let's say you use 100 megabits per second.
We will give you, we will then bill you onwards for 100 megabits per second virtual fibre." And this has now become the hub of our future fibre to the business. But also telcos can use this. Because it is an incremental way without committing to a full fibre. Because the full dark fibres we sell on a long-term basis, a 15-year contract. Whereas the virtual fibres we can do on shorter terms, two years, five years. But so the fibres, if I when we started, I mentioned that COFLs of two megabits per second. Then there were fibres then. And the fibres then could do two gigabits per second when we started Vodacom. So in 1990, two gigabits per second. Last year, the two gigabits per second, the record in the world now is 402 terabits per second on a single fibre. That's half a what comes after tera?
Peta. There's half a peta bit per second on one single fibre. So this means that the capacity inside this virtual fibre network now is just huge. And what is interesting about this is we've spent a lot of CapEx in the last couple of months, year, to upgrade the network. And we did two things. Firstly, when we originally built, when I say we, I wasn't there then, but they built the fibre wherever Vodacom wanted their base stations built. So they put in these fibres and then close to the base station, they would dig a hole in the ground. That becomes your manhole. And then hopefully MTN will also buy and they open up the manhole. And then you connect the new customer. And that's also how we initially built the fibre to the business business.
So every time there's a new enterprise customer, you have to open this manhole, stick your hands into this manhole, take the fibre out, find the open fibre. And every time you do this, you and I've got a picture I'll show you now, you dislodge half of the other customers. So you connect one customer, takes you three months to find the fibre, and then you've upset 10 other customers. So we had to find a way of improving the quality and the speed of execution. And that's where the DUDC project came in. And by the way, DUDC is just an acronym, but it was invented here in South Africa. One of our suppliers saw the opportunity and they invented what is a modern manhole. So instead of let me show you what it looks like.
So this is on the bottom left is what an old manhole looked like. So it is a spaghetti full of fibres. And then there's the black thing bottom left photograph. And there's the black thing at the back. And on the right-hand side, one of those black things are open. Those are the sleeves. So in there are these 672 fibres. And they're all lying loose in there. And you have to find a clean fibre and connect it for the customer. So it's a lot of effort. It took them three months to connect a new customer. And surely that cannot be. And that's the DUDC. So this is the modern manhole. It's really this thing pops out of the ground. And it's all the wires, the fibres are pre-fibreed into this DUDC. And you can easily, like in a good telco, just connect a new customer.
So the three months went to three days. And I'm sure you can one day bring it onto one day from order. You can actually provision the customer. By the way, in the middle top, I show this active layer two network that we've built on top of the fibres. And we've also part of the CapEx upgrade. We've now upgraded that equipment to be terabits per second proof. So in the future, when new technology comes in and makes it faster, and the fibres can go to half a petabyte, petabit, the equipment can also handle it. And what's neat about it is this is what an active Ethernet switch looks like that you, as the customer, get. But what I want to show you is how clever this is. So every time there's new technology that makes the fibre faster, you don't have to replace this whole thing.
They've got this little thing that takes the fibre and converts it into electronics. So you only have to replace this little thing as technology evolves. So we don't have to this is the first big upgrade we've done in the 15 years that we've been in operation. So the CapEx spike that you've seen now, it doesn't have to continue to go. But by the way, maybe you can also later on explain what do you see as a good CapEx profile going forward. But I must also give you a chance to speak. I get carried away. The last leg is the fibre to the home. So I've mentioned we have got the dark fibres. We've got the active layer two Ethernet network. But then we have a third type of network, which we call the GPON network. And GPON is actually also very clever.
It is really to take fibre and make it super affordable. So instead of from the Teraco data center having a fibre go to every house, you take one fibre and you take it to the residential suburb. You can take that one fibre that now can carry half a petabit and take it to Alex. And then at Alex, you can split that fibre. And what's neat about this is, in fact, I've got one of them here. So this is probably the yellow one is now coming from Teraco. And then it goes into one of these little boxes. So this box uses no electricity. It takes that fibre light that comes in and just using optics, prisms, and lenses, and it splits the light that comes in into 16, 32, 64, 1,000 different fibres. So the long-distance cost is then split into multiple.
And because it's so fast, the users, the end users, the residential users, they feel like they have their own fibre. But in fact, they're sharing a fibre in the background. But because fibre is so fast, they don't really but we call this a best-effort service because it is shared. They all share the same fibre. So we have these three technologies: dark fibre, active layer two, and then the GPON technology. Yeah, that's just a picture of what a GPON is. It's similar to this one, but it's a big one. It can cover the whole of the suburb. But how do you make money out of this? How do you convert this into revenue in the end? And I'll just take the different segments again.
The dark fibre, when we put it in the ground, those ducts, we put them to a depth that will be acceptable to MTN or Vodacom. And it's typically more than 750 mm, just to make sure that somebody doesn't come and rip it open, because that's a real mess. In fact, I have a picture here of this happened. This happened on Saturday morning. The municipality in Ekurhuleni decided to do some work there. I don't know how they can not see this, but when we got there, this tractor was still ripping up the fibre. And if you zoom in, I can't zoom in now, but if you do this, you can actually see the individual fibres there. Now they're 672 times a few messed up in this hole. Now you have to first get the municipality to do their thing. And then you have to come.
And now it's night. Now you have to fix so many fibres. And this is in the middle of nowhere. So there's no labels on each of these fibres that says, "This is for customer X, and this must go there." You just have the pile of fibres. But they're smart, these guys. What they do is they go to the customers and they shine a torch down the fibre. And then the guys in the middle of the night, when they can see on the ground where does the light come out on the fibres. And the other guy sits at the office and he also shines down light. I'm oversimplifying, but that's really how they do it. And then they weld these fibres. Like Craig was splicing the fibres in the boardroom, they literally take these fibres and they weld them together. They melt them together.
So when we have the fibre network in the ground, if you don't touch it, I suppose the fibre can lie there for decades and nothing will happen to it. And you can upgrade the electronics at the end and you can eventually get better bits out of the same fibre. However, stuff like this does deteriorate the fibre. Because even though this is now happening in the middle of the night, it's wet, it's raining, there's some crooks behind you. And that's why if you look at the OpEx, sometimes the operational expenses to fix the network when this happens also goes up. Because it's not all about prevention. This happens at any time. And also during load shedding, the vandalism, they think that there's value in these fibres. I don't know what they do with it. There's no copper in there. I've heard that they sniff it.
But I don't know how true that is. But the repairs that they do create a weak point in the fibre. So where it was a pure piece of glass, now there's a welded connection. And maybe there's a 5% deterioration in the signal quality. So it will, if you have lots of these breaks, surely it will go down. And then maybe every 5, 10 years, we need to replace more of the fibre. But we don't know. We've done tests. The fibre that we put in 15 years ago is still as good as it is now. Talking about speeds, last night, just before we watched the golf, Stewart, you asked me, "What is this Starlink thing?" And surely Starlink will take away your business because Elon is so clever. And if everybody's got a Starlink in their iPhone, why do you need this?
But there's a big difference. So when you put in a fibre and you get the fibre to your house, you can have that petabit eventually at your house. Whereas the way Starlink does it, Starlink is just a big mobile base station in the air. It's got an antenna. Whereas a mobile base station has an antenna and it shines it down on the earth. Now this thing is 230 km up in the air. So by the time that this beam comes down, it spreads. And they move. So all the time they're not stationary like the very high satellites. They move all the time. So they come across South Africa, they start here in Gordon's Bay, and then they go across the Karoo and they exit in the north. And that beam moves across. So they must have multiple of these beams.
But the point I want to make is that it is just a big mobile cell. So it is using spectrum, no different to a mobile network. It's just the whole of Johannesburg will have one cell. So there will always be capacity constraints linked to spectrum. And you can never have a petabit from your Starlink, Stewart, I just wanted to tell you. The fibre to the business, this is where we're selling our active virtual fibres. But also we've brought in the GPON technology now. So we've made it more affordable because this technology works amazingly in the residential suburbs, the GPON technology to bring down the cost. We've now rolled it out also into SMMEs. So we can now have affordable broadband for SMMEs. And Ditlov will explain how that works and Phila will expand how big is that market segment.
