Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the results presentation for our interim results. Welcome to all the analyst shareholders. There's a lot of Tiger people here, and you'll see, I'll talk about the new structure and the MDs. There's at least three of them here. There's one that's sick, and one is on study leave, so there should be four here if we count. Welcome. I think the results starting at 10:00 A.M., and Pick n Pay started at 8:30 A.M. this morning is messing up a few people's diary a little bit this morning. But be that as it may, so there's the agenda that we're gonna follow today. So I'll start off with just updating you on the transformation journey, which I think is very pertinent for where we are at Tiger and what we're busy doing.
Thushen will then have the nice job of taking you through the first half performance and the operational review of what happened in the business for the six months, and then I'll conclude again with the strategic update and the outlook for us going forward. So where are we in the business? I've started here in November, which is just it's about six months now or a little bit more. So 1st of November, I started. That's actually incorrect. I started the previous day. Thushen was appointed the 1st of January, but remember, he's been in the business, so he didn't come from outside. So he's been around before the 1st of January. The 1st of February, we announced the operating model and the appointment of the MDs, and we are on the way at the moment of getting things bedded down.
The MD structure are bedded down. Their teams are in place, and we're driving very hard as we're going forward to make sure that we get all the stuff into the categories or into the businesses that should be there, keep at the head office what we should keep at the head office, and driving that process. So that's what we're busy with right now, and we're actually making very good progress in doing that. So if you look at the strategic review, where the big issues are... Sorry, if we can just wait a second, our chairperson is just arriving. Good morning, Chair.
Good morning.
Welcome to Geraldine. So if you look at the strategic review of the organization, if you look at the results that Thushen will share with you later on, you can see the two big areas where we are lacking in performance is in bakeries and in the grains business, and I'll unpack that a little bit later. The second big area is in our grocery business, and if you look over the last number of years, those are the two areas where we need the biggest recovery in Tiger Brands, is to recover in the bakeries, Albany, particularly, and in the rest of the grains businesses and in our culinary business or our grocery business. The other business in groceries is where we really we've done well, and we really need to sustain that.
Our general trade recovery is, has got two legs to it. The one is in the bakeries, where we really need to get better in the general trade, and the second leg is the strategic, strategic process we started about two years ago, is to get the rest of our basket into the general trade. And that's also going well. I'll come back to that. Operational review. So as I've said, the work of getting the businesses really empowered, getting things in place, getting the categories or the MDs and their businesses to really be quick in decision-making and execution, that process is really going well, and it will take a while for people to settle down and really get good at that, but that process is on the way.
We've identified ZAR 500 million as a cost saving, and I know somewhere you'll ask: "But you said last year, ZAR 560 million?" That number was defined as cost avoidance and cost savings. This number is also only cost savings. We don't measure cost avoidance. And then we talk a lot about streamlining the organization, and that's a big focus at the moment, is really streamlining the organization in whatever we do. Some very good work we've done in the last six months is around capital allocation, and we do have a model now where we can really, on a targeted basis, target how we spend our money and how we invest our money.
So CapEx projects must obtain certain return levels or, yeah, certain return levels, and we've got a very clear model on how we drive that. We simplified the portfolio, and again, in that capital allocation model, if a business doesn't deliver the results that we need from that business over a period of time, we will look at exiting it. And then the optimal capital structure, which I'll come back later on, what do we do with our money? How do we invest it in capital? How do we invest it in acquisitions? How do we invest it in returning to shareholders, whether it is dividend, special dividend, share buybacks? But I'll come back to that a bit later. So there's the new operating model, and it's not difficult to see the handsome guy and the financial guy.
And there you can see the six MDs. They're all in place. Quinton is down sick this morning. Dumo, I haven't seen here. I think he's traveling somewhere. He loves the factories. He's there all the time, which is where he should be. Liezel, Ismail, Grant, and Polycarp looking after the international business, and these guys are all in place. We are busy relocating these teams back to the businesses. The bakeries are out. They're sitting in Germiston Bakery. There's extra office space there, and the other guys are all busy planning moves back to the operations. So the whole philosophy is we want focused businesses, and we want to spend time in the trenches. We want to operate these businesses and really understand our customers, our consumers, and understand our cost structures.
So in this restructuring also that we said last time, we've eliminated a whole level of management, which results in a lot of cost savings, but we also created a lot of focus as a result of that. So there, aligned, empowered, accountable, agile, and a winning culture. And I'll come back to the winning culture, 'cause that's probably the one thing that will make this whole journey that we on in Tiger will make it work, is how we're developing a winning culture that can execute. We've spoken about this before, how do we restore our cost leadership? And there's various things that we're doing. We're looking at process innovation, and the guys have been busy with this for a while. This is not something that I've started. We're looking at innovation and automation.
There's quite a few projects in place, and there will be a lot of projects identified as we go along. Hi, morning, Sam. Procurement optimization, we've taken about half our procurement, call it effort, that put it back into the business where the focus should be, and then we're there where you've got real corporate synergies. We kept those procurement activities at the center. SKU rationalization, I'll refer to it later, that's well on its way. Supply chain optimization, lots of work in logistics, lots of work in our factories, how we run them better. Value engineering is being more efficient, looking at unit cost, how do we drive unit cost down? And then manufacturing footprint, that's all about where should our factories be? Can we combine some factories?
Can we be more efficient with some of them and maybe reduce the importance of some others? And this whole drive, if you look at our capital allocation model as well, is we're gonna recover our performance in Tiger by fixing our margins, our gross margin and our operating margin. We must improve those margins. They are too low. And that will obviously enhance your returns, eventually going through to shareholders. So the two biggest turnaround areas that I referred to briefly a bit earlier is the bakeries and groceries. So in bakeries, there's quite a few things we're busy doing. That team is really running full steam, and there's two areas that's on the slide there. The first is all around how do we get to where we want to go with our bread?
So it's defined distribution footprint. At the moment, we've probably got too many depots, bakeries drive past each other's areas, they drive into each other's areas. So we've got a lot of work to do, and busy doing it, is to look at where do we drive and where do we go? Where do we open depots? Where don't we open depots? And then we need a proper technology, which we're busy implementing, to optimize those routes. Remember, we're probably going about 38-40,000 customers a day. It's probably every bakery probably runs about 120 routes a day, so it's extremely important and lots of opportunities to make that more efficient from a cost point of view and from a delivery point of view. And then we really have to incentivize our drivers. On those GT routes, it's a selling exercise.
It's not a delivery, it's not order replenishment, it's a selling exercise, and your driver is a salesman, so you need to incentivize him to do that in a good way. The second block there is all about our bakeries, how efficient our bakeries are. So we're really doing a lot of work about quality and consistency across all our bakeries. A big issue is maintenance. We're driving a lot of work into getting a blueprint for maintenance and doing the maintenance in an optimal way. And if we just look at our breakdowns that we've had in the Q1 versus the Q2 , there's already a huge improvement in that. And then we need to look at our footprint. How many bakeries do we need? Do we need bigger bakeries? Do we need a Mega Bakery? We do. We'll talk about it later.
But we need to look at our bakery footprint around the country, and where do we invest and how do we invest in that? If you look at our groceries business, that's probably where the biggest opportunity lies around value engineering and around SKU rationalization. And if you look at the culinary business, where we've got lots of seasonal products, which creates lots of working capital problems, that's where we've got lots of opportunities, and the guys are really working hard on that. And then our distribution system, where we go with the cans, you've got a year stock sometimes if you pack seasonal products, and how do you do that in the most efficient way? We also have in that business probably a big opportunity to change our pack sizes.
So if you go into the general trade or into the wholesale trade, our pack sizes are probably too big. That's how many cans you've got in a wrap. We've got 12, maybe you need six, so that's the challenge there. Brand renovation, we really need to look at how do we renovate our brands, these lovely brands that we have, and how do we look at the content of the brand, what it stands for, and how we- how do we put marketing money behind that brand? And there's an opportunity for second-tier products under our major brands, and we, we're doing and we've spoken about that.
When we, when we opened the Black Cat factory, we said there's a variant coming that's more affordable, that's got less peanuts in it, but it's still a very good product, but it's more affordable, and the consumer can make the choice which one they want to buy, and there's lots of those opportunities coming. And we've done lots of work already in this business around process and labor optimization, and that also goes with waste management. But what underscores all of this is our people. So we need... it's very urgent in our bakeries, but it's very relevant throughout our business, and I think it's very relevant throughout South Africa, is engineering skills, and particularly at the lower levels when you get to maintenance, our, our level of artisans that we have in the organization.
We're putting a lot of work in that, and we're very aware that we'll have to train them ourselves. We're not gonna get them anywhere in the country, we'll have to train them, and we're busy doing that. We need stable labor relations. We need to get along with our unions. We need to work together with our unions, and I think by and large, we're doing that. And then we're developing core competencies around all levels in the organization. But I'll come back to it later. Our people is what is gonna make the difference in this organization. So a bit on the bakeries turnaround plan. So there's lots of issues. We tried to put it down into five bullet points, but there's lots of issues in bakeries. We really lost our maintenance discipline.
We've had hopelessly too many breakdowns, and that results in your trucks leaving late, and that result in you delivering your bread late. Bread is delivered every day and consumed and bought every day, so if you're late, you lose the sale for that day. We can't really track where we're going. We need to do that better. Our drivers are not really incentivized. They're not motivated. Our cost is too high, and it's obviously, if you've got breakdowns, you don't deliver on time, you've got lots of returns, lots of damages, your costs just go through the roof. And then we have lost our focus, and I've spoken about this last time as well. We have lost our focus to operate in the general trade, and we have to restore that. So lots of initiatives.
Focus, a focused executive team that's on track, and that bakery team is really on track. They, they're in the field the whole time. They're on top of the issues. I mean, some issues will take some time to sort out, but we, we're already seeing, we're already seeing a lot of good stuff happening in the bakeries. So the restoration plans, we, we go to every bakery. Obviously, start with the more important ones, and they design a restoration plan around maintenance. And this will cost money, but that's not what it is. It's about focused effort on how we do maintenance in the business, not to have breakdowns. We also have to restore the discipline in the, in the bakery business around discounts.
'Cause obviously, when your drivers go into the field, they're not replenishing an order from Pick n Pay only, they're selling, and they have got limits to which they can give discounts, and that, that probably was out of control. The discount levels are just too high. And equipment and infrastructure review. Within the bakeries, I don't think we've got... Our technologies are not too bad. I think we've got all the right technologies, not maintained to the level where it should be. The big issue is around the infrastructure, around the bakeries and where we should have bakeries and how big they should be. I've spoken earlier about the route optimization. We really have too many depots around the country, especially in KZN and in the northern parts of Limpopo.
We've just got too many depots, and we need to look at how we do that efficiently. The SKU rationalization is, it's not a big issue in this business, although they've already cut about, I think, about 20%-30% of the SKUs. Certainly, your biggest challenge in a bakery is if you have to change pans and different sizes of bread. That really messes up a bakery big time. So and they've already done that, so, that's in place. So we, our biggest bakery that was a problem with late deliveries was Germiston, and I think Germiston hasn't been late for the last six weeks, if I've got the number right. So really making great progress in that.
Damages way down, and that, that's an indication of that your maintenance regimes and your discipline in the bakery is starting to pay off. Obviously, it saves a lot of money, obviously, 'cause you've got 50% less of these things which you just throw it away. But that's your biggest indicator, is damages, whether your, your maintenance regimes are working. The costs are coming right down. They, they're busy with the depot rationalization, and that, and that small loaf has, has been phased out. So going forward, in the bakeries, you know, it's a game of measuring cents, and that's what you do in bakeries. If you look at-- if you, we disclose it, but if you bake 500 million loaves of bread a year, which is what we should be doing, a cent is ZAR 5 million a year.
So a cent in your cost, a cent in your discounts, a cent in your selling price is ZAR 5 million. So it is a business that you manage in cents. That's how sensitive it is to costs and how sensitive it is to volumes and to selling price. We need to manage the bakeries with clear targets for product availability, and they do that. They've got times in the mornings from when trucks must leave, and that's measured, and that is disclosed or reported as a miss if trucks leave late. The general trade kickstart obviously starts with incentivizing the drivers properly, incentivizing getting discipline into our pricing structures, and then improve your routing.
And then the long hard slog starts, 'cause that, that driver leaves the bakery, and he stop at 50, 60 points where he must do a selling job. And our competitors are there. They're not... They, they also know this. So it's not gonna-- it's not a one-day game, this, but it's something to start, and they have started, and we must get the technology in place, which we're busy rolling out, and then that will get better and better. We haven't taken a price increase in the bakeries, I think, since last year, February or March, somewhere like that. And there are obviously inflationary pushes in the business, so getting that discipline back into the business to have price increases at the right time, have the right level of discounts, have the right price points in the market, that, that's being restored in the business.
The territory reconfiguration and reallocation is... You know, we at one point, we would have 1 day 2 trucks going from Gauteng to KZN to take bread there 'cause there's been a breakdown, and 2 days later, 2 trucks coming from that side this way because there's been breakdowns here. And that is really looking at where do you drive with bread and when, when do you say, "Okay, we'll just short deliver," rather than taking bread there at a very, very unprofitable, in a very unprofitable way? So that, that whole exercise with that and the routing, and the fleet optimization, that's, that's a big job, and those are big numbers. And as we get better and better at that, we'll see the performance of the bakeries returning.
Again, the employee part of the bakeries, you know, you've got, you've got a bakery with a bakery manager and a team running that bakery. They must really be on top of it. You can't run that from a head office. And then you've got those guys in the field with the trucks delivering and selling bread. They must be empowered, they must be rewarded properly, they must be focused, they must be disciplined, and that's a process that starts right at the top of that organization and be driven through that, and I'm very comfortable with where the guys are. They're doing good work. So that's my initial talk. Over to Thushen, the financial guy. Remember that.
Morning, everyone. Tjaart called me the financial guy. I'm sure most of you remember me from marketing. So here's my best shot at it. Tjaart covered the restructuring initiatives, as well as the leadership changes and some of the strategic focus areas, as well as the deep dive into groceries and bakeries. It's important to appreciate that while all these balls were in the air, these results are within that context and background, as well as what was a very tough market and continues to be a tough market. The volume regression that you see there boils down to about two or three things, which I will cover later on. Some operational challenges, I'll cover that in the coming slides.
The other issues were supply chain challenges due to extreme weather patterns, and we'll talk a bit more about that a little later. The third one is, as I mentioned, the tough operating environment, where we continue to have a constrained consumer. Having said that, the revenue that you see was a reflection of probably two divisions, where the consumer, home, personal care, and international were really delivering stellar sets of results in the first half, and you'll see that coming through in the coming slides. Then the grains' underperformance due to the various challenges that Tjaart called out and how we're addressing that, as well as some supply chain challenges around the El Niño weather pattern, et cetera. The income from associates, it was an excellent first half.
The Zimbabwean operations, National Foods, due to their strong balance sheet, managed to hold long positions and operate throughout the drought and keep the mills running, whilst most of the regional players weren't able to hold on to stock for that longer position and as, and essentially were out of the market. The Carozzi business had an excellent set of results as well. Strong performance out of pet food, deciduous fruit, their pulp operations, which you'll see reflected in our L&AF business as well, given that global fruit pricing held, as well as their biscuit operations in Peru, where they're seeing a nice turnaround. So another stellar set of results from our associates. EPS benefited from our portfolio honing exercise.
We disposed of our non-core brand Status, and you'll see more of that to come when Tjaart talks to the capital allocation model and the work we're gonna do around the portfolio. When I get to the operational slides, I'll talk to groceries, the home personal care, and the other divisions where we had an excellent first half, and I'll also cover some of the challenges in grains. The two things I really wanna touch on here is working capital management as well as portfolio optimization. Given the complexity of Tiger, various channels, various customers, and various products and categories, debtors management as well as stock management is quite complex. Therefore, we fast-tracking our technology platforms to assist us in this regard.
Historically, we would had to manually reconcile documents that our logistic service providers would supply us with, delivery notes that our customers would supply us with, and ultimately, it took some time to address some of the queries that our customers raised under our debtors. With the technology that we fast-tracking, that will be in place before the end of the fiscal, we'll be able to address queries sooner and manage our debtors' balance a lot tighter. The other tool that we installing or implementing is the integrated business planning tool. That will really assist us with demand management, stock management, as well as predicting supply chain challenges. If you consider the number of SKUs we have, there's well over 15,000 components that we have to have at any one of our facilities in order to produce a product.
So with this technology, it will allow us to bring a lot more focus to our inventory management. Portfolio optimization, you'll see continued focus around that. Tjaart will take you through our thinking around a capital allocation model and the returns we anticipate from our portfolios. But it's important to bear in mind, as we move forward and assess our various portfolios, we aren't gonna dispose of businesses at all costs. If we don't find a fair value, we will hang on to these businesses, turn it around, drive profit enhancement, and only sell at the appropriate time when we believe we'll receive fair value. As you can see, inflation started speeding up in the first half for various factors. I'll touch on some of those. We've had the El Niño impact on our maize pricing, as well as small white beans.
The intake for the groceries business was about 10%-15% less than anticipated on small white beans, which goes into the manufacture of our baked beans product, and it was actually a month late as well. We had to therefore process beans that we procured from Ethiopia.... And here again, we're very cognizant about the brand equity of Koo and decided not to put this bean in the Koo, under the Koo label, 'cause it didn't meet the required specifications, and we manufactured it under the Hugo's label just to keep the factories going as we experienced these shortages. And that Hugo's is being sold into the independent and wholesale channel as it is. Sorghum was another challenge due to the El Niño factor. Wheat luckily held.
That's a winter crop, and we'll see what that harvest looks like in the coming months. We've also had to increase our imports of oats and also imported sorghum due to the local shortages. The other challenge we faced was on orange concentrate that goes into the Oros product in particular. Brazil had extreme weather patterns. They're a big exporter of oranges that impacted supply and global pricing. Florida as well had a citrus greening disease, and they've had the worst crop since the 1940s. So all of these challenges culminated into quite a extreme conditions around supply chain, agri supply chain in particular, as well as resulting in high prices. And then you're all aware about the Indian rice ban that we highlighted in December last year, which impacted global pricing. Moving on to the P&L.
We spoke about the exceptional results from home personal care, groceries. Groceries, there were some marginal declines in revenue due to some supply chain challenges, which I'll give you a perspective on just now. And really, it was the grains division impacting the revenue regression that you see. Our gross margins held up for two or three reasons, and I'll spend some time discussing that. The first you'll remember is the time and motion study that we went through in the prior year, where we reduced about 320 heads from our various facilities. So that helped quite a bit around the production efficiencies and helped mitigate the impact of the volume regression. The second was the load shedding, which was essentially half of the prior year, and that helped hold up margins as well.
And the third element is the change in estimate, which you will see in our results announcement. Historically, we released in September our growth hurdles, and it created a bit of a skew in the results 'cause this the first half wasn't really a true reflection of operating performance. So any customer that didn't achieve their growth was only released in September, and you had a bit of a hockey stick effect. Now we're truing up that. We're looking at it every quarter, assessing how customers perform, and accordingly, truing up our operating income. The big difference here is it allows management to have a better perspective on what their true performance is, and then decide in a very considered manner whether they reinvest behind volume-driving activities or customer recovery. So that's really what held up a gross margin.
You would see there was ZAR 169 million change in estimate impact. About a hundred and forty million of that relates to above the gross margin line. Moving on to other operating expenses. The delta there is as a consequence of the IFRS 2 charges. Last year, there was an inflow of about 12-odd million due to forfeitures, and this year it swung the other way around to just under a ZAR 40 million expense, and you also find our retrenchment cost sitting in that line. The non-operational items refers to the Status disposal, which I had spoke about earlier. Your net finance costs are increasing as a consequence of the average debt moving by about ZAR 1 billion. Last year, it was about ZAR 1.7 billion. It's now moved to ZAR 2.7 billion.
The foreign exchange losses as a consequence of the UAC and Deli Foods proceeds that we couldn't repatriate from Nigeria, and due to the weakening naira, we were impacted by these foreign exchange losses. We continuously engaged with our local bankers to try and find some liquidity in the market, and between March and April, we managed to repatriate all of those funds. So we have taken a big knock; however, we won't see that going forward 'cause those funds have been repatriated. We spoke about the income from associates. The other thing to probably call out there is the ZAR 102 million proceeds from the profit from discontinued operations. What we have been doing is bringing a lot more focus to historic claims, insurance claims, negotiating harder with our insurers to try to settle old disputes.
This was, as a result of, products that was unsaleable during the listeriosis crisis. We had a claim in place for many years, and we finally managed to settle that. So that's the benefit you see coming through. You'll see there's a reduction in working capital, the delta year-on-year. That's helped us by approximately ZAR 320 million, improving your cash generated from operations. As mentioned, with the technology focus and the focus driven out of my office, we plan to reduce our working capital requirements even further. But please bear in mind, we are still seeing a high inflation cycle on agri products and commodities. The net financing costs I referred to earlier, the increased debt position, and the cash outflow from investing activities is essentially our fixed asset investment, netted off by the proceeds of the Status disposal.
Other is essentially the share movements, the translation impact of our foreign balances, foreign bank balances, as, as well as the lease liability that sits in that number. What's also pleasing to note, our cash conversion has almost doubled year-on-year. And obviously, given our low gearing, we're well within our covenants. Moving on to CapEx. Tjaart will take you through our capital allocation framework and the increased focus around efficiencies and margin, and therefore, moving forward with capital investment, we're gonna be a lot more considered around which capital or in which division we should invest behind relative to our return on invested capital ambition.
As you'd see in the current year, we've had some big projects: the two aerosol lines commissioned in Isando, the new peanut butter facility that we've commissioned, that give us, gives us great capability to pack in PET and a blended peanut product as well, as well as some maintenance CapEx in the bakeries that's helped us improve our product quality and efficiencies. So we anticipate that the spend this year will be around ZAR 1.1 billion. Moving into the operational review. As mentioned earlier, ladