Welcome, everybody. I'll see there's still a few people joining. Just give it a minute and see that that all stops clicking away on the screen.
I think that should have been actually up, but yeah.
I'm going to start. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining the Southern Sun results presentation. The presentation looks very much as the previous ones have. I was going to change the order and things around, and I got quite a few people telling me not to do that. It's in the same order, we'll talk to cash flow first, then we'll talk to income statement, better trading. I mean, overall, we had a very good year. The second half was particularly strong. If you remember, our half-year results were a bit wishy-washy. We had like 5% revenue growth, flat EBITDA. We had sales closed, lots of excuses around cost control. As I've been out over the last few years, the second half is really the part that make our money in.
We make about 2/3 of our cash in the second half of the year and 1/3 in the first half. Our second half came through this year.
Oh, you did. How are you today?
Candy, will you just keep me?
Okay, I can. I am. Yeah.
Okay. Overall, the end results were great, and they're kind of what we hoped they would be: high single-digit revenue growth, double-digit EBITDA, just under 20% growth in adjusted earnings. We increased our dividend by 20%. The final score was a good one. Group very stable from last year. I mean, HCI, including the foundations, still 46% shareholding. The public, 54%. No real change in the group. I mean, the short story is we made good cash this year, we used it all to renovate hotels, pay dividends, and buy back shares. That's the kind of story in a nutshell. The board hasn't changed. Well, there was only one change on the board. Rob Nicolella stepped off, Kevin Govender came on, part of HCI. That's a little internal restructure there. It was Rob oil and gas or something.
Our portfolio hasn't changed. 95 hotels, just under 17,000 rooms. The portfolio is very much the same. What we have done on our brand slide is add in just the Westin, the Radisson Collection, and the Radisson Blu. This previously showed what we operated directly. I discussed it with Laurelle. This has put all the brands on that fall in us so that certainly from a shareholder point of view, these all matter. We've added Westin, Radisson Collection, and Radisson Blu, as well as Ecomotel that run a couple of SUN1s for us, and the Birchwood Conference Centre out at the airport, which is what I call the horizontal Magellanian, 660 keys and huge conferencing. Okay, sorry, I'm trying to remove blocking my screen here. Okay, I'll start with our cash flow. EBITDA up 12% on 9% revenue.
SA much stronger than offshore, good cash production this year. Our property rentals are up more because we've got the variable leases on the Sandton Strip. The Sandton Strip, you'll see in our segmental report too, was very strong in the year for two reasons. The towers opened, which had been closed in the prior year, were refurbished. You had the full 557 5-star room stock back. You had B20 and G20, which brought a lot of business to the Sandton Strip. The G20 function was out at NASREC, we had all the heads of state and European Union and everybody else sitting here in Sandton. That was big for us. Obviously, we pay out a lot of that as a variable lease to the Liberty Consortium. That's the jump in cash rentals relating to normalising of the Sandton Strip. Working capital.
Normally, when we're growing, we should be generating positive working capital. We had quite a good deal on some IT licensing costs that we paid for in March, where we prepaid about five years' worth of licensing fees. I think the total was just over ZAR 20 million. You got a financial discount versus what you would have paid if you paid annually. That caused a negative working capital, but then we don't pay anything again for five years relating to our internet IP for rooms and so on. We made a conscious decision to take the discount upfront. That's why working capital is unusually negative for us. Normally, we positively generate working capital. Dividend from associates, that little U.K. business. For those of you that read the actual booklets, the IFRS format of the accounts, the dividend from offshore was like ZAR 91 million or something.
A big chunk of that was returning capital from having sold three hotels in the U.K. business. I've put that further down the cash flow under associate JV loans and investments as a return of cash because it's not trading profit. It was selling hotels and extracting the proceeds. The ZAR 15 that's cash generated from operations is true cash received from the U.K. business as trading income. Interest, obviously, comes right down. We now effectively de-geared. We finished the year on a net cash position of ZAR 86 million. We had some debt during the year, but essentially, we are now de-geared. Going forward, we should be producing interest income. We will, I think now in the first quarter, probably go slightly back into debt because we pay our dividend, ramping up our CapEx spend now again in the first half of the year.
You see things like the Southern Sun Waterfront in Cape Town. You can't renovate in summer. You need the rooms. You spend a lot of your maintenance CapEx in the winter months. Essentially, we are now de-geared. We should start earning interest and not paying interest. Taxpayers got up quite a bit more than earnings. Two reasons. One, we were still utilizing assessed losses in the prior year, which are now pretty much all gone. I don't think we have any assessed losses left. You're now at the full whack. Some places like Tanzania, where we make a loss, or Seychelles, where we made a loss while it was closed, you account for deferred tax, but you obviously don't get a cash check from the relevant governments. Your cash tax paid is higher than your income statement tax will be. Pretty normal.
Our overall tax rate, I think, was 26%, which is pretty close to the 27%, and cash isn't that far off. Operating equipment is just your normal odds and sods in the hotels. CapEx was a big feature of the year. We jumped from ZAR 450 million to ZAR 600 million spend. I would have pointed out at the end of last year, we really think long-term CapEx is sort of closer to the ZAR 500 million mark. There was an element of underspend last year because we rolled forward. As recently as three months ago, we thought this year would be closer to ZAR 650 million, but again, you have to roll forward. The cash just doesn't flow as fast as we ever think it does. I'll get you further down. There's some big projects in there.
Seychelles was the biggest one where we spent over ZAR 100 million in Seychelles. I'll talk quite a bit on CapEx of splitting that ZAR 600 million between what we think is what you're spending to keep your business the same versus what you're spending to enhance your business, with the first part almost being completely involuntary. The second part, you can delay refurbs and so on if you want to. The background of that would probably be accelerating stuff.
CapEx up in the year, that brings you overall to free cash flow just over ZAR 1 billion. If you reconcile free cash flow to earnings, profit for the year is ZAR 1.2 billion. That difference of ZAR 300 million really is the excess of CapEx over depreciation. We run somewhere around a ZAR 300 million depreciation charge on the income statement, and we have about ZAR 600 million of CapEx.
That's because we're investing heavily in the product at the moment with all these refurbs. Otherwise, earnings basically equals cash. Looked after our shareholders, paid our dividend. That was a ZAR 0.25 a share last year. We paid the ZAR 344 million, we did ZAR 359 million of buybacks. We didn't have that many. We had about 76 million at the half-year. After the Pareto deal was cancelled, we thought, "We're not going to spend ZAR 700 million on buying hotels in Sandton." Best we do buybacks. The Iran war started, it must have shaken somebody because we suddenly got quite a bit of volume. We were chuffed about that. We bought 37 million shares in the month of March, we bought another 3 million or 4 million just looking at Laurelle, how much? 4 million shares in the month of April.
We've managed to reduce our share count by another 40 million shares. I think as of today, we've got 1.310 billion shares in issue. That was 1.5 billion after the HBF swap up a couple of years ago. I think in this environment, it's quite a good use of cash. The yield on us is still much higher than you can get on most other assets in the market that we would be able to buy. That's our hurdle for acquisitions or new builds or anything is you buy back better than what else you spend the money on. In April, March, we spent close to ZAR 400 million on share buybacks. If we hadn't done that, obviously, our cash position, which ended the year at ZAR 86 million, would have been closer to ZAR 400 million.
We'd have had a lot more cash, but we figured that was a good allocation of resources. Disposal proceeds, we sold 10% of Birchwood back to the founding family. Kevin's working fiercely and hard and being motivated there. That was good. That money went into Birchwood. We now own it 90/10 with the family. That money's been on refurbs and a redevelopment of a very big conference facility there, which will come through in the F2027 year. Expansion CapEx on small odds and ends on really fees and so on around Beverly Hills. The money that came out of the U.K. from the disposals. That brought us from ZAR 266 million debt last year to ZAR 86 million cash this year, with the vast majority of it going into CapEx and return to shareholders. Sorry, now my clicker doesn't work.
Let me just find out why. There we go. There was the expansion CapEx. Maintenance CapEx. I spent a lot of my life on analyzing this, thinking about this, and working on this. The pure maintenance CapEx you see at the top, that is what keeps the buildings alive. You have to spend that as long as. That includes everything from new beds, the birdcages that they load the luggage on, the kitchen equipment that breaks and burns out, and putting new stuff. Basically, you had something. It's worn out. You've got something going. Repairs, maintenance that you capitalize versus ones that go through the income statement. There's another ZAR 200 million sitting in the income statement of pure R&M that we expensed. In this year, ZAR 61 million of IT. We had ramped up our IT spend quite a lot.
In F2026, we did a lot of work on the internet services to the hotels and the whole infrastructure for that and your IPTVs, your smart TVs that you get the much better, clearer picture. In F2027, we're going to be spending a whole lot on our networks. Our servers are 16 years old and end of life. Terry's got a huge budget for network replacements. We go back to IPTVs after that. That number of ZAR 227 million is a little bit lower than it would be normally because of the amount of refurbs we do. The major projects below that will also include work that will then be wrapped into the refurb project that you would have spent. If we hadn't renovated Paradise Sun, in theory, the project of ZAR 112 would have not happened.
We still would have spent other money on repairs and maintenance, etc., that we have encapsulated in the project. There's always going to be something breaking needing replacement. They got a whole new kitchen here where they would have needed new kitchen equipment anyway. That ZAR 227 is lower because the ZAR 373 is higher, but it's not a material problem. In general, if you think about this business, you're going to be spending ZAR 300 million a year without enhancing anything, just keeping the system alive. That's kind of what our depreciation number is running at the moment. You put money into refurbs, and you hope to get a better result and a new product out of the refurb. Over time, your depreciation number is going to go up as that refurb money gets spent. You can delay refurbs.