We tackle that with this product set. Then fibre to the home. I'm getting to the end. Ditlov, you must now warm up. But let me use an example. So again, I want to show how does the business model work behind building a fibre to the home network. And on the next slide, Craig has helped me put this together from his spreadsheets. But this is really the fundamental business model. How do you make a fibre network make money in the end? So on this, let's say we target a new residential suburb. And here you can see in this suburb, there's 1,500 homes. Now the only difference between different suburbs is how big the houses are. So in Sandton, maybe there are homes that are 50 m wide in the frontage on the road.
But when you get to Mitchells Plain, maybe the homes are, like in this example, 15 m apart. So when you put the fibre in the ground, when you add all the CapEx together, because the homes are shorter closer together, the CapEx comes down. Also, they've become smarter. They don't always dig up the road or the pavement. They've now got these rods that they tie a piece of fibre to the end, and they just stick it underneath the road, and it comes out on the other side without digging up. So they've been very clever in how they bring down the cost by then they've invented the aerial fibre. So they use a combination of the different installation techniques, the aerial fibre, and that's how they bring down the cost. So I've just used this example, 300 m to build per meter.
So now you have 1,500 homes. That gives you CapEx to pass all the homes of 6.7 million rand. But now you have to start connecting and get a return on this. And this is where the penetration then of the suburb comes in, where we activate Phila. Now he has to, with the ISPs, target that suburb. And when we just switch on a residential suburb, they quickly go in, and the first 30% is quick to connect because everybody is waiting for the fibre. And depending on the suburb, depending on the average usage in that suburb, you get to an ARPU. So this is typically Mitchells Plain, 15 m apart to the homes, 290 Vuma reach product. And in the end, Craig did me a nice graph, and it shows a 30% at a cash margin on revenue of 75%, at 30%, 11% return.
This is after tax. And what I'm trying to show here is that we need to drive penetration. Phila, penetration. You have to focus on penetration. But we want to get the margin up. So this example, our margin is around, the EBITDA margin is around 70%. But as you build more of these, the scale comes in, and the EBITDA margin can go to 80%. So margin and penetration will hopefully give us the good returns. But really, I've said enough now, Ditlov. I'm going to hand over to you to tell us what your strategy is.
Thank you. Thank you, Pieter. Yeah, I think, listen, I was asked to talk a little bit about the investment thesis and just u npack the massive idea and strategy going forward. And before I start, I think it's just an absolutely exciting environment to be in because we're changing lives.
I think what we do is we're changing the way people connect and the way people actually interact. And if we do it correctly and a lot of people follow us and we can cover South Africa, I think that's the objective we want to get to, and that will be success for us at the end of the day. But I think a lot of people touched on this, but I just want to emphasize this again. If you look at the dynamics of digital connectivity, it's driven around this amount of data and the usage of data and the consumption of data happening in the world. And if you look at it in the world today, I mean, that compound annual growth rate is 26.2%. Increases the data consumption. And you've seen this whole move from voice to data. And that's what we're seeing.
And then also what you're seeing is this oversupply of international supply of data and consumption where the sea cables just hit the continent. As long as you've got this amount of data coming in and you've got this capacity increasing, somebody has to obviously transport all this data into the data centers and then build these spider webs across South Africa and Africa to transport this data into phones and devices. So what makes it so exciting is we've got this market, and that is phenomenal. What we do with the market is up to us. And it's not just us. I mean, I say, listen, there's lots of competitors coming in. But the challenge is how do we get South Africa connected because of this data demand and need that we have to do.
And you know, I asked myself a question is, you know, when we started Vodacom 100 years ago, I can remember we were doing every three months we were doing a review because we broke the budget. We actually broke the 10-year plan in the first six months. And because it was just phenomenal, we thought, listen, X amount of customers will be on phones and you will have X amount of SIM cards. Our penetration rates will be maximum 30%. Today, 120 million customers in South Africa. Or you look at SIM cards in South Africa, you look at data mobile penetration, everybody's got a phone. 30 years ago, I can remember when I started, that was not on the radar. So what I want to get back to is in 20, 30 years, depending on us, will homes be connected? They have to be connected.
Every home has to be connected. And it will happen because we saw it with mobile. So why will it be different to this? And that's what I want to get to is if you look at the market that we're sitting and you go look at the fixed broadband penetration, we've got a massive problem with the rest of the world because Africa is so far behind. And that's the slide on the right-hand side. And it's South Africa and Africa. And if we can't close that, the digital divide, forget the digital divide in South Africa between rich and poor, okay? The digital divide between us and the world will exponentially increase. And our competitiveness will be taken away. And that's the critical thing for us.
And even more worrying is if you go look at the slide on your right-hand side is the people that need it the most is not being connected. The low LSM areas, the people with the low income. It's our responsibility in a way to get this done. But on top of this, we're building business models that make sense with great returns, great revenue, great investment. And I think that's the thesis we're basing this whole thing on. We say, listen, we've got the market, we've seen demand increasing, how do we get there? And people ask me a lot of times, I mean, fibre, you know, why fibre? It's high-quality, reliable connectivity. It's latency. You can never think of going into any technology with a high latency. Self-driving cars. The world is going, you look at how drones will be used to deliver.
Today, 60, 60 delivers with a motorbike. In three, four years, drones will fly and deliver those packages. So the issue is your latency. It's critical. Nothing can compete or compare with fibre at this point. Or ever. It's light. You know, it's light through glass. Nothing's faster than light. So that's where we are with this. So it's a future-proof technology. Then you look at, you know, people ask me about 5G and satellite. Listen, satellite and 5G uses fibre to actually transfer data. And the more 5G sites there will be, the more fibre will be connected to it. Because you can't do it without. You can't do it today on microwave only. And then you've got your limitations on satellite. You know, satellite's not built for high-dense areas. It's built for remote areas, far distances, long distances, where fibre might never get to.
Farming communities, Africa will use a lot of satellite because I think it's a niche market. I would love to work with the satellite providers because I think it complements our connectivity proposition. But is it a competitor? No. Because it's two different technologies, but it plays a fantastic role in the ecosystem. You know, then what you're seeing is the consumer needs are changing radically. You take COVID, for instance. You know, when COVID hit, I mean, immediately what we did was we doubled line speeds. And we did something like which was never done. We said, listen, up and down has to, we made it symmetrical. Up and down had to be the same. Because suddenly, people were not just downloading, they had to video upload. So the challenge was, listen, we had to get to Zoom technologies.
People had to come work from home, away from their offices. The only negative there, we didn't have enough fibre in the ground to connect all the places. Because guess what? We only covered most of the leafy suburbs and the high LSMs. And the issue was we didn't cover the 4.8 million homes, the Mitchells Plain homes or the Sowetos. And that's where you are. It's a changing environment. I mean, COVID is a super good example of it. And there's no way you can go give data in abundance, asymmetrical, on a mobile network. You'll crash the network. Remember, mobile networks are not built for capacity usage. It's built on a, it's not built for peak hours at night, 8 o'clock. It's built on average. The CapEx will just kill you. So what we're seeing with the users today is they want reliability.
You know, they upselling in their packages. I mean, a few years ago, I mean, your data, Carelo was touching on it. You know, if you use three gigs a month on your handset, it was a lot. Look at what you're using today if you go check it. Look at what you're using at your house. Mitchells Plain today, 400 gigs in a house versus Parker's 200 gigs. Why? More devices. So you've got these huge heaps. People want faster speeds. Why? Because there's different requirements that forces people to upsell and upscale. So firstly, there's speed. Go back to the ADSL, asymmetrical. I mean, 5 MHz was like the speed. Today it's 50. But you go to a little bit of the developed world today, China, one gig services. Singapore, one gig services. Standard. And that's also that addresses my ARPU need.
You know, there's a lot of questions always around ARPU. What we believe is you'll see the top line ARPU pricing come down, not charging ZAR 4,000 a gig service. That will come down. But your average ARPU, I think, will sustain. We've got this balance between usage, upscaling, and the charge, which we believe is very positive for us, how we've designed our network. You look at what devices are just requiring more and more, and that's why you're seeing these consumptions. I think businesses, you know, a lot of businesses are going, smaller businesses that we have to get to is using a best effort service. But as cloud comes in and as the security needs become higher and higher, because the data consumption is so high, they have to build more security protocols into their network.
I mean, fibre is the only way to do it. What we're seeing is the small SMMEs are upgrading from a best effort service to quality of service services. Not just for the speed, but all the cloud computing, everything, all the cloud apps that they put on top of it. You need to have security on it. That's little or not, that you manage or not managed. We're seeing this huge demand of businesses changing from using different technologies. fibre to back all the towers. I think Pieter touched on it. You know, if you go look at the towers, 5G will have a bigger requirement for fibre. You know, if you look at the towers and the 5G, that's going to be launched on it. I think there's a huge opportunity there as well.
You know, so yes, I can compare, and I think on the slide I show it again is if I compare fibre to mobile, it's performance firstly. You know, mobile is not built for those high throughputs at peak hours. I don't know if you remember, we had very clear peak and off-peak tariffs a few hundred years ago. And it's just not built for it. So you can give up to 100 meg service. If it goes over density or usage is too much on peak hours, that dips. And what people need today is consistency reliability. You want when you go into an application, you want that reliability and that consistency on that line. If you look at population density, it's just too expensive for mobile operators to compete because you have to build more and more base stations in highly densed areas. Why?
Because you have to compete with the coverage, with basically the consumption that happens there. Spectrum is a scarce resource. I think that's the problem that the mobile operators are sitting with. More people are moving away from voice to data. If you look at the bandwidth demand on data, it's much, much higher than voice. The more data you use, the lesser the spectrum becomes. That scarcity is just a bigger problem. The only way you can complement that is through absolutely amazing backhaul and services around that. Indoor coverage for me, you know, there's options and solutions. 5G uses very high spectrum bands, 1800 MHz, 3500 MHz You know, it's very difficult to penetrate.
So it's okay when you penetrate the first wall, but if you go to the second wall and third wall within a house, it's got different impacts. And that's where fibre to the house creates a different experience because it's a dedicated point-to-point connection into a house, which is different from a broad, wild, open access type of Wi-Fi networks, which is also a competitor or kind of a competitor in a way. So what I believe is we've positioned because we've spent a significant amount of money in quality fibre in South Africa. We've got this product and this asset that is phenomenal. And it's very difficult to replicate because of the amount of money that we've spent in areas that make sense. It's areas that we can monetize. It's the best areas. And we've got a very, very valuable asset in the ground.
So yes, just to look at it from a bigger picture point of view, I touched on it. The market's there. We've got this absolute oversupply of data. We've got a market that's under-penetrated that we have to get people on. We have to close the digital divide, meaning we have to make people part of the digital economy. You look at what India did. India, people are coding from the streets. They're coding. The kids taught themselves how to code. And they're active in the world economy because they actually come out at very aggressive costs and help people code across the world. That's where we have to get to. You know, and it has to be in the areas where that's underserved at this point because that's where the potential sits. That's where we're going to drive the businesses.
I'm very, very keen on, you know, and it drives me and I think the whole company from a purpose point of view is to say, listen, we have to connect this. We have to close that digital divide and we have to make sure if we do it correctly, we will make sure that South Africa stays competitive with the rest of the world. For me, I think we're very, very strong in setting that up. I think we've got a position that plays into our favor there because we've got this amazing network that, and listen, we're very innovative. We do things differently. I think we've been the leader in South Africa. What you're seeing now is people are copying us in every area, every segment that we play in.
I love that because our penetration is so low for us to get to that penetration we want. We need good players in the market. They have to do clever investments. That's where I say, as you know, our scarce resources, access to funding. Where people overbuild and replicate, it's unnecessary. We've got enough places to build. We've got enough homes to cover. The issue is how do we do it fast? Because otherwise the rest of the world will run away from us. If you look at our three Pienaars that we've got in the business, we've got enterprise, fibre to the tower. That's how we started. Pieter touched on it. We didn't just build fibre to the tower and did a circle or did a square and tower to tower.
As we went to the towers, we built this fibre network passing as many buildings as possible. So when we got to the towers, that opened up in time other markets. And that was the fibre to the business leg of it. But what's nice on this segment for me, and that's what makes Mazov so special at this point, is with 5G coming in, suddenly the metro towers that are connected today are opening up because suddenly we have to get to the microwave sites more rural, more further out. And if you want successful 5G coverage in these areas, which is an obligation by ICASA on the mobile operators with targets to actually connect with 5G, we can build those fibre. And we're basically the only company in South Africa that offers a service which is a data and a bundled unmanaged service that we can give them.
So I'm working with all the MNOs, all three of the main MNOs. One MNO self-provides. But all the other MNOs we've got an amazing relationship with. And what's even more positive is we've got very long-term contracts with these MNOs. Great customers, great product. And this thing is expanding because every site in South Africa will be connected with a fibre line. Has to be connected with a fibre line. And as we build out these fibres to these towers, what happens now? Now suddenly we open up areas that we could never get to because it was too expensive to build fibre out. But as anchors coming onto the network, we're sweating the asset. And then suddenly we've got other opportunities to build this out into different segments within our business that we can do. So yes, enterprise, fibre to the business, we touched on it.
There's lots of businesses, 570,000 businesses. I think there's even more if you go look at the small SMMEs. And this is where that requirement comes up. The large businesses have got connectivity. You know, we're using these aggregators and system integrators, big ISPs, the NPPs and BCX and all these companies to work on top of our network. And they give services to private businesses and public businesses. And what we're seeing is this is a tough market because it's super competitive because it's metro-specific. But if you go into the smaller SMMEs and the smaller businesses, more outside of the metros, this is where we believe the opportunity is and this is where I believe we can see good things. But what we're also seeing is people are going, like I said earlier, from best effort service to quality of service.
And the issue is how do we embrace that? How do we embrace that side of the business? And Phila will talk about that. Then back to fibre to the home. I think we were the first to really challenge Telkom. We started fibre to the home. We built it successfully. We've got a million homes covered now in those areas. It's penetrated at this point. There's only 2.2 million homes in that segment. But luckily we then sat halfway, three and a half years ago, we sat and we said, listen, why don't we just try and get into areas that traditionally nobody would have ever covered, not even the old Telkom would have covered them. And we started in Mitchells, like I said on the video, and it was super successful.
And now we cover, we've got a million homes in the past in the rest of South Africa. So we cover all the big places like Soweto. We cover Soshanguve Vosloorus, Phoenix, Chatsworth. And that opens it up. So what we're seeing is also other FNOs also building out now. But it's opening it up for us. And it's opening up different opportunities for us because now suddenly we can go from a core network, and this is how our methodology works, core network, we build it out to reach, and then we want to go into the key areas, which is the sub 5,000 rand a home market, 9 million homes in this market. And the challenge is how do we get there? And this is where I believe with our scale and our leadership and in the market, we can get there. We are leading the market.
Yes, these players are starting with different segments first. The way we did it, I believe from core, strong P&L, going into your reaches, stronger P&L, supporting a balance sheet. I think that was the way to do it, and I still stick to that. So yes, it's difficult to replicate our network. We've got 10 years head start on this. You can't just come and overbuild us or do something. It's what we've launched on this on a prepaid basis, first in the world. I think it's phenomenal. You know, I was listening to people from Brazil the other day. We're far ahead of the Brazilian market at this point. The challenge is we're not doing it fast enough. And that's the challenge that we have to get right to say, listen, how do we do it? So yes, I'm doing it with a fantastic team.
And Pieter touched on it. You know, over 20 years, over some of the folks, over 30 years experience in the market. Telco, system integrators, a lot of Africa experience in it. They've seen it. And what I love about the team is they think differently. The opportunities, we see the opportunities and we change things and we do it differently. And yes, we started Mazov. Mazov was not MAZIV, it was Mazi, which is the Greek word for togetherness. That's how we got the word and we just put the V and it became MAZIV in time. But listen, we had to put a culture on top of this. You know, it's a big company. It's distribution arms, building arms. You know, and we had to do a belief system and a canvas on culture. And for us, it was very simple.
So we believe in the power of human connection. That's what I was talking about the whole time. The impact we'd make is creating that human connection. It doesn't matter through that integrated digitalization and development that we create around that. And the purpose is impacting lives and changing, making it better. You know, and that's where I say is that we've got this opportunity in this developing, emerging market, Africa, even to make a difference. And I think that's what the CIVH investment is giving us. We are really making a difference. And it's amazing to wake up in the morning and you know that you've changed lives. The way people study, the way they work. Call centers are being created much closer to the edge of the old township models where people don't have to travel into Cape Town anymore. They just go to the call center.
Why should you travel to Cape Town to go work in a call center? So the values for us is be bold and create. Be bold to create innovation. We want people to take chances. We want to do things differently. Are we building this on a culture piece of, you know, not just a winning culture, but a challenger mindset type of scenario? We have to reinvent ourselves. And the only way you can not be disruptive is by reinventing yourself. And it's difficult to have a winning culture if you're winning in the market. So what do we have to do? We actively have to reinvent ourselves every three years. And with my management team, that's what we try and do. To say, listen, we have to launch new things. We have to do it differently. And it's not just challenging status quo or business as usual.
Reinventing is changing rapidly. Otherwise, it doesn't work. So for me, you know, do the right thing. I think that touches in line with everything we spoke about. It's not just for the people. It's really the communities. It's the country. It's the staff. It's our customers. And then really build those trusted relationships. Without those relationships, we can't get there. And that doesn't mean if it's government or public sector or customers or communities. We have to absolutely drive that. And we believe in it. So yes, I think, you know, we've got a very, very good network. I mean, our network is there. I think we differentiate on our network, but we have to modernize it. We did now. We spent 700 million on the network roughly. And we had to do it because we wanted to get closer to the customer.
We wanted to take a low-touch network that Pieter was explaining and turn it into a high-touch network where you can plug and play much faster, connecting customers, SMMEs, businesses. I think that's really critical. So we must continue thinking of modernization, continue thinking of improving and being relevant because the customer needs change is changing radically day by day. Then future-proofing, I think the businesses, you know, we've got a business called VumaCam, 3,500 towers, and we only use those towers for surveillance. You know, that's phenomenal results that we're getting. Working with SAPs, building a platform on top of it. You know, we started with infrastructure. Today it's actually a platform business, monitoring and controlling. So we do a lot of the MNO businesses, the security, the vandalism, the action forces tied into it. We work very closely with South Africa Police Services, with the municipalities.
But what we then also did was with the densification of 5G. Now remember, 5G is densification on the one side and building out on the other side. We're using our towers now to put small cells on. It's got a fibre connectivity. And so some of the MNOs are piloting now with us, 60 sites, 40 sites on the other side to actually create this as a little base station, micro base station within the densification, within the dense metro areas. So really, I think very exciting. And you know, we've got these amazing dreams that we want to get to. And I want to ask Phila to maybe just run into, just talk about the commercial side of it, how we get there, how he sees the market and what we have to do to just make sure we tap into this fast. Thank you.
Thanks, Jetlof, for that passionate and well-articulated overview of our business. Connectivity is the foundation of all digital innovation that we actually see these days. And I think sometimes whenever we think about innovations, we seldom kind of give thought to connectivity because we just assume it's there. If you think about it, there's no Uber, there's no Airbnb, there's no Microsoft Teams, there's no self-driving cars. All of those things require connectivity. And so we're kind of like proud as MAZIV to be a significant contributor in terms of shaping and contributing to the digital revolution itself. So we are a connectivity provider as a business. We have 57,000 km of fibre that supports the three businesses that Jetlof and Pieter have touched on. 57,000 km, let's put that into context. That's one and a half times the circumference of Earth.
You take our fibre, you'd wrap around the Earth one and a half times. That's how much fibre that we have in the ground. And to support these three businesses that we have, fibre to the tower. Jetlof has briefly touched on this. We've got 47,000 sites in the country currently. Of those, 30,000 of them are already connected to fibre. 5,000 has a fibre point of presence nearby, and we believe that can readily be connected to fibre. There's 3,500 that's on microwave. And there's also another 8,500 that's rural sites that would also be connected to fibre in time. South Africa is between 40 and 70 data centers, depending on who counts, but it's between 40 and 60 data centers. We've got six cable landing stations that host 2 Africa of Facebook, Equiano of Google WEX.
That's part of the consortiums, mostly the telcos that are consortiums in that space. All of those require connectivity. There's 5G densification. Both Pieter and Jetlof have touched on it. Whenever we think about 5G or mobile services for that matter, not just 5G, any mobile service, we think mobility, but mobile networks are generally fixed because every one of those towers is connected to a fixed network somehow. So that presents a huge opportunity for us as the connectivity provider. When one looks at the FTTP space, which is the fibre to the business, South Africa has 572,000 businesses registered currently. Of those, about the top end of the businesses have already been connected, just more than 100,000. That's the corporates and large enterprises.
There's still an opportunity for about 450,000 businesses here and there that need to be connected to fibre so that they can access cloud services, they can access security, they can grow their own businesses and also digitize their own processes as well. And then as you look into the fibre to the home space, there South Africa has more than 18 million households. 6.4 million of them have been passed with fibre. In fact, unique ones in that space is only 5.4 million because there's an overbuild of a million. That presents to us another opportunity of 11 million homes still to be connected to fibre, to be passed with fibre and given an opportunity for connecting with fibre in the country. And there's also probably about half a million micro businesses as well that also have to be connected, that get to be covered in this same space.
BMIT Wholesale Telecoms report indicates that through one of our businesses, DFA, we have a market leading position of 35% in terms of market share. And that's the market share of all connectivity that is traded in the market in the fibre to the transmission space. Let me put it that way because this is mostly transmission. Jetlof was saying we passed businesses and when we went to the towers, but that includes connectivity to data centers, this mobile backhaul metro connectivity and long distance. So we have a market leading position of 35% in terms of market share. In fibre to the business, in the same report, which is BMIT Wholesale Telecoms report, we are number two with 23%.
That 23%, I believe that we are well poised to be number one within the next two years when I look at the growth that we are seeing currently and the growth that we are expecting to come through our businesses within the next two years. Africa Analysis report, the latest one is up to December, December 2024, would indicate that we have 32% market share in fibre to the home. Of the 6.4 million homes that have been passed, more than 2 million of those are with one of our businesses, VumaTel. It's important to note here that a 32% market share in a market that has 38 major FNOs is really, really significant. And we are not just leading at 32%, but we are one and a half times the size of the next best competitor in that space.
So it just shows you the impact that we have made and the stride that we have made in ensuring that South Africans are connected to fibre. This slide shows the active services ratio over the homes that we have passed. We talk about 2 million homes that we have passed. How many of those are actively consuming services? Because we roll out infrastructure first and then I get sent, like Pieter was saying, to go and activate those customers to make sure that we get the returns on that investment. If you just look at the last six consecutive quarters, that's Vuma there with 830,000 connections. Over the last six quarters, we've just been continuously growing, coming from the early 30s to around the 40s that we are 40% that we are at now.
In fact, by the end of March this year, we are going to be at around 42% in terms of connectivity into our homes passed already. Just talking about then, who do we serve in this segment? I think that's important because when we talk about fibre to the tower, fibre to the business, fibre to the home, it's a little bit impersonal in a way. But who exactly are we serving when one looks at the commercial segments themselves? We're serving carriers and global customers in the fibre to the tower. That's mobile network operators, FNOs, which is fibre network operators, OTTs. That's over-the-top players, hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google. They're all part of our network. Tower calls and ISPs. These are customers that buy for own consumption. They're building their own infrastructure and networks. They require high capacity, kind of like almost unlimited.
They must just buy their own boxes sometimes to light it, or they will buy it from us. We will connect them if they want us to manage the network for them. They want scalability so that they can actually be able to grow with the capacity as the demands improve. And they also want low latency because you don't want to, especially if you get into things like 5G or industrial connectivity, latency must be as low as possible. So these customers, we see the opportunities with them, mostly through the partnerships that we already have with them. We have very strong relationships with them, which is the MNOs and FNOs.
If one thinks about the data centers and the cable landing stations, in fact, the first slide Jetlof touched on showed the explosion of data capacity growth, both from the cable landing stations, the subsea capacity, as well as capacity that sits in data centers. All of that traffic does need to reach out to the homes, to the businesses. And so one has to look at these as an ecosystem, by the way. So in fact, during COVID, we saw demand shifting away from fibre to the business to fibre to the home as most of us went to work at home. So there was this explosion of demand and growth from the home. Businesses kind of like stayed fairly flat.
And then the carrier side of it also exploded because they had to carry all of that traffic and take it to where the businesses are or where the homes are as well. So there's an opportunity for terrestrial bag hold so that we bring all of that traffic. And we're continuously looking for opportunities to create commercial partnerships with the FNOs and carriers and global customers to make sure that we build in the right places and we find the right commercial models that support all our businesses. In terms of FTTP, the customers that we support, it's mostly our, we call that mostly enterprises and public sector because they all buy the same things. Maybe it just differs how they actually buy public sector issues, RFPs, enterprises just come and buy whatever connectivity they require.
So most of the customers we have there is corporates, it's businesses, it's SOEs, like state-owned entities, municipalities and metros. Because we are wholesale and we are open access, so we go to market through channel partners. I did touch a bit on some of them, PCX, NTT, COM, BitCo. They are the ones that generally go to end customers. We support them, but we make sure that we align our go-to-market strategies to make sure that we are aligned in being able to provide services that they require for their own customers. Because they've got customers that have high bandwidth requirements. They want cost-effective solutions. They want network availability. The uptime network must be up most of the times because we cannot afford to be at any point in time not be connected. They want redundancies. They want managed and unmanaged services.
And that's one of the key differentiating factors of our business is that we give the customers the flexibility and the choice. Our channel partners to either manage the services themselves or we can manage it for them and sell them bandwidth capacity instead of selling them a service that is unleashed already. So we see opportunities of growth in terms of strategic partnerships that we can have with property developers or property owners themselves because we want to expand our network. One of the things that DUDC is giving us that they've been talking about is, I don't know whether Pieter, you've actually said what DUDC stands for in the first place. I don't think it's dry underground distribution cabinets. So it's a distribution similar to a street distribution cabinet, a fibre point of presence. It's because they are closer to where the business centers are.
It makes it easier and quicker to connect customers because when it comes to business customers, they want to be able to get the services as and when they require. It makes it easier, quicker for us to connect customers, improves reliability as well because there's lesser hands on the network. And then on top of that, it improves our coverage in that space. And then we continue on our side just to evolve our products to make sure that they can cover the changing needs of our customers. As our customers grow, we can actually grow also with them. Then lastly, in the FTTH space, that's our mass market where we serve residential customers, which is the homes, as well as small or micro businesses, we might call it that, because micro businesses are mostly within the space where we roll out FTTH. We've segmented this market into three.
We've got a core segment. The core segment is mostly our high LSMs, leafy suburbs. That's mostly been built up. We are just reaping the benefits of the investment. I think Carel earlier spoke about capital-heavy business with the CapEx that's already been spent in our core market. That's exactly the case. So we are already just continuously connecting the customers in that space. In the reach segment, we believe about half of the market is covered. There's another half opportunity, that 50% of homes that have still not been passed that still require to be connected. And key is the next frontier for us, key segment, which is the lower LSMs. There we still need to pass a lot of homes and connect a lot of homes of that 11 million opportunities. We go to market here via internet service providers. That's the ISPs.
You buy your services from MWeb or Webaf rica or AfriHost. Most of the times behind those services that you buy from them, it's our infrastructure. So generally, they don't own much of that infrastructure. The customers are looking for uncapped internet. They're looking for choice. They want cost-effective pricing. We need to come up with solutions, products and solutions that are suitable for the markets that we are in. We need to match the type of customers. A product that works in Bryanston may not work in Soweto. So some customers want to pay cash, whilst other customers want to have debit orders. We need to start to have a look at that as well in terms of moving with our markets and moving with the customers that we have.
We want to continue driving expansion into all of those areas, drive penetration as well as value-enhancing products and services for those markets. Not only are we excited about the commercial opportunities that we see in fibre connectivity, but we are also even more excited about the social impact that fibre connectivity in South Africa provides. And I think Jetlof will just take us lastly through that.
Thanks. Just five minutes on the social impact. I think we build our foundation on four Pienaars, which is health, education, welfare, and environment. And we want to make an impact. So it's very simple. I think our methodology here is just to impact as many lives as possible with our technologies. It's sustainable. We want to put technologies into it. We're connecting very close to 900 schools at this point.
We're impacting roughly 700,000 kids across South Africa, 27,000 teachers at this point. And it's just the way we do things. We tie up with the ISPs. We give one gig line into those schools. The ISPs give the services on. We partner with nonprofit organizations to give different assistance in different elements. But I think we're making the impact. And I think this is the caring leg of it, where we can actually get these communities to just work with us. Mobile libraries where the literacy rates just absolutely increase when we get that actively rolled out into schools. So I think we're in a fantastic position. We can make the impact. I think we're just trying to use our sustainable technologies to actually drive this going forward. And I want to just show you a quick short video.
And I feel like they deserve the opportunity to learn like males too. We are empowering both the children and the grandmothers to negotiate the bigger world. She can actually send us messages on WhatsApp. She can use the internet for herself. She doesn't call me to come and help her. And she can also send emails. And that is what I like about this initiative. We are focused on deploying mobile digital libraries. The schools that we were targeting do not have access to purchase the digital library. So you're opening a world for the children by us giving them that opportunity to press a button and they can research their high schools. Thank you to Vuma. Thank you to Go go. Thank you, Vuma and Gogo, for coming to our school. You've helped us a lot. Thank you that you did it.
You came through for the people. Thank you. Thank you. Please, you mustn't give up. You keep up the hard work. I salute you.
So just to wrap up quickly is, on the one side, I think it's very critical that we keep investing in the robust network. So I think our business is driven and it's built around a robust network. We have to keep improving that. It changes. We have to have best coverage. We have to build it out. We have to look at technology, stay the technology leader. We have to digitalize this. And we are digitalizing it now. We're moving the whole thing into Salesforce. I think AI will become a bigger play in the whole offer that we do. It's critical that we start understanding the customer better.
I think if we put the customer like we do at this point in the middle, we have to still understand that customer better. And with predictive behavior and using AI, that's what will happen. We must also use our technology to address the need. For a good example is we launched 28-day bundles. And what we realized over time was that every month, the person that recharges moves away two days from his payment date. After six months, he's 12 days away. And then we worried about the recharge. The challenge is we have to be flexible and agile to change those things quickly. And the only way you can get there is if we understand that customer. And that's a learning curve because, like Bila was saying, every area within South Africa is totally different. It's a different world the way Fosluer adopts technology versus Soweto or Mitchells.
And the issue is the only way you can do that is not through standardization. It's through being agile and the ability to offer different services throughout the country. And the success of this is that execution leg. We have to get the execution done. And I've got a team of people, not just the Exco, but within the organization that can do it. At best, the build engine can deliver 60,000 homes a month. That's the maximum homes we've built up to now. Now imagine building and passing 60,000 homes a month. That's the scale of the engine that we can actually roll out into the market. So if I look at the market side of the business, I think we have to build far further out on our leadership.
I think challenging, and I want to pass to Biden now on this, is we have to sweat the asset. I think that's the thing. And we can debate that a little bit. We have to get the uptake there. We have to sweat the assets. Where we've got fibre, we have to monetize it. And I think that's the critical thing for us to say, listen, let's keep our competitiveness, but let's sweat the asset we've got and then build out on top of it to address the other side of the markets. Efficiencies and operational efficiencies, yes. Return on investment, yes. That's the things we have to build on out more because I need more investment. We need more investment. And that's the challenge for us. Our scarce resource is definitely access to funding and building it out into the communities where we can connect.
But on this, I want to hand over to Biden just to go through the financials quickly. Thanks.
Thanks, Dietz. And good afternoon, everybody. I think just to touch on what Ditlof was saying and sweating the assets, I mean, absolutely. I think that's really where we are today. We've really spent a lot of money investing in our people, putting money in the ground in terms of the CapEx, how we built up the networks. But I think more importantly, I think the positioning of where we are today is important to illustrate. Now, this business, if you think about it, and these are forecast numbers again to the end of March and again a little bit to the audit side of things. I mean, these things are still kind of temporary numbers, but we're a 6.7 billion rand revenue business.
The underpin of that is we service 70,000 links and customers as far as businesses are concerned, and we've got 860,000 active subscribers. If we translate that into an EBITDA number, that's 4.6 billion with a margin of 69%. I mean, to get to margins of 69% today, I mean, I think that's largely unheard of. I think the focus that we're really looking at and a little bit to sweating the assets is our free cash flow. If you think about where this business has been, how we've looked to invest, we've leveraged up quite a lot in terms of how we've had to build out these networks and connect the customers. Free cash for us is a critical element in terms of how we're looking at rolling out further networks and where we're investing.
The more free cash we make, the more we invest, the more people we connect. If you look at conversion rates, and I'm saying this is in a high leveraged environment where we are currently, and I think we're probably at the tipping point of our interest environments, we're converting 44% of our EBITDA into free cash after interest and before tax. If you add back our interest elements, we're probably on a 4.1, 4.2 billion unlevered cash flow. Now, that's significant. And that really sets us up in terms of how do we then continue to unlock value and drive value. If you look at the capital invested, 30.6 billion, 17 billion of that comes out of the Vimital environment connecting the consumer, 13 billion really underpinning the growth engine and how we're looking at expanding this asset in time.
Touching on the financials, this is probably the most important slide before I get to the next one. I think it's also quite important, but this is the heartbeat of our business. This underpins our financial position. It underpins our financial performance. Ditlof mentioned sort of where we are in terms of building out the homes and the fibre to the home space. We've executed on 2 million homes past. Very interestingly, if you just think about where we've spent our CapEx over the last five to six years, we've connected over a million homes nationally, largely in the lower LSM areas. If you convert that into subscribers, we're at 860,000 subscribers, which I mentioned before. But more importantly, if you think about the gravitas, the momentum, we're connecting over 100,000 subscribers per year. And we continue to do so.
I mean, if you look at our lower LSM areas in the last year, we had 38% growth in the segment. I mean, that's compelling. If you think about where the demand sits, we spoke about the data demand. We're really seeing the opportunity sort of unfold. If we then unpack that in terms of a key operating metric, which we track, that's our uptake curve or penetration rates, we are really making inroads in terms of how we're looking at driving value. And over the last year, again, we've taken our uptake curves from 36% to 42%. And that just talks to the demand, the driver that Ditlof and Pienaar were talking about.
More interestingly, and I think it's really part of our business that a lot of people don't really talk about in detail, but what we see as well in the market is the demand in our enterprise space, the backbone of where we see this growth engine unfolding in time. If you look at where we were in 2019 at 38,000 links, we've almost doubled that now to 70,000 links. If you think about where we want to be and what that looks like in time, we think based on what Pienaar was saying, that opportunity extends to a addressable market opportunity of close to 500,000, 600,000 businesses. So we really are well positioned in terms of what we've got today. And the opportunity for us is how do we accelerate what we've got? How do we monetize what we've got? My second most important slide.
Key metric that we talk about, I think, every single day at the office is penetration, uptake, what does it look like, how do we get there? Importantly, we track a lot of our international peers. And I think just for sort of your benefit and as a proxy, I think something that we typically look at all the time is what are they doing from a penetration perspective? What are the markets that are largely fixed line, broadband orientated? How are they tracking in terms of their penetration rates? And what we've seen from a European perspective, we've got markets in Asia, even South America. Those markets have got penetration rates north of 70%. In some areas, 80% plus. What does it mean from our business perspective? So we only started really putting significant investments in terms of the asset probably five, six years ago.
So if you unpack our sort of velocity, the aging of where our networks are and those related uptake curves or penetration rates, we are really getting momentum. So if you look at the right-hand side of the graph, there's networks there that are kind of over the 84-month mark where we've got 66%. And if you look at the left-hand side, our relatively new networks that we've delivered in the last 12 months, those are at the 31% mark. That tells us two things. One, we have the ability to get to 60%, if not more. And I think that we can prove. I mean, this is proven. These are our data stats in terms of where we're currently trending. The second part of this is the opportunity.
So if you think about where we've got aging of networks from the 12 months to the, call it the 60 months, 72 months, the difference between where we're seeing penetration rates going on the back of data and how the data evolves is we then need to find and unlock that value from getting to the 31s to the 70s or the 80%. And that really is where we sit every single day thinking about how we accelerate value creation and connecting people on the back of what we think is the data consumption profile. Just to touch on our CapEx profile, and Carel alluded to it in his opening remarks, we have invested 30 billion since massive was kind of consolidated. I'm talking Vimital DFA. More importantly, out of that 30 billion, we've probably spent 20 billion in the last five years.
And there we have really sort of focused on making sure we can expand our networks and connect our customers. So if you think about what we've got today and what underpins our growth cycle, we are really well positioned in terms of how we accelerate future growth. The last two years have been, if I can put it, a very different time for our business. We've been, well, let me put it like this. We took sizable chunks of change and invested into those networks. We then made the conscious decision to say, listen, let's go and put more cash and make our network more resilient and future-proof it. So we've been looking at capital allocation in the last two years around two things. One, the network, how we position ourselves in the future and driving uptake.
So it's really around what do we need to do, where do we spend our CapEx, and how do we make sure that what every single rand we spend on CapEx makes us that 20%, 30%, 40% margin that we're talking about. CapEx is quite a big thing in our world. If you just unpack our financial stable, we've got CapEx, we've got revenue, operating costs, and obviously networks. But I think it's important to distill the fact that when we start thinking about how we spend CapEx, what's the future profile of that CapEx and how does it look like?
80% of our CapEx typically follows a revenue profile, where the other 20% talks to upgrading our network, making sure that we can carry the capacities that we're talking about, investing in IT, AI, and making sure that our systems are resilient to effectively service the points that Ditlof was mentioning. It's the customer experience leak. It's making sure we drive and understand the technology layers that we are entering into and how we remain competitive. So Pieter asked a question around what does a normalized CapEx profile look like? And the answer is it's not an easy answer. Put it differently, if we were in a scenario where we are just driving uptake, it would be different. If we're in a scenario where we're not upgrading networks, it would be different.
But on a normalized basis, and assuming we don't go and put anything into any more expansion, we're probably looking at about a 2 billion CapEx number a year, if that makes sense. Now, if you go back to the free cash number that we were speaking about before CapEx, the business at this point kind of washes its face. It's self-funding, which is in a really, if you think about where we are financially, that really puts us in a stronger position. So any other further capital, any other debt profile that we look at, it really drives that additional unlock of value that we continually seek. This is a snapshot view of our revenue profile over the last five to six years. I think sort of the major point that I just want to get across here is we've got an increase in revenue profile.
And that kind of hinges on the back of how we deliver the networks, doubling up on the link counts, accelerating the uptake curves, etc. You'll see a little bit of a dip, I almost call it a dip, but almost a flatlining of the revenue profile in '23 and '24. And I think it's useful just to give you guys a sense of what happened in those kind of two years. And when we were trading through a lot of activity and putting money into the networks and the way we look at things in time, just from a market perspective, we always talk about this two or three-player network. We needed to be competitive. We needed to make sure that we were compelling when we were talking to our customers. And remember, we B2B.
We don't sell to the end customer other than our ISP that we've got that's only dealing on reach. But we B2B. So we needed to make sure that there was enough money in the channel. We talk about our ISPs, making sure that they were competitive and making sure that we were competitive in the market when we were talking about where we drive a network, how do we become the preferred network operator. We made a conscious decision in 2023 and 2024 to effectively reduce our reliance on one-source revenues. We were charging installation fees. We were charging activation fees for customers coming onto our network. And to make us more competitive, we actually dropped those. We actually dropped those one-source costs. From a value perspective, that was significant.
If you think about the profile that you see at the bottom, that's just a function or what you can see is that's our annuity revenue curves for both Vimital DFA. But if you just do the maths, our one-source revenues were probably close to 400 million a year. What's really compelling, though, if you just look at the Vimital curve specifically, we're seeing 25% compound growth rates in our annuity base. And that's driven on the back of what we're doing from an active perspective in the market to drive penetration. If you unpack that and you roll it forward, the question we all need to be asking ourselves is what does terminal penetration look like? And that's where this business really starts to kick. Cash and financial return to shareholders and other stakeholders. The green line is the DFA curve.
We're not seeing the compound growth rates that we've seen in the consumer segment. But I think what's really compelling there, although we're seeing compound growth rates of about 4%, the opportunity for us is more than that. So again, talking about where we're investing strategically, we see those compound growth rates improving to the 4%, 6%, even 10% mark. The demand's there. We're seeing the demand. And it's exciting. What I also think is quite nice about the underpin of this infrastructure business called DFA is that a lot of our customer orders and revenue profile is by and large certain. We sign up contracts. They are long-term. They are almost predictable, which helps us in terms of how we're positioning these networks and how we're positioning this growth engine that we're looking at.
So if you look at this from a 40,000-foot perspective, the takeaway is we've got increasing revenues and we've got a very, very healthy annuity base that we continually see growing as we're driving activity rates. EBITDA, our favorite topic. Not to read too much into this slide, I think there's one or two points that I think are very important, Joe. And it comes back down to the margins, how we think about margins, what's the future state of margins. Vimital delivers stable, certain, reliable 70% margins year on year. And that comes with a lot of effort, by the way. We've got teams that focus on making sure we find efficiencies in the business. We call it scarcity. How do we create scarcity?
Because scarcity creates innovation in terms of how we need to operate, from people to systems to putting all the right things in place that we can maintain those things. We've got an evolving economy. We've got diverse revenue streams. And we need to be competitive as we continue this journey. DFA, on the other hand, we've, and I think Dietz touched on it, is we're very alive to understanding how we can deliver growth. And to do that, we've had to invest in this network that we keep talking about. With that comes a cost that we've, by and large, I mean, I don't want to call it unexpected, but we didn't really think about one or two things in terms of what we would expect in these markets, given that changing networks, this thesis, how we architect, would create additional cost.
So that cost has impacted the margin, as you can see, going from this, call it the 70% normalized rate to about 66, 64. But we're very confident that those margins will normalize. And if you look at a normalized margin range, if I can put it that way going forward, we think anything from 68% to 75% as we start reaching terminal penetration and those uptake curves and densifying the network that we keep talking about. Free cash, I think we touched on it earlier. I think important here is that we're generating 44% free cash after interest in a very highly geared environment and a high interest rate environment.
We think that as we start to find operating leverage that we keep talking about, we find the cost savings that we're looking at, we find the efficiencies, this cash conversion rate will skyrocket and this business will start pumping some serious money. And we're excited about that because the more money we can create from a free cash perspective, and as I mentioned previously, the more money we can invest in building out more networks and connecting more people. That's what we're about. We're about connecting people. This is a snapshot of our net debt position. As you can see, we've had an increasing kind of curve on our net debt positioning. And that's deliberate. We were very deliberate around where we're going to invest, how much we're going to invest, what returns we were looking after, how does that play out in terms of the long-term strategy.
What you're seeing is a flattening of that net debt curve. And that's a function of us getting to those penetration rates that you saw in the previous slides. It's growing that from 36% to 42% with the view that we get those up to 70 and plus. So we think over time, not we think, we know, that as we start to generate these free cash positions and finding that operating leverage, we are going to be finding the reduction in that net debt curve. We've also been very deliberate in terms of how we think about managing net debt. So we've targeted, I think last year, we actually targeted a net debt number that we wanted to get to. And we worked and operated within those limits. We are now in a position where we are, from a leverage perspective, targeting 3.5 and less. Now, that's a journey.
Now, we need to get to the uptake curves that we've planned. I think if you look at where we're going to end now at the end of this financial year, we're going to be at about 3.9. We anticipate 3.6 by the end of the next financial year. And following that, getting below the 3.5. 3.5 is a critical number for us. Why? Our debt covenants allow us to then offer distribution. And that's where we want to be. So what we want to do is, as we start to scale in excess of where we are now, that free cash flow will then be decided on. What do we do? Do we go and invest more? Do we distribute back to shareholders? And Neville keeps asking me, where's my dividend? So Neville, maybe another year. But anyway, I think it's positive.
We've got a hell of a good business. We've done a lot of things in the last five years. And again, what's important is we've been very deliberate in terms of how we've thought about the strategy. We've been very deliberate in terms of how we think about the market. And we've been very deliberate in terms of how we're thinking about our performance and our balance sheet and how we position ourselves in the market. I think with that as a backdrop, I'm going to hand it over to Pieter to finish off. Thank you.
Thank you, Byron. It looks like we've come a long way since that photocopy room. Well done.
And that is one of the things that really stands out for me in this business is the people, the entrepreneurial team with the experience that they have to create the value for the shareholders, but also to make a difference in South Africa and the economy. So over the time, we've built this network, the 30 billion rand. And it's not just the fibre. The layers of products that sit on top of it are now geared to serve products into all of those segments. So we've done the investment. We've got the people. We've got the products. We've got Pila. And Byron spoke to the dividends. And I'm going to wrap up there. I'm not going to repeat everything we said. Lwanda, maybe you have some questions for us that we can drill into a little bit further.
Thanks, Pieter. I must say that it was a very.
Break my fibre there.
Yeah, mind my stockings. That was a very interesting and useful one-on-one on fibre. I'm conscious of time, but a lot has been said by Carel and yourself, Dietlof, around the size of the opportunity in the space and given just the usage of data that's growing. So I think everyone can agree that it's a growth story and the thesis remains. So if we can start with questions in the room, please. There's one over there.
Thanks very much for the presentation. Just the slide on observed uptake curves. What were you modeling for five years ago versus what you've actually observed? And then secondly, just on penetration, where are you actually expecting penetration rates to level off now? Thanks.
So I think there's a couple of points that you're talking about there. And I think it's important to kind of dissect what we've got in the fibre-to-the-home space. And again, I think just to answer your question, I think we've got various sort of fibre hoods with different profiles. And what we're typically finding in sort of our experience is that they are tracking, by and large, what we'd planned. If you look at our traditional areas, I think we've seen the likes of a park house as an example. I mean, those areas are north of 80%. If you compare that to our reach areas, which are our lower LSM areas, those acceleration or those penetration points are actually a lot quicker than what we planned. So it's a bit of a mixed bag.
I think if you think about how we invest and what we need to do from an investment perspective, what are the kind of various steps that we need to be thinking about before we invest, we kind of determine what that RR is or that uptake curve is. And look, I mean, we've got 2 million homes. I mean, not all areas are the same. In some cases, we've got some underperforming areas where we have to do a little bit more extra in terms of marketing and how we position ourselves. In other areas, we've got some really sort of diamonds. So it's a bit of a mixed bag. But I think on the balance of probability, it's by and large tracking what we'd planned originally.
Thanks, Byron. Any other questions in the room? No questions. Can we check if there are questions on the line on Chorus Call?
Thank you.
There are no questions on the line.
I think the presentation was that good.
I've got a question.
Just a few on the webcast. The one, I guess, for you, Byron, but the question from Integral Asset is, does CRVH still have unredeemed CapEx balances and tax losses to rattle?
At CRVH?
It says CIVH or MAZIV. So maybe.
Yeah, I think if you look at our business, again, we are a very heavily invested infrastructure business. We do carry, if I can call it, tax shields that unwind over time. We've got large deferred tax assets in our balance sheet. We probably unwind those as they sort of come to fruition.
Thanks, Byron. And just one on funders and KPIs. What sort of KPIs do they look at that make them comfortable with the high levels of gearing?
So I think just on the gearing levels, and I think just to put it out there, I think we've got lenders that understand our business. We've got lenders that have supported us since the early days. We're in constant conversations with them in terms of where we are, where we're tracking. I think the key thing is just around, and a little bit to the question earlier, is how are we promoting ourselves in terms of the uptake curves? What does the EBITDA look like? Are we seeing improving trends, etc.? And I think with those kind of engagements on a regular basis, we've got good relations to making sure that we can effectively articulate positioning now and going forward. And the banks have supported us in making sure we can execute on those strategies.
So that is, I think, quite a positive thing if you think about where we are and how we're positioned today.
Thank you. And Dietlof, just the last one for you. Outside of the corporate actions, it sounds like an opportunity that is compelling. What are some of the immediate challenges that are front of mind for you and your team?
Listen, I really think at this point, we're sitting with, and it may be a little bit over now, but with the load shedding it created, huge vandalism on the network. So for me, that's an issue. It's vandalism on the one side, and then it's damage on the network on the other side. When people upgrade infrastructure across South Africa, you're looking at the water, you're looking at electricity, and they dig up the fibre. That impacts us. It impacts our customers. It forces us to build more redundancy into our network. I think that's a critical one. There's very positives on getting way leaves quicker through the municipalities. I think that was a very, very good move from the municipalities to get that done faster. But at this point, really, I think definitely the energy situation, there is an improvement, but we need that to stay.
Energy impacts us. When load shedding happens, people start digging for copper, and they dig up the networks. That's got a huge impact on us. Security on the other side, we're going into areas now where it's dangerous. It's difficult. So we've got a very structured health and safety program around the safety of our people. But if we go into these areas late nights, it's quite difficult. You saw some of those costs coming through on the DFA side, where we have to have responses, T3 cars sometimes, just to get into areas where we have to get the networks up. Because remember, you've got your big providers, mobile providers on the data centers on those networks. And I think those three elements are definitely a challenge for us.
Thanks, guys. And Pila, maybe you can share with some of us at the bar why you chose to join the team from Telkom. Thank you very much, James. And really, just to wish you luck and greater patience as you continue to pursue the partnership with Vodacom. And Pila, with all you shared earlier around the process and the Heritil one, we certainly hope that we'll get there and be having a different conversation at the next Capital Markets Day.
Yeah, definitely.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to almost the end of our agenda. And certainly the end of my role on stage today. So before I ask Yani to come back, just four way few observations. Just on my side, I said at the beginning that the theme for the day was partner, reignite, and grow. I think we can tick the partnership box. But how do we ignite that growth? For me, the common thread across all the presentations today has been people and opportunity. Carel spoke about our priority of driving more actively performance across the portfolio. And this for me was mirrored in both what Dietlof and Ronnie said, a team of mavericks and can-do-attitude, Dietlof said. Ronnie spoke about always talking to their people about everyday existing to ensure quality healthcare for their clients.
Both incredibly passionate and experienced teams, which we are proud to be partnering with to drive performance in their various businesses. Secondly, Yani spoke to one of our building blocks of our vision lying in backing and partnering with good businesses that have growth to offer and resilience. And again, that was evident in both businesses. The CRVH team spoke about holding market-leading positions in all the segments that they operate in, and of course, the growth opportunities that are vast in that space. The Mediclinic team spoke about running great businesses with world-class clinical care and significant opportunities for growth. So I think these are the right ingredients in achieving the growth we seek to ignite. And at the core of that is partnership with our management teams, our co-shareholders, as well as yourselves, our shareholders. For me, thank you very much for your time and engagement today.
I'll now ask Yani to wrap it up for us. Thank you.
Okay, I'm not going to get wired up again. But I'll be brief. I know it's quite late and we're running over time. So I will be quite brief. So what did I start off with today when we spoke about it? And I mentioned, what is our vision? We want to be an investment partner of choice to generate value for all our stakeholders. And so I do actually summarize today's meeting. And I think all that we can say, if we look back in five years and want to look back, what do we want to have to achieve? And I think it's wanting to retain our partners, be in alignment with them, and deliver shareholder value. And why do we define shareholder value? And I think it's simple for all of us. It's total shareholder return.
I'm talking about the earnings momentum in the view that we've got. We think we've got earnings momentum going forward. We would like to see the dividend to be increased so that we get the cash flow generation at the center. So hopefully, you can see a good increase in the dividends going forward. But to do that, we need to meaningfully grow the earnings. We need to look at the cost base of our companies. And we need to look at efficiencies going forward to generate that cash and that returns. Maybe just a few comments before I close off on the operating environment that we see out there today. It's tough out there. I mean, what has happened over the last few weeks is not helping. I mean, the exchange rate is not helping, especially where you're actually dealing with commodities.
And our consumer portfolio do deal with commodities on the wheat side, on the maize side, and things like that. So that might have an impact on the consumer demand going forward. And it's impossible to actually pass all the pricing onto the consumer. They're under pressure. So we need to get more efficient in that respect to protect our margins. But as I said earlier, we're cautiously optimistic about the reforms happening in the country. But unfortunately, we're also struggling on the regulatory side. So we're trying to manage these uncontrollables. We're engaging with the government. We're engaging with the regulatory bodies. And we're even taking them to court in certain instances where we don't agree with them, as Mediclinic will be doing on the NHI also going forward. But this also influences our capital allocation strategies.
To be quite brief, we prefer not to be in business with government. To do acquisitions that are not organic growth, inorganic growth is very difficult. The regulatory environment is difficult. To get these things passed for the ComCom is getting more and more difficult. And the onerous conditions that they put you on make the cost of doing these types of deals actually not viable at all. And that is a concern of the investment-friendly climate that you actually should create in South Africa to create jobs. Well, but at least what we can say is, as I said right from the start, these two companies that you saw today, they're number one in their respective industries. We're very proud of them. And we believe that the transparency that we show today on our capital markets today will give some more clarity. And you can understand the valuations more.
If you don't, you can still come and ask questions. But we try to be as transparent as possible as we can. So thanks for attending. It's been a long day. Everybody's quite tired. Some of us watched golf late last night. But in any case, so thanks for coming. And we'll see quite a few of you tomorrow on the one-on-ones. But thanks for attending. We really appreciate that. And let's do this again next year. Thank you.
Okay. All right. Yeah, nothing further to add from my side. Usually when the CEO or the chair speaks last, it is the last word. So nothing further suffices to also say thank you very much. Update, I can give you, Trump is awake. Obviously, he's updating us about the war, Russia, as well as, you know, actually Russia. He says he didn't start it, but he's doing everything that he can to end it. South Africa has actually appointed the former deputy finance minister of this country, Mcebisi Jonas, as the U.S. envoy. Good luck to him. Yeah, no doubt we'll be hearing developments there on. So to all the club of entrepreneurs, wonderful to spend time with you, of course. And I think the underlying message that I received from you is, yes, it's tough out there.
But one thing about entrepreneurs, you guys always look at the bright side. Even if there isn't one, you guys create one nonetheless. Ladies and gents, thanks so much. Those of you attending Andrea Bocelli's concert this week, it's fabulous, by the way. I saw him on Saturday. Those of you who are not, next time, get your tickets early. But hope to see you next time again. Goodbye.