You can prioritize this one versus that one, but they're not going away. They are coming. The end of five years, we'll have a glorious-looking portfolio, but something that looked fine three years ago, they're going to be up for refurb. This never goes away. In total, there, you can see the major projects we did. We ended up at ZAR 600 million. I'd say very unlikely to see a number below ZAR 500 million over the next 5-10 years. That sort of number escalating. We have a quite clear vision of the hotels we want to tackle in the next three to four years. It becomes more opaque after that. Kind of see where the market is, which one to become more priority, who's aged well, who hasn't. These are the ones we prioritize at the moment. It's quite a lot.
We did, I'll think of our own portfolio. We did 652 rooms in the year. The add-in towers, it's 852 rooms. I mean, we've been running at probably about 1,000 rooms a year run rate out of our total estate portfolio of 17,000 rooms. We're furnishing about 1,000 rooms a year. The development department's been pretty busy. I'll show some pictures and so on of these various refurbs a little further on. Debts are now becoming a bit of a nonsense or not a nonsense, a no story here. Laurelle's looking at me because she runs the debt off. He's nonsense about it. It's a bit of a we don't have debts anymore. In October, we settled the last of our dollar debt in Mozambique. We have no dollar debt and no debt offshore.
In fact, we have net cash sitting mainly in euros in Mauritius. At year-end, we had ZAR 500 million drawn down NSA with ZAR 1.5 billion of unutilized facilities. We've subsequently settled that. You can see we had cash on hand there and net there. As of today, we have zero debt drawn down and net cash in the books. That's a great position to be in. Whatever the future holds, you can make more money, less money. You can be super profitable, grow fast, grow slower. That was in Iran. You don't have debt. You just existentially are not facing the kind of risk you do if you have overgearing. I'm pretty chuffed about that position. Trading. Yeah, it was a strong performance, particularly in the second half of the year. Overall income up 9%. Occupancy at 62.9%, which is just under.
I'm irritated we didn't get 63. What is good is in South African operations, we were actually over 64. We did 64.3%. The offshore operations were sitting at 39.5%. That's a bit of an artificially low number. The Seychelles that was closed for the six months, the rooms available stayed in the denominator. Occupancy is rooms sold over rooms available. If it's closed for less than six months, you don't take the stock out of rooms available. Essentially, Seychelles sat in the system showing zero occupancy for the six months it was closed instead of taking it out of the numerator and the denominator. That 39.5% is a little artificially low. 64% in SA is great. We think there's still some room to grow there.
Obviously, as you get higher and higher in occupancy, your pricing power should start coming through that you're getting increased in rates. Our 5% increase in average rates in the year is a little disappointing to me. I'm trying to push rates more. We think we're taking market share, or at least we're getting new aspects to the market that we didn't have before. Some of that is coming at a price. We have a large chunk of business that comes directly to us through what we call the transient travel. Just people going about their business. We have all the contracted stuff. Our sales team's been very busy. That is quite a competitive market. You've got to be keen on pricing. I also think as inflation's coming down, we start 5% used to be a terrible rate increase.
It's now 2% above inflation. Inflation was 3% last year. Certainly when you're dealing with the procurement departments of corporates, SOEs, etc., they're not interested in you coming along with a double-digit price increase when inflation's sitting at 3%. We do ameliorate that when we have higher bulk pairs because nobody gets lost from availability. We can yield you out. Your average contracted rates, you battle a lot to get significant price increases unless you are sitting in a very high-demand market. Overall, good increase in occupancy, decent increase in rate. That gave us a 9% revenue increase, which is, I guess, three times inflation. That we're pretty chuffed with. Seychelles will refer to a couple of times because of its impact of being closed. Mozambique and Tanzania are still tough. Mozambique had a relatively good second half of the year, actually.
There was some quite nice recovery. The December trading was good. The market is still in distress. It hasn't recovered from that election-based violence. It's got fuel shortages there at the moment. It's had currency shortages. It is difficult. We are not making money there. We're not making the kind of money we should do. Tanzania, we're not making money. We're actually losing money. It's very, very difficult in Tanzania. There's just the most awful violence around the election. It just remains a very, very difficult market. Obviously, a story of the year you'll hear over and over again is the G20. It's not just the big summit that happened in Sandton. It's about 100 events that happened over the course of the year all across the country. That was good business.
That obviously creates a bar that we have to cross in this coming financial year. We've got things like the New Zealand rugby tour coming to South Africa, which is massive for us, particularly for us because we host teams and the media and so on. There's always something new that comes in, whether it's not as big as G20, there are some big events coming down the line. The story of F2026 anyway, G20 was good for us. Not ramble on too much about that. Seychelles did really well post-opening. We opened it on the 15th of September. By October, we were running huge volumes, 85% occupancy almost immediately, great rate, fantastic feedback from the guests, and a really successful refurb, going like a Boeing. Then everything shut down because the Middle East War started. It's not as bad as that.
We went from probably 75% occupancy to 55% occupancy. A large amount of your airlift into the Seychelles comes from the Middle East. We're still doing quite a bit better than the market there because we have a very European focus in that hotel. Our key markets are Italy, France, Germany, and the U.K. Some of the very high-end stock in Seychelles had pivoted a lot of its sales and marketing effort into the GCC. Now the GCC's gone into stress because of the Middle East War. They're battling with that. Ultimately, until that settles down, disruption of the Middle East is really not great for Seychelles. We haven't seen much impact in South Africa. We've had some cancellations. If I was to add it up in my head of what people have told me, I don't think it's ZAR 10 million.
We haven't seen a decline in tourist numbers. We haven't seen a decline in bookings. Even our Ford bookings are good. I mean, May is turning out to be a spectacular month in Cape Town. That's all working fine. There's been disruption of some of the air capacity, which is big. I mean, I think the Middle East makes a big chunk of our air capacity coming in here. It doesn't seem to have affected inbound travel into SA. What we're not certain about, and I guess maybe I'm still got my old casino days in my head, when you have big fuel costs going up and so on, that just is terrible for the consumer. I'm not entirely sure what all this volatility does to the SA economy. It's not so much that we won't have foreign travellers in Cape Town.
It's what happens to local travel because diesel is ZAR 35 a liter. What happens to local demand if interest rates stay high and inflation goes up instead of expecting to carry on declining? Food prices, taxi fares, everything else. That's the bigger concern about because a large portion of our business is still exposed to the S.A. economy and local travel. That's a bigger worry about the Middle East impact than actual flights into Cape Town or Joburg. There's some detail on our income statement later that I'll show. Food and beverage went a little bit faster than room revenue. That's not because we sold more food and beverage. I think I mentioned it either at the end of last year or at the half year of things. We gave an increased allocation to the breakfast and dinner allocations on our packages.
When you book a bed and breakfast rate, say ZAR 1,500, we take out that. We allocate ZAR 185 or ZAR 225, whatever it is, to breakfast. The balance is what we record as room revenue. That number had been static for a number of years. You use that number, goes to the chef, and is recorded as breakfast revenue. That's the measure against your food cost percentage, how you control your costs in the kitchens. If you're too tight on that and you allocate too little, the chef will ultimately underdeliver because that's his revenue he can work with. If you're too generous, he'll find you overdeliver and you lose control of your costs. You think you've got a great 28% cost of sales in food and beverage. Actually, it's 28% of our inflated revenue number. It's something we watch quite closely.
Long story short, I increased those allocations in this year. If we hadn't done that, you would have had slower F&B growth and higher room revenue growth. It's pretty marginal, I think. That's why rooms go up by eight and F&B goes up by nine. Employee costs came in for the year.
Just mute that.
Is it off?
Sorry. Can you just hear me talking? Just mute yourselves. Okay. Okay. Employee costs came in at net 4%. We gave higher than that increases. Our STRs for the year, sadly, are lower than last year. Our STRs largely financial are based on achievement of budget. We hit our budgets this year, but we didn't hit the stretch exceeding over budget that we have in the prior year. Our total bonus pool reduced from something like ZAR 127 million to ZAR 109 million. We had an overprovision in the prior year. What ends up is that your overall cost in the year brings down your payroll cost. Payroll's still our biggest number in our income statement. Controlled at 4% is pretty good. We have implemented sub-5% wage increases for F2027. That's all done and across the board. We try to give above-inflation pay increases.
With inflation coming down, means the pay increases are lower than in the past. There we still 1.5% above inflation that we've allocated or that we've issued in F2027 year. I spoke about this quite a bit at the half year. Operating cost pressures came from some unexpected places. One was IT costs, which was really my fault that it wasn't expected because it was clearly coming. I should have seen it. Essentially, our license fees go up. Dollar pricing with high dollar inflation offsets a little bit by rand strength. Generally, software as a service. You have zero negotiating power with Microsoft. Across the board, our IT license fees went up. Plus, Laurelle did the SAP HANA upgrade. There was an increase in license fees and so on related to that. Property costs, your rates, taxes, weren't too bad.
Your administered costs, electricity, water, etc., went up double-digits, well above inflation. On top of that, we had the impact of water shortages and supply breaks, particularly in Sandton, where we then have to truck in water. Trucking in water is like 10 times the cost of just having water come out the taps. At the moment, in Sandton City, for example, we're installing another 350,000-liter storage capacity. At least you can run down your storage and hopefully refill that with municipal water when the supply disruption's over, as opposed to having to truck the stuff in because it's properly expensive. It's interesting. I spoke to Kevin from Birchwood this week. They are basically completely off-grid on water now. They're totally self-sufficient and actually producing bottled water there. We do have, I think, in our group, how many boreholes?
About 20 properties that run on boreholes. This administered cost of electricity and water is like a continuous burden on us. Lastly, our channel costs went up because part of the reason we've done so well in revenue is we have opened up the OTA channels more effectively. Those come with a cost. Now, if you just move existing business from direct to OTA, booking.com, etc., that's bad for you because you go from zero channel cost to a high channel cost. We don't believe that's happened. We think we've accessed a channel we wouldn't have had before. It brings additional business in that has a lower margin because of the channel cost, but overall is still high-margin business and not as high as direct. It's good to have. We are also not a rate parity country, thanks to CompCom.
You can price up on the OTAs. You don't have to have the same pricing as on your direct. You can offer the best through direct and price up on OTAs. That often works well because the OTAs will then take some of their commission and put it back into the pricing to try and compete with you. OTA has been a good strategy for us. They've actually worked very well with us, particularly Booking.com. We were off Expedia for a year because we had a severe disagreement on fee structure. We are now back on Expedia because everyone's come to their senses. That's going to take a while to get back to its normalized levels. Booking.com's been going great guns. They work very nicely with us. There's definitely a market that we won't get.
Particularly, foreigners may not know our brands. Their Genius program is strong. There are people that just if you're on Booking.com, you get access to 5,000 hotels. It's definitely a market we have to be in that we have to manage. It does result in an increased cost, but it's pretty good business for us. South African EBITDA, overall 13% up. We were 12% for the group. Obviously, offshore was quite small. The cash flow was strong. We spent a lot of that I've covered in the cash flow on refurbs and projects, giving out dividends and buybacks. I've covered most of this slide. What are some of those projects themselves? You won't see the Radisson Collection one in our cash flow because it's an investment property. Its replacement reserve sits at property level.
We just record what we receive as distributions from it. It had a lobby and public area refurb, plus I think 95 of the rooms. It's looking quite beautiful. It's the only Radisson Collection, I think, on the African continent. Given the location of that hotel on the foreshore, I mean, it is a spectacular location. Paradise I've referred to several times. That was a very successful refurb. Once the Middle East settles down, I think that's going to go absolute great guns for us. We're hoping for probably north of EUR 3 million a year out of that business, which is not bad for a little 80-room property. Mbombela, small hotel in Nelspruit, 109 rooms. We redid all of those. The Gautrain Hotel got a full refurb. Cullinan was a big one last year. We finished that off in this year.
Birchwood has done, I think 200 or so rooms out of the 600. Their big project this coming year is going to be the Terminal A, the 2,000-seat conference facility that's going there. That's just a little bit on the Radisson Collection. There's that location. It's on a good day. It's just magnificent. Cullinan largely covered. Mbombela, Paradise. What are the others we're working on? Newlands, we did about half the rooms this year. I said half the yard. It's about half the rooms. We've finished the next half now in F27. As I said, in Cape Town, you can really only work in winter because you need the stock in summer. Demand is so high. You stop all renovating work in summer. You go back now in the early part of winter.
Newlands will finish off this year. For those of you that attend the RMB conference, by the time that happens, you should have a fully refurbed hotel. There was quite a laugh at that investor conference last year because there were a lot of people staying at our hotel. You could see the ones that had the new room versus ones that had the old room. It was a bit of misery. Everyone will have the new room this year. Hazyview wasn't on the list. We had a bit of a roof problem that some structural issues. We said, "Oh, we've got to take the roof off to fix it." We may as well do that entire block. We're doing 24 rooms there. We'll do another 30, I think, rooms next year. Waterfront's the big one.
That's the 500-room hotel next to The Cullinan. That's going to take us three years. I've signed off the mockup. That's all looking great. Again, it's 504 keys. You just don't get that done in 1 year. Development told me they need 3 winter seasons to get through it. We'll start in this winter. Mount Grace is also a multi-year project. We have just finished all the bar, lounge, public areas. We've done about a third of the rooms. We're busy with the restaurant now. I mean, we're trying to get this thing up to a single good standard. It's one of those properties where you see these rooms were 30 years built. These ones were 20 years ago. These are 10. By the end of this, they'll all look good. It's going to take another two years as we access the rooms.
It is coming out beautifully. I mean, it is such a gorgeous property in such a gorgeous location that I think this is going to be a total relaunch and reimagination of what Mount Grace is. Hyde Park, I've been faffing around because we can't really understand what to do on the level 6, which is all the restaurants and so on. Instead of holding back, we've done the mockup room for the bedrooms there. It's looking absolutely beautiful. We're going to push ahead and do the rooms. It's not a terribly big hotel. I think it's 135 keys or something. We're going to do the rooms this year. We'll figure out what to do with the lounge and the public areas because they're working fine.
The big unknown is do you put a whole new concept in there, or do you just renovate what you've got, put in new carpets, furniture, etc.? The bedrooms, it was built in a bit of a grand scale. They're a nice size. I think once you push that button, this hotel's going to see pretty good rates upside because it's essentially a deluxe hotel on Hyde Park Shopping Centre there. Then Elangeni & Maharani, after signing the new 50-year lease, we now started with that. Whether it's a fudge or not, what I have done is I'm going to disclose Elangeni & Maharani under expansion CapEx. The logic being that if we hadn't signed a new lease, if we walked away from Durban, this wouldn't be there. We have essentially got to it's not built a whole new hotel because there are structures and so on there.
We have underspent on that property for a long time because of the uncertainty over the lease tenure. There's ZAR 255 million that we have to spend in the next three years. Overall, we're going to spend about ZAR 500 million on that property. We're just keeping this as a separate line item because the choice was either walk away and you have nothing or treat it almost like a new acquisition. A lot of the first money that's going into there is going into pure infrastructure. Your IT, I'll say close to ZAR 30 million just on IT, between internet, TVs, door locks, etc., to modernize all that. You've got vast public areas. You've got two big buildings with big lobbies. You've got 11 food and beverage outlets and 734 keys. It's a big project over the next few years.
I'm personally very excited about it because it is one of my favorite hotels. There's going to be quite a lot of focus on that over the next period. Debt facilities, I said, becoming a little bit irrelevant because we have settled everything. We do have ZAR 2 billion of unutilized facilities, possibly too much. You never know what comes along. We could do a ZAR 1.5 billion acquisition very easily. We do keep ourselves quite well funded. There'll be a little bit of working capital move in the first half of the year. Certainly at the moment, our cash flows are so strong, we don't really need any of that debt unless we buy something big. Okay, the income statement. It was all the cash flow and the kind of way we think about business. Room revenue up 8%.
I said your occupancy at 62.9%, not helped by 39% offshore, which is not helped by Seychelles being at 0% for six months. Overall, 8% growth in rooms revenue, 9% in food and beverage. As I explained, the allocation part was different. Property rental income, which is the hotels that we treat as investment properties, also 8%. Kind of straight move there. Then other revenues rising 14% up. This covers everything. We did well in our management fees go up because some of the managed properties did better. Our golf revenue was much higher. Arabella has now been the number six golf course in the country. That hotel's like a remarkable growth in profitability, popularity. Golf revenue is up. We make a bizarre amount of money out of no-show and cancellation fees, which is not really how you want to make your money.
You want the guests to be there. People that just book, pay, and then don't arrive. That had an increase in the year, which is also a function of just volumes going up. We had a 14% increase in other revenue. Overall, 9% up in income. Overheads at 7%, particularly payroll being controlled at 4% on the back of lower bonuses. It says Laurelle and I are gritting our teeth. That's obviously how you control your costs. There will be EBITDA coming in at 12%. The Jaws effect doing exactly what it should. Property rentals and amortisation, I mean, this has got all IFRS stuff in it. I hardly look at it. I look at the cash flow number for rentals, which I showed was 20-odd percent increase because of the variable rentals on the Sandton Strip.
There's quite a lot of IFRS adjustments in here. We try to set out in as much detail as we can in the commentary and so on as to what those are. Essentially, property rentals, amortization, depreciation, and interest are all impacted by IFRS 16 on the leases. I just refer to the cash flow for the real items. Your exceptional items, by and large, are all year-end adjustments from the auditors. We had a write-up of some ZAR 75 million of our investment properties and a write-down of ZAR 37-odd or something of our property plant and equipment, which was a big chunk of that was the Radisson Gautrain Hotel, where the valuation of the hotel hasn't changed. We had to write off the refurb in one go.
The values have got a 14.5% discount rate on this stuff, which I think is a bit ludicrous. The base discount rates have not come down, even though interest rates have come down. At some point, we're either going to have a massive revaluation of assets because they do bring the base rates down, or if the rates go up, then we're not going to have any change on the properties because these discount rates are so high. You don't argue that values do what they do in the auditor's dictate. Those move up and down are all non-cash. That's it. Any exceptional items, then we take it out of adjusted earnings. Associate earnings lower than last year because we have a much smaller portfolio. We sold those hotels in the U.K. We've got the money back in. That number comes down.
We really think mostly about the cash number of the dividend we receive. The management company, RBH, in the U.K. is doing very well. We did a bit of a cost restructure there and just a refocus because as Starwood disposes of a lot of the old Redefine International portfolio, the management company was running those hotels. You had a risk of losing management contracts there. They've restructured themselves not to be as reliant on Starwood. They've done a very good job. I mean, they're signing up a couple of management contracts a month in many cases. They've got a really lean structure going there and some very innovative stuff that I'm actually getting learnings out of in terms of automation of processes and so on. It's a nice little business that's doing that. I mean, it's not big in our lives.
We get maybe GBP 1 million a year in dividends. It's not quite. It's about GBP 750,000 in dividends. It's a very nice business to be involved in. Then income tax, as I said, is not much change in the income statement because you kind of just follow your earnings. In the cash flow, quite an increase because we've used up the assessed losses. When you have deferred tax on offshore losses, you don't get it paid back to you in cash by those revenue authorities. The adjustments between normal profit and adjusted earnings are those fair value adjustments and then little odds and ends. Overall, ZAR 1.2 billion profit. The number of shares in issue don't change from a weighted average point of view because we did the big buybacks all in the last month. Laurelle's included on the slide here.
At dividend declaration date, we had 1.3 billion shares left. That's down from about 40 million from last year. We issued about 10 million shares to share scheme participants in the year. Overall, you went up by 10 in issues. You bought back about 50 million or in total, 40 million. That's your net number out. You don't see a change in your weighted average here. You will see a change in your weighted average in the coming year, obviously, because that now kicks in immediately from 1 April. Some quarterly numbers. There you can see the big acceleration in the second half. The first half was 5% revenue growth, flat on EBITDA, flat on bottom line. Second half was 12% revenue growth, 20% on EBITDA, and 29% on the bottom line. Very strong growth in our peak months.
Some of the months were just astounding how last-minute just pick up volumes. March was an amazing month. This has continued into the new year. April, we are well up on last year. May is looking to be a pretty spectacular month, not in every region. Cape Town itself is just shooting the lights out. It seems pretty good at the moment. Q3 had G20 in it. Q4 did not. By the end of November, I think it was, G20 was completely done and finished. Q4 is straight. There's no big eventing or things that I can think of there. That was straight transient domestic cross-the-board demand. We just did well everywhere. There is some accounting benefit that you get in the last months because we clean out provisions that we built up in the year and so on.
Laurelle and I have looked and said, "Can we try to get that a little bit more evenly?" It really doesn't change the numbers by much. It can affect a quarter. You accrue for marketing expenses based on your budget as you go. You release it every quarter. You get to end of the year and go, "Oh, I actually had more accruals. You didn't spend any of it. You release all of that." That's not what's impacted here. This was just really good demand, good pricing in Q4. We're pretty chuffed about that. From a regional point of view, obviously, the consortium is a very strong growth. The EBITDA is up 31%. As I said, that's the tower's being reopened plus G20.
The SA portfolio, if you include the Manco benefit across SA on its own, excluding offshore, was like 11% up. It's about 10% in revenue and 11% up in EBITDA. Every region had growth. Cape Town came in at 9%, which I'm very chuffed with if you consider the pretty exceptional growth we've had for the last few years. In this period, we had certain non-recurring sports events. Some of the events that the CTICC didn't have as much delegate takeup and so on. It still produced 9% EBIT growth off of that high. Chuffed about that. KwaZulu-Natal started weak. The first quarter, it seems so long ago now. Remember, we had a budget that was declined twice in Parliament. We had delays in municipalities getting their allocations.
First quarter was very, very hard and came through strongly in the nine months after that. KZN came in at 15% EBITDA growth, albeit F25, which we pointed out at the time, was a bit of a low base. Nice growth in KZN most of that coming straight out the beachfront. Gauteng overall, 9%, much stronger in Sandton and Rosebank. The Southern Sun Sandton and the Southern Sun Rosebank had fantastic years. They're performing at levels that they should be at now. Very nice profitability out of those. Offsets a little bit by slow growth on the Pretoria and some of the East Rand market. The East Rand, some of that government conferencing and so on, slowing down a bit. Hotels like Southern Sun O.R. Tambo will be running at higher volumes anyway. There's not a lot of growth there.
In Pretoria, we have an issue or two that we need to address. Overall, Gauteng at 9%, but still very nice, very nice numbers. If you include the Sandton Strip into that, the Johannesburg area really performed well. I still think that's probably one of our biggest upsides if you can start getting decent rate growth because the rates are Cape Town the highest, Durban next, and then Joburg, Sandton. Sandton rates are not where they should be. We're trying to push that quite strongly. Then your Manco costs, the unallocated portion largely comes down on the back of lower unallocated short-term incentives. Laurelle and I getting lower bonuses. There you can see SA at the bottom, 10% up in revenue, 13% in EBITDA, and offshore negative, principally because of the Seychelles closure.
I would anticipate, assuming we don't have a really long dragged-out Middle East issue, that the offshore will show very nice growth in F27 just because you've got full-year trading of Seychelles. It looks like Mozambique is doing better, if not brilliantly. Tanzania is what it is. I've spoken to these. Gauteng did very well out of conferencing, impacted a little bit by water issues. We need to get some volume and rate more into this market. It's done well on the refurbs we've done here. Quite a lot of our CapEx in the last year or so has gone into the Joburg market. Cape Town did pretty well. Some large-scale events didn't happen. They've done, I think, well in the year to maintain off of that high base. KwaZulu-Natal, the highlight for us really was signing the Elangeni lease.
We don't pay any rent for the first three years. We have our spending ZAR 255 million in the first three years. That's all actively going. I think I've largely covered this. The outside areas did pretty well. I mean, your Polokwanes, Bloemfonteins, Ulundis, and Mthathas, all that trade is continuing. It is good. You had to think back a little bit on this year. I'd say at the moment, sentiment's a bit weak. You've got those Iran stuff and high petrol prices and so on. It's amazing how, as the sentiment bounced up like it did going into December and so on, you definitely get a volume uptick in travel. It's not just the economic circumstance. It's how people feel that drives a lot of business travel. You've got good sentiment. We boom.
Income statement, very odd for me to talk to all of this. As I said, there's detail in the booklet on the leases. They're so impacted by IFRS 16. I mean, the Sandton Strip is essentially 100% variable lease. What we earn in EBITDA, we can keep our management fees. We pay it out in rent to them. Because you've got a fixed and variable portion within a year, the auditors make us do all sorts of adjustments, which we get a credit in the rental and then a depreciation charge to write it off so that you don't have any income statement impact. Otherwise, I'd be making profits that I'm never going to realize.
I just strongly look at the cash flow and say, "What is the real cash move on interest depreciation and rent?" The exceptional items I've covered pretty much covered all of this. Finance costs, share profits from associates, I've covered all of that. That's all fine. Share buybacks, as I said, you won't see it in this year. You'll see it strongly next year. Overall, 41 million shares down. We'll continue to buyback as long as we see really good value in it. Definitely one of the better ways we can allocate our capital. Okay. I've jumped through all of that a bit. It's kind of a very repeat record story. If the revenue performs and we control the costs, everything flows where it's supposed to go. It's what we do with the money. Our strategy remains internally focused.
We say we have an irreplaceable portfolio that sells. I've said this publicly lots. If I gave you ZAR 40 billion and 10 years, you couldn't rebuild what we've got. We think investing money into that is the right way to go. We're seeing good returns on the properties we have put in. I do get asked a lot, "Well, if you spend this much CapEx, what's your RRR or what's your return on investment immediately?" It's hard to claim that it immediately jumps up. Cullinan had 15% growth in EBITDA. It does on the back of a refurb. It must have been a genius move to refurb it. You would have had growth because the Cape Town market's strong if you hadn't refurbed it. Ultimately, so you have to spend money on the properties.
To claim that, "Look, the refurb did this. Therefore, automatically, we went up," I don't think that's true. Keeping your portfolio as good as you possibly can has got to be the right long-term strategy, particularly in a market like Cape Town where you're going to get new stock coming down the line. You don't want to be competing with that with old stock. You want to be competing with new stock. We still think you just can't get what we've got. We're the lowest-cost producer. Spending money on the properties is the right way for us to go. That's what we're going to carry on going forward. We do have the larger development projects. There are not a lot of them.
We're working with Vivian & Co on the oceans developments, that middle tower, where we will take an equity stake plus have a management contract of the entire tower. That's all still in progress, even though the crane's up. I think that building's up to nearly the 20th story or something already. Signed off the mockups. It's all looking very good. The planning for Beverly Hills is continuing. Us and the city are fighting with Oyster Box next door. They're fighting with us. We're telling them they're wrong because they're trying to question our rights. That will all pass. Beverly Hills, I'm very keen to do. We've got to pick our timing right. We think we can do it for under a billion Rand. The designs and stuff look really great. It is, without a doubt, the best location in KwaZulu-Natal.
That's one we are working on, although we haven't pushed the button yet. Then, obviously, our Cape Town joint venture with Growthpoint in the foreshore area, that land that we've got outside The Cullinan, where we're planning a mixed-use, 330-room 5 -star hotel plus offices for a single tenant. They've got beer at the back. We're working on that. We've looked at a couple of acquisitions in the year. There's stuff floating around. We haven't purchased anything. I do think it's not all bad. You have a bit of a wobble in the market and a little bit of nervousness around interest rates and a little bit of Laurelle, your battery's going flat here. You need to plug this thing in. Sorry. I'm on Laurelle's computer. The battery's going low here.
A little bit of a shake in the market could just shake out some acquisition opportunities for us. There's nothing that we've particularly done at the moment. Sorry. Crisis around the battery dying has just been averted. The Middle East war is exactly that type of crisis. I don't think we would have got 40 million shares at the price we did if there hadn't been a bit of a Middle East wobble in the last month. We do try to take advantage of that. We don't know what the impact of it will be. As I said, it's more impact on the South African economy and so on. We've got a bulletproof balance sheet. We'll see if it gives advantages that come out. You definitely, if you're in a time of uncertainty, want to be facing it with zero debt.
I think it may just shake through some opportunities for us. If we don't get them and we sit on cash, special dividends and buybacks or the default make it back to the shareholders. Okay. That is pretty much the presentation. It is same as last year. We're very happy with the growth continues. I mean, it's just been an astounding recovery from the COVID days. Long may it last. At the moment, we're not seeing any latter. We should be reaching normalized levels. That's still a way off. I mean, I remember trading at 68. Occupancy was the norm. We're only at 64 in SA. They're still upside, provided you don't have any catastrophes in the world and so on. Okay. I can't see anything on the screen here. I'm happy to take questions.
You may have muted everybody.
[audio distortion] .
Does anybody got questions?
Yes.
Yep.
Mr. Marcel, the Beverly Hills, just an estimated completion date, I mean, once you get all of these things good to go, how profitable do you think it'll be?
I'm not going to answer the second one. I mean, look, it's a great location. The big decision you've got to make on Beverly Hills, I can either renovate what I've got, which is a 90-room hotel, spectacular location, 60-year history, glorious feel, lots of customer loyalty. You spend a couple hundred million on it. And it is what it is. What we're planning is a tie redesign. So completely strip the existing tower, virtually bare concrete, expand it from 89 keys to 177 keys, redo the whole swimming pool, resort-style area, new F&B offerings, take away the Cabanas, move them closer to the Pearl Valley. So if we do that's about, as I say, current budget sitting on ZAR 950 million, I think, which almost guarantees you it's going to be ZAR 1 billion when you're done. It obviously needs to become a substantially more profitable hotel.
That sort of scale hotel could easily make somewhere between ZAR 120 million and ZAR 150 million a year if your market holds and your rate holds and all that sort of thing. It's a great location. 177 keys is not a big ask for volume. You could get a very nice yield on your spend there. It would take us two years to do, at least, because it is a big chunk of new build. With all of this, once you start, you don't want to stop. This, the new building Cape Town, we're doing all the work, as in right down to detailed building plan designs and submissions. We've just got to pick our day when we're going to start.
Beverly Hills is lower risk because it's not a skyscraper in Cape Town that goes up 150 m in a town known for golf course, winds, and so on. Just sort of construction risk and understanding all of that, it's an easier build. Those are the only two large-scale projects that we would go at. We haven't made the call when to start yet. We'll do it when we're ready. The nice thing about both Cape Town and this is that we own it. Nobody's going to take it away from us. We don't have to make a decision to buy or not buy. If you do it this year or next year, it really doesn't matter. It's ours. We can do it when we feel like it.
I mean, like Sandton. I'm sorry about that.
Correct.
If nobody else has a question, just another one. Just on the direct flights to Durban, I feel like what's holding back tourism a lot to Durban I mean, not that it's doing terribly. I think it's picked up a lot. The direct flights and I met Patricia de Lille on the airline coming back from Mauritius the other day. I mean, it makes no sense. They're absolutely pumping it. Durban has a severe shortage of international flights. I told her, "What is holding its back?" She didn't really have an exact answer for me.
Neither do I. I mean, the truth is, if there was demand for those routes, the airlines would put it on. I know Turkish was flying in there. It was a hop from Joburg. Emirates was doing direct. I don't understand what triggers an airline to do it or not. What's interesting is Club Med opening up the road. Air France is not doing direct flights. Normally, Air France and Club Med hunt in a pack. Wherever the one goes, the other one gives the flights. Air France has said they're not doing it. Whether that'll change in the future or not, I don't know. At the moment, I mean, our Durban market is virtually all local. It's not an international destination, not helped to a large extent by Durban's past bad PR around infrastructure and so on. Even that doesn't affect the North Coast.
It doesn't have the reputation that Cape Town's got. It hasn't marketed itself and built itself like Wesgro has done for Cape Town. They've had a direct air access program sponsored by the DA government. Pushed very hard and a lot of private input into it to get those direct flights in. Cape Town today is just substantially differently thought of to what it was 20 years ago. 20, 25 years ago, it was a backwater door piece at the end of thing that you certainly didn't want to go anywhere near in winter. It's just a totally different market now. Durban's got a lot of work. It has that potential. My views on whether Club Med will be successful or not are neither here nor there. Club Med is great for tourism for Durban. It's another reason to put KwaZulu-Natal on the map.
Hopefully, these things will come in time.
Marcel, Minister de Lille's mentioned to me that Air France is planning to have direct flights to South Africa.
Yeah. I'm not sure it'll go to Durban. We'll see.
Sarane, do you want to go ahead?
Sorry. I was also plugging in my computer. Marcel, more color on KZN, the beachfront. You mentioned the spending on Elangeni. There was a figure of ZAR 1 billion mentioned, which will include other hotel revamps. Is that still going to go ahead? The plans for the oceans development, when obviously, it's not as much CapEx because it's a lease. That's quite a big development. It's likely to happen before Beverly Hills, from what I understand. Some color from that perspective. You mentioned Club Med. There are developments further up around there with Zimbali. Would Southern Sun consider further investments up the North Coast, considering the boom around Ballito and that sort of thing, especially with international players looking to enter? Thank you.
Yes, we would look up north. International players look to do anything but spend their own money. You can count them out. As long as they can find somebody else to spend the money, they'll put a flag on anything that moves. We would look up north. I think what Club Med is going to do is unlock a new node, very much like Sun City did around it. It suddenly became the Pilanesberg Resorts and that sort of thing. You'll get more and more growth up there. At some point, we will go into that. I think it is very dangerous to rely completely on leisure up north. Beverly Hills, it's a resort hotel. It's going to be a beautiful resort hotel. It's still going to get more than 50% of its business is going to be business-related travel, people coming for work.
The corporate market is in uMhlanga. It's not Ballito. At the moment, if you were to put a hotel up in Ballito, I think you'd bleed because you cannot rely just on leisure and visiting friends and family. You need to be in uMhlanga for that because you need all the sources. You need to be able to do business travel, conferences, groups, and leisure. That market is in uMhlanga, not up north. Our focus will be down here. On oceans, it's not a lease. It's a management agreement. We take a stake. We are going to co-invest with the IDC and the developers in the property. We will own somewhere between 25% and 40% of it, which is uncertain at the moment. We then operate the entire building. It's not a lease. It's a management agreement.
That will come first because the building's going up. I don't think they're that far away from topping out on top of the building. We have a penciled-in opening date of May next year. There's lots of paperwork and contracts and all that still happening and the IDC funding and so on. Vivian's building away furiously while he's doing it. Back to the Durban beachfront. Yeah. They're like quoting the ZAR 1 billion number. I mean, it included, first of all, in our bid, we had a fully functioning, fully kitted out, fully operational hotel. If they didn't allocate it to us, we take all that kit away. There's a chunk in there for existing investment in the property that nobody else could compete with.
As you say, over and above the ZAR 500 million we spend on Beverly Hills, we will spend money on The Edward and on South Beach. They don't form part of the lease obligations because they own properties. The decision for us was, if we stayed in Elangeni, we are committed to the Durban beachfront. If we were out, I suspect we would have pulled out of the entire beachfront. I would have sold everything and walked. I think that would have been the death of the beachfront. The decision for us was very much, we're in this. We're going to make this whole thing work. We're out completely. That's why we will now spend money on the other properties too. There's no time frame on that.
I've already got designs for Edward and so on that are just spectacularly beautiful. We have to allocate and prioritize our CapEx as we go along. In the short- term, Elangeni & Maharani is the big machine. That's what we're going to spend the money on. The trading down there has been spectacular. In December, on the beachfront hotels, just the beachfront hotels, we were 84% occupancy. That is just transient leisure business, Durban beachfront. I know people in Cape Town battle to understand where Durban is and Joburg can be the same. It is volume. It works. It's money that we're pretty happy to spend. I was there last week for Indaba.
I mean, when you have that Winstall day and you've got a function out on that Elangeni pool deck, it's got to be one of the greatest locations we have. All of that money will flow in good time. That, in uMhlanga, our key focus. There will be stuff up north. It's not at the high on the priority list at the moment.
Marcel, just to add, sorry to jump in ahead of anyone else for questions. With the oceans having the group's first apart hotel component, where else are you looking for introducing that in the rest of your portfolio? Because that's quite a big thing in Cape Town with quite strong competition from the apart hotel players and the number of apartment hotel developments happening in the Western Cape.
Nowhere else. If an opportunity comes along, we didn't plan this thing. Vivian came to see us. He had a design that another unnamed hotel group had put forward, which was really, really crap. We said, "No, no. We can fix this thing." We came up with a whole new, better design. Now we're in oceans. I don't have a plan to roll out additional stock. I think that's actually a very important point. Our strategy is not to go from 95 to 200 hotels. We're not interested in planting flags. We're not interested in building new stock just for the sake of it, very much inward-focused on getting more out of what we've got because you simply cannot replace what we've got. Then the expansion opportunities are the ones I've highlighted.
They are very particular and very focused on areas where we own land. We do not have this thing saying, "We're going to have 30 new hotels in Cape Town." We have an incredibly strong balance sheet. We have a long track record of acquisitions and so on. If somebody wobbles, we're the ones who are going to sort out that market if we get a chance. That would be my hope. We've done very well on acquisitions over the last 15 years in the hotel space. I think the Hospitality Fund was the biggest hotel deal ever done. It is in South Africa. It has been very good for us, not in every way that we thought it was because nobody's got perfect foresight. That's how you really make money. You wait for a distressed moment. You buy.
We don't have a strategy of going and building apartment hotels.
Conversions, considering the size of the Southern Sun Waterfront or the Garden Court waterfront?
No. We're happy with what we've got. We trade very high volumes and good rates at what we've got. The apartment hotel thing is a lot of nonsense in many cases. That's a terrible thing for me to say. It was driven in Cape Town by Section 12J. Section 12J was SARS's put out a whole scheme to develop, ultimately, investments that you could tax deduct by investing into small businesses that you were going to grow. People started using their holiday flats in Cape Town and claiming it for tax. I saw it shut down 12J. Without that, I think there's going to really have been quite a distinct slowdown in it. At the moment, Cape Town market is booming. Everyone, therefore, thinks they can be a hotelier. You are going to see new supply come in.
A lot of it won't matter. It'll be in the wrong locations and badly operated, very much stick to our knitting, inward-focused, improve what we've got, and don't get too distracted by the latest fads is our approach anyway.
Saran, would you like to go ahead?
Yes. Thanks. Marcel, maybe on that topic of Cape Town, you've seen the Marriott coming in with the waterfront hotel opening later this year and then the InterContinental reopening. I mean, the supply backdrop, do you have any concerns there? I know you kind of did answer that question. Maybe you can just delve a bit deeper into what you see in Cape Town.
Cape Town is running at high occupancies and ultimately does need more stock. I think it's reached the point where the stuff is going to come. The question is it going to do the usual hoteliers trick and going to oversupply? It takes a couple of years to then wind out the system. I think it probably is what's going to happen. It'll take at least three years for much of that stock, if any meaningful stock, to come into the market. The waterfront stuff is there. Ultimately, if they do all that land reclamation and so on, you could see six or seven new hotels go onto the thing. Over a long term, the market has to grow. That doesn't worry me. In the short- term, be aware that you can end up with oversupply. That puts pressure on pricing.
At the moment, the pricing in the V&A is exceptional. I mean, they've been really, really strong in rate growth. That's helping the whole market. I have no doubt that if they hit the wobble, they're going to drop pricing. Then you're going to have a bit of a price war in the thing. I don't see it as a collapse. Cape Town is, in many ways, Cape Town's become a stronger brand than South Africa. If you walk around and say, "I come from South Africa," people look at you and say, "I come from Cape Town." They have done an incredible job on promoting it as a global destination. They continue to do that. We have to navigate our way through whatever happens with stock. If you're scared of competition, hotel business is not for you because there's zero barriers to entry.
Anybody can build a hotel. Often, fools do. We just have to deal with that. I think in the next three years, you will see some more stock come in in many ways. Some of that can end up being acquisition opportunities for us. It was interesting. I'm quoting old stats now. In 2000, I think there was I'm trying to think when the first STR stats came out. Basically, the market in South Africa per STR was like 30,000 rooms. Southern Sun had a third of that. You roll forward 15, 20 years, the market's gone to like 62,000 rooms. We still had like a third of that. I'm including when the gaming portfolio was part of it.
Over very long- term, we've maintained our high volume of ownership and management in the industry despite the growth with all the volatility in between. If you take hotels like the Southern Sun Sandton, was the Holiday Inn built for World Cup. The Radisson Gautrain was built for World Cup. The redevelopment of what is now the Southern Sun Rosebank was the Crowne Plaza, the Westin, the Arabella, Victoria Junction. These are all hotels that were built around us. They're all part of us now. New supply is coming. We'll just navigate it.
Thanks. Maybe just one follow-up on your CapEx outlook. I just wanted to get a clearer picture. I mean, you spent ZAR 600 million this year. For 2027 and 2028, what is the kind of rough guide? Also, if you could just add, if those three bigger opportunities come through, the JV in Cape Town, the KZN, the Sun Hotels and Residences, and then the Beverly Hills, if you can kind of maybe separate that, so just give us a sense of what the group will be spending cumulatively over the next two to three years.
Maintenance CapEx line, the equivalent of the ZAR 600 million you see there is probably going to stay at a similar sort of level for another two years. Then it drops off. Depends what I activate and don't activate. I can accelerate that by bringing projects forward. I can slow it down by delaying them. You are looking at that sort of level over the next 2 years, at least with the elevated IT spend. Then it comes off as the IT stuff slows down. Long- term, if you're building a model, you don't go below ZAR 500 million. You need to put some inflation escalation in that. If we then look at specific and that includes all these renovations and so on, over and above that, Cape Town is a ZAR 1 .5 billion project.
If we JV with Growthpoint, it's ZAR 750 million for us. It would take at least a year to start and three years to build with phased cash flow out. Beverly Hills is ZAR 1 billion. All ours would take at least a year to start and two years to roll out. I don't have a clear view on what year those cash flows fall into. We haven't made that decision yet. Oceans, I can't give you a number because I don't want to disclose it yet. There are a couple of other things floating around. We buy in the land that the Cape Sun sits on from the city of Cape Town. We're spending ZAR 180 million there. We're looking at a new hotel in Stellenbosch with Remgro, adding onto that small little all-suite hotel we have there. That'll be the old Distell building.
We haven't pushed the button on that. We could well co-invest some ZAR 250 million in that. That all sits in our expansion CapEx line. What we do say is that, assuming we don't go into a COVID world or outright war and all that, we should be generating off the maintenance CapEx, comfortably generating ZAR 5 billion + over the next few years. If we did all our expansions and all our acquisitions and Elangeni and the other stuff in Durban and paid our third dividend, we'd still end up with net cash. We can fund all of this out of our existing cash flows. The decision really is it better to give a check back to shareholders or spend it on these items?
We should be generating around about ZAR 1 billion a year in free cash off the maintenance, growing going forward, assuming there's no price. It fits into all of this.
Thanks. That's very clear. Thanks a lot.
Eric, would you like to go ahead, please?
Yeah. Thanks, [audio distortion]. If you could dig a little bit deeper into the Gauteng market. I mean, clearly, G20 has helped a lot in that region this year. Maybe just a little bit more on what you're seeing there, the kind of outlook, supply-demand. I mean, clearly, if you need to get back to that 68%, you need Gauteng to be firing. Yeah, just some detail there would be useful.
Yeah. I mean, G20 was a meaningful number in the year. With all these things, I think the phrase I used before was, with us, nothing is material. There isn't anything material that can really move the needle on this group. That makes everything material. G20, in our own revenue that we put into these numbers, probably ZAR 60 million. On a ZAR 7.5 billion group, it's a number that moves in the world. It's not the I think the New Zealand tour is going to get us just about the same amount of cash, to be honest. I don't want to underestimate or understate, but also not overstate what these events are. There's always another event. The Gauteng market was quite pleasing, particularly the Southern Sun Sandton and the Southern Sun Rosebank.
Those two hotels were battling coming out of COVID. I've put a lot of money into both of them. I mean, Sandton's completely refurbished. Rosebank had that complete lobby done. We closed it in COVID. We redone, I think, the North Tower - forget if it's North or South Tower - built a new restaurant in there and so on. They both did really, really nicely. They're sort of trading at the mid-60s occupancies. We're starting to get some rate growth. It means a property like that goes from making ZAR 20 million EBITDA to suddenly making ZAR 40 million, heading to ZAR 50 million EBITDA. That means it's doing what it's supposed to do. Those were good for us. The Sandton Strip, the disappointment of not buying it is there. The refurb on the towers is gorgeous.
The Sandton Strip is doing really, really well. The Garden Court has totally shaken off any impact from that sky thing next door. The five-storey is running like a dream. The convention center had its absolute record year. It didn't host the G20. It did host the B20. It's really doing nicely. Sandton is improving. Rosebank's still a tough node. It's definitely improving. The airport node, I think, can do better, particularly our little Garden Court. The Southern Sun does well. It's pure transient, just stuff out of the airport. The Garden Court need a bit of focus on. I need to spend some money on it too. We actually want to expand it a bit. Birchwood had a good year, not phenomenal growth. It maintained its very high levels of trading.
I think it's going to have a step up when we put the new facilities in over the next year or two. It did well. Pretoria was where we battled a little bit. I've got some own issues there. Pretoria needs some focus at the Southern Sun. The Garden Court did well. The Vaal, it's a small hotel. Riverside Sun, it was decline on last year. It had to shoot the lights out year last year. Over a sort of three-year period, it's still looking pretty good. Joburg has picked up nicely. There is still upside here, and particularly in rate. I mean, The Cullinan 4-star in Cape Town achieves a higher net rate on an annual basis than the Sandton Sun and towers achieve in Sandton. That just tells you Sandton's wrong. Sandton prices need to go up.
You can't just do it on your own. You need to get the market to follow.
Oh, it tells you not a lot of tourists go there in summer.
Yeah. It's business travel here. You should be less price sensitive. The market in Cape Town, it's an astounding thing to watch how that pricing has just adapted. It is a rising tide thing. It's not a Southern Sun genius thing. Our good tick we get is, we didn't miss the tide. We weren't shackled in a sleep to it. Everything in Cape Town just goes up. Our little SUN1s can achieve a rate of over ZAR 1,000 on certain peak periods. I've never seen a SUN1 ever go anywhere near ZAR 1,000 anywhere else in the country. That's not tourists. That's local travel. Somehow, once the market gets that pricing right, it just goes. We need to drive that elsewhere. In some cases, we can't. I mean, government has rate caps and so on.
Like Bloemfontein, I've used an example before. It runs at very high occupancy. Half its business is government. If I increase the price there by ZAR 100, I don't go from 90% to 85%. I go to 0 because I just lose I'm out the caps on the thing.
Whilst I was a bit sorry, in Gauteng, are you seeing a resumption of corporate travel like you haven't seen before? Is it kind of getting back to where it was?
Not just back to where it was. We definitely saw and obviously, the G20 was active in town. The mayor started fixing traffic lights and all that sort of stuff. Outside of that, we've seen pretty good business travel in Sandton. Our volumes are up. I'm not entirely sure how much of it is us taking market share from others. Because we don't subscribe to the STR stats anymore. I do think there's an uptick in Joburg. It felt better when the sentiment was better, that Q3, so that up to December, was really great for Joburg. It carried on into Q4. December, it didn't die off like it normally does. We had conferences and events and all sorts of stuff well into December, which is unusual, what we haven't seen for a while.
It doesn't take I think South Africans are a little bit battered and bruised because we've had so many bad years. You just can't believe what a little bit of positive sentiment and positive news flow and economic activity and reduced interest rates and coming off the grey list does for demand. Just as it seems to work, some other trauma comes along, like Middle East wars and things. We are seeing improvement here. It's still got a long way to go. It's looking pretty good.
Okay. Great. Maybe just one quick follow-up. Just on the Durban beachfront, you're obviously now investing a substantial amount of money there. What has structurally changed in your mind that this region or that area of the city is suddenly now likely to be a much nicer place to go and visit?
Good governance for the first the city manager is really competent. You are still on an office there. I'd say if MK takes over after the local government elections, we're probably going to go into a spiral. Who knows? What happened is, basically, they let Moosa get on with it. They dealt with their infrastructure problems. Generally, and I say this carefully, we don't have a crime problem there. I don't know when last there was a mugging in Durban. I go running on that beachfront when I go down there. It is beautiful. It's spotless. It's been cleaned all the time. Yeah. If you go one row back, the city's got a lot of degeneration in it. There's a long way to go. It's never going to become a corporate hub because that's moved to uMhlanga. The beachfront itself is well maintained.
The lighting works. It's clean. It's popular. The conferencing works down there. They are focusing on getting events back into the ICC there that they haven't focused on for a while. The beaches were only closed for 10 days last year. You're always going to have them closed for some days because when you get the big storms, the rivers come down. There's nothing you can do about it. All that sewage problem and so on, which the media goes I mean, Durban sneezes. Everyone reports that it's dead. There's more shit in the Cape Town water than there is in the Durban water. That has been addressed. If that continues, I think there's a lot of upside there.
Okay. Great. Thanks very much.
David, would you like to proceed, please?
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Marcel and the team, for a great set of results. Your controlling shareholder has said that for sort of fair value, they would certainly entertain a sort of bid for the company. I mean, does that mean there's kind of an active process in play? Is it kind of business as usual from your perspective? If somebody knocks on your door, you kind of refer them to them? I mean, is it just as no real difference to your life. You continue to manage the business as you would otherwise. If anyone knocks on your door, you just refer them to them. Is that how it is at the moment?
Johnny is in Cape Town, in Sea Point. I'll send you his number. You can ask him. I'm not getting into shareholder matters. Deal with HCR on that. They have their views. They must do what they must do. We're carrying on. I don't know what they're doing.
Okay. Salome, please ask your question.
Hi. Good day. I wanted to follow up on your employee costs. You indicated earlier that the reason why it was controlled, it was because you didn't pay performance bonuses or bonuses in general. Maybe can we use that opportunity?
No. That's not true at all. We're paid lower bonuses than the prior year. We paid about ZAR 109 million in bonuses. The prior year was ZAR 126 million. Your provision is lower because we didn't exceed budget by as much as we had in the prior year. We certainly paid bonuses.
Oh, they just.
There's a lower provision. Correct.
Okay. When you say lower provision, is that like a non-cash element part of the income?
Lower provision. The charge in the income statement is lower than the prior year. That all sits in the employee cost line. Because you go up by your wage inflation. If you had ZAR 130 million last year, and you've got ZAR 100 million this year, you've got negative percentage growth on your bonus. Your overall number, if you gave a 6% increase, now comes in at 4% overall on the cost.
Yes. Yes. No, I understand that. I misheard you earlier. Thank you for clarifying. On the share buybacks, there was some that you bought back for your share incentive scheme. I just want to clarify that the post-period or towards the later end, are those ones just for capital allocation purposes?
Your.
Are they all for the share incentive scheme?
No. We don't buy for the share scheme. When we issue shares, we issue new shares. If I didn't do any buybacks, your shares count would have gone up by 10 million because I would have issued 10 million new shares. Separate to that are buyback shares. That brings the overall thing down. We don't buy for the scheme. It's just the movement in your shares is opening balance plus what you issue minus what you buy back, which we cancel, equals closing balance.
Okay. No. Got it. It's not necessarily your intention that you would want to offset that shares that you issued as part of your incentive scheme. It just happened to be that as part of your capital allocation that detracted from the other.
You could have a year where we don't do buybacks, but we still issue in part of the scheme. You could have a year where we do buybacks, and we don't issue in the scheme because nobody's cashed out. They're not directly correlated.
Okay. No. Thank you for that clarity.
Yep.
Leander, please go ahead.
Thanks, Marcel and Laurelle, for a great set of results. Just quick 1 on my side. From an occupancy point of view, what percentage of occupancies would you say is linked to the corporate contracts that you're aggressively getting? How much of it is linked to government? I'm just trying to get a sense of the pricing going forward and also the sensitivity to occupancy from foreign travel versus domestic travel.
Yeah. It's quite hard to answer that. If I take our South African portfolio that we operate so exclude the ones that operate by Marriott and Radisson, exclude offshore, just our South African in-the-system portfolio, we have about 27% of our business is contracted. About 30% is groups. The balance, which is about 40%, 43%, is uncontracted, transient, just moves through. Contracted means you've got a deal. There's a rate code associated with your booking. Standard Bank, Nedbank, Transnet, any sort of government, corporate, SOEs, even small businesses and so on, you have a price. When you book, you're doing it through your travel management company. There's a rate loaded for you in the system. It's not a public rate.
Often, it's like guys will come to us, and they'll say, "Look, if I guarantee you all the winter business in Cape Town, can you give me a better rate in summer?" We say, "Cool. You stay with us. You don't pay the spike pricing in summer. You better stay with us in winter where you could have gone and found something cheaper because everybody's empty type of thing." There's a rate code associated with that. That is about a third of our business or 30%, groups or anything over 10 rooms. That could be you and 10 of your mates going to play golf at Arabella. It could be a wedding. It's like what we normally think about groups, a conference that has rooms associated with it, sports team, anything like that. It's over 10 rooms. That's groups.
That's about a third of our business. Both of those categories, you're dealing directly with a customer. There's a rate code. Someone's approached the Elangeni. They want a group of 400. There's a deal. There's a price. There's a room allocation. There's a conference, etc. The balance of the uncontracted, you're coming through the public markets. You're either going through OTAs. You're coming to our website direct. You're going through a travel agent, etc. In that contracted space, it will never be exclusive with us. Transnet will have contracts with us. They'll have contracts with all our hotel groups. There's an agreed price. When the employee goes onto the travel management system, they've got a pick of three hotels, Southern Sun, Protea, and City Lodge, or whatever the choice is.
That business is usually location and service and so on gets them to come to you. Of that contracted business, our loyalty program touches 70% of that business. It's a big driver. At the point you go onto the travel IT system, and you say, "Where am I going to stay?" you choose Southern Sun because you want SunRands. 70% of that contracted business has SunRands associated with it. That's a very powerful tool we've got. I'd say it's the thing that is that just we are way better than the other groups in the country, including the internationals, because they don't have the you can have 5,000 Marriott hotels in it. You don't have the distribution we've got in this market. That's very powerful for us.
The part of the contracted stuff that's not got SunRands associated with it are generally because there's no point. For example, an airline crew, the air staff are not going to sign up to SunRands because they're here today, and they're in Taiwan tomorrow, and they're in South America the next day. There's a contracted price. They're arriving at it because we've done a deal with Qatar, Emirates, or British Airways, or whatever it is. The government part of the business for us is in total, probably 20% of our business, if you include SOEs, in the South African market. Yeah. I'd say it's probably about 20%. Also, the loyalty factor on government is very big. They like the SunRands program. The government employee gets just like the corporate employee, you get the SunRands yourself. You don't get many other perks in government.
You get your SunRands. That makes it a very valuable tool for us. Did I answer your question there?
Yes, you did. Thank you very much for that color. Maybe just in terms of occupancy, would you say that less than 30% is driven by tourism, and 70% is domestic? I'm just trying to get a sense of the sensitivity to the domestic market.
Yeah. That's the other part of your question, Johanna. That's the hard one to do. If you say before we worry about the international locals, they were like, "What's leisure and what's business?" 20 years ago, I said, "Well, let's have a look at weekends versus the week because during the week, people are working. On weekends, they're there." That's just simply not the case. I could have and I always use the example of a sports team. There's a big test coming up. I've got the Springboks in Hyde Park. I've got New Zealand in Sandton Sun. I've got media. I've got everything. I'm full up on the weekend. Those people are working. It's contracted business because we have a SARU contract. That is their job. Everyone from Mark Alexander right down to the physio, everybody is at work for that weekend test.
It's not leisure. You and your mates going to watch the rugby, that's leisure. It's quite hard for us to say. We think it's roughly 70/30 between people at work versus people at leisure. We don't really know. It's very obvious in Seychelles. 99.9% are there for holiday. Nobody's going there for work other than if you probably work for Southern Sun that you've gone there for a reason. It gets much harder in urban hotels and even your coastal properties. I mean, the best way this was described to me once by one of our GMs, "Hotel is like a dam. You've got to put every pipe into it and fill it. We service every market. We don't really care whether you're there for work or leisure. We are interested in how you come to us. Did you book through an OTA?
Did you book direct? Are you a contract? Cruise line of business is big for us in Cape Town where they come off the ship. There's a swap around on ships, etc. Usually, they have 400 people checking into the Cullinan, 400 checking out. That is leisure. It's not leisure for us advertising into the leisure world. We do a deal with the cruise liner to host their guests with us. It's a contracted amount. Yeah, I think 30% is probably leisure and 70% business. I've got no science behind that because we don't track your reason for stay. We track how you got to us. More importantly. In Cape Town, I'd say the majority we used to have a stat of 60%. I must actually try to find a way to reprove it.
The majority of people sleeping in our hotels probably have a foreign passport. Only 10% of those are booking through foreign channels. If you take the Mining Indaba, it is full of foreigners. They're not trying to find their way into South Africa. Anglos have booked them all in. They are foreigners. They're here for conferences and work. The booking comes through the local channels. Very different to, I guess, the game lodges where they have strong sales representation into the European markets and so on where they're bringing foreigners in to stay. Different to some of the V&A boutique properties that are trying to target like Cape Grace. I mean, it'll be 80% foreigners. It'll be out of Europe and GCC countries and that sort of thing.
That's why they get ZAR 30,000 a night and location is special and all that sort of stuff. The fact that it's foreign or local, it's more important where's the booking coming from. Most of it is local bookings. It doesn't matter that it's a foreigner that's staying in the hotel.
No. Perfect. Thanks, Marcel. Thanks for that. Then maybe last question, if I may. Top of mind for you, what do you think is potentially the biggest downside risk that we should be thinking about over the next 12 months in your view?
Downside risk. Yeah. First, I should say I'm very much more comfortable than what I was six years ago because I don't have ZAR 3.3 billion debt. My ability, whatever that risk may be, to withstand it is substantially improved. In fact, a little bit of market wobble would hurt us in trading. I think that fleshes out opportunity for us. That's when some of these highly geared, new-built stuff out there suddenly comes to market. I don't generally feel threatened in the medium- term, which means the thing that I should be worrying about, I don't know about at all. It's some event that we haven't even considered. What do I worry about? I worry about cost pressure to an extent.
It's just relentless on the administered costs from government, the IT costs, the ability to negotiate that with the foreign big software providers is zero. I worry about that. I worry about staff costs because one of the factors of new supplier coming into Cape Town is we are the industry supplier of expertise. Where are they going to come and purchase? They're going to come purchase from us. I'm going to experience some wage pressure in markets where they're going to look for people. The first thing they're going to do is come to us. I've got to look after my people. I've got to make sure that they don't get poached by the flags that are running up, putting up flags where we don't need hotels. It's just whatever crisis could come that I don't know about.
I'm not sure what happens if you have a severe inflation shock or an actual run out of fuel. Those are so out of our control. I don't really think about it. I would probably be more losing sleep about it if I was sitting on ZAR 3 billion debt. I'm not. If those things happen, we make less money. We don't face existential threat that we can see.
Okay. No. Thanks, Marcel. Appreciate it.
Sure.
Warren, please go ahead.
Thanks, Marcel. Just a quick one. The delta on the offshore portfolio, I mean, I think you kind of phrased it that the Seychelles asset was marginal this year, its contribution. I think you made EBITDA of ZAR 46 million. FY2024, offshore made close to ZAR 100 million. I mean, how do you think about what you would like to see that print in FY2027?
Yeah. It should be north of ZAR 100 million. If Seychelles was trading normally, I'd say it's worth ZAR 50 million-ZAR 60 million in its own right. Maputo should be a ZAR 50 million business. ZAR 15 million out of Lusaka. Let's say you get to break even in Tanzania, that would be nice. You're sitting on ZAR 125 million. Maputo's not at ZAR 50 million. It's kind of sitting at ZAR 30 million, I think. Seychelles would have gotten there, I think, other than this Middle East stuff. I don't know how that's going. I've got nights where I'm running at 75% at the moment. We can't, with consistency, say that Seychelles is just fine. This Middle East thing is hurting it. It is going last year, when we were closed, we lost ZAR 45 million EBITDA in Seychelles. We're not going to have that again.
If nothing else happens, I think it does ZAR 100 this year. It's a volatile market. It can change quickly.
Just last one, kind of your buyback. I mean, how do you think about the kind of trigger to stop the buyback? What type of valuation level do you get? Do you pull back? Obviously, where it is today, it still looks quite attractive.
I don't know if I can answer that. I don't think I want to answer that, no. I don't want to give you the price. The way we think about it anyways, I look at my free cash flow in my cash flow number, add back tax to get a pre-tax number, and look at CapEx and say, "What is normal?" Take that as a yield on the enterprise value, which is equal to the equity value because we don't have any debt. What is that yield relative to what I can get on paying off debt before, which I don't have now, versus sitting on cash or buying other hotels? If it's marginal, what is better? Give it to the shareholders in dividend or just keep buying back shares?
From a company point of view, buying back is always better than dividend because I get a long-term benefit from a reduced share count if I just ignore shareholders completely. You could almost overpay for shares because you're reducing the share count. You always do better. Obviously, you don't want to do that because there's a point where if it was overvalued, rather give the money to the shareholders and put it in something else. I don't think we're anywhere near that point.
Thanks. I think just a comment. There's not many CEOs on the JSE who understand capital allocation and could explain it how you did now. That's appreciated. Thank you.
Hours on Twitter watching Warren Buffett.
Thank you.
Okay. We don't have any more questions except that we do have a few that have been posed in the chat. I'll read through them, Marcel. The first one is from Tshepo. He says that with the recent cleanup in Durban and the local government seeking investment in infrastructure, is there interest in a partnership with the municipality to turn around uShaka Marine World? He goes on to say, "I would also assume it would drive up demand for KZN consumers as they hope to turn around Durban and push more investment in other areas of KZN.
The short answer is yes. We would work with them on uShaka, on the ICC. We do work with them a lot in terms of business government liaison bodies, their presidential working group we had input on. Samantha who runs that region is very involved in dealing with the municipality and with people there. Their ability to do deals and say, "Look, can we take over operating this or that?" is not that easy because they operate under the PFMA. Anything they do would have to require, first, the political will. I'm not sure KZN is as pro-privatization as Cape Town is. Secondly, would require a public participation process. It needs a tender as Elangeni did. The truth is, there are not too many people putting up their hands. It's not as easy as going in and saying, "Right, guys.
We can help you here. What do you want to do? I can do a private sector-to-private sector deal with a Growthpoint or a Pareto or anybody very quickly. It's quite hard to do something with municipalities. You've got to navigate that regulations quite well. Are we committed to helping them in every way? Oh, we are.
Great. Thank you. We have a question from Willem. He says, "Why did the Sandton Consortium transaction fall through? One would have thought that matters like preemptives, etc., would have been addressed before the deal was announced to the market.
Yes, Willem. I am a dealmaking idiot. We got caught. I'll tell you what happened. First of all, we announced it too early. I pushed everybody to get the ComCom application in December because ComCom always takes the longest. For whatever reason, maybe they ran out of work or something, ComCom approved the thing in like two weeks flat and announced it publicly. I had to announce the deal before I had a signed agreement because ComCom went public with it. Normally, we would not announce a deal until everything's signed up. We did have agreement that they were waiving their preemptive. That's why the application went in. Pareto, for their own reasons, changed their mind. They are perfectly entitled to do that. They are a very big property player. They've got government employee pension fund money. They owned 25% of it.
It was going to be 50/50. They decided they want to only own this thing. I am still operating it. They are still my client. I am not ever going to go to war with them. They are our single biggest management client. Sometimes, people change their mind. It is their prerogative. It would normally never have been in the public like this. That is why it is a valid question, Willem. It shouldn't have been announced and then canceled. I was forced into announcement because ComCom put it sorry. It was over 5%. It was a category 2. If it was under 5%, I would have ignored it then still and not announced it. It was category 2. ComCom went public. We got pressure from JSE. We announced it. You live and learn anyway. Okay. Next question.
Okay. He has a follow-up question which says, "Why don't you subscribe to STR anymore? Don't you need the industry data for planning in your business?
First thing is STR, the most arrogant crowd you could ever imagine. One of these big software platforms out of the U.S. They charge a fortune. They demanded that we submit daily stats instead of monthly stats. First of all, I think daily is a big potential red flag for the Competition Commission. They don't like industry sharing stats. They're okay with it if it's historical and aggregated. These guys want every hotel every day. We're not prepared to do that. We think you're going to run into competition problems with that. Secondly, we are the market. Why should I pay them to give them our stats? I don't need the stats. I've got enough information around the place. I can go find out what I need to find out if I want to. They do not have a valid set of stats without us.
They should be paying us for the information, not the other way around. They clearly didn't see it that way. We canceled on them.
He says, "Understood. Thank you." From the chat box, that is all that we have there. So far, I don't see any further questions in the audience.
Okay.
I think that concludes it.
That's it. Perfect. Good. There are rather now that I fly to Cape Town. Okay. Thank you all. Thank you for attending. Thank you for the interactions. We'll talk to you in 6 months. Thanks.
Thank you, Marcel, and team. Bye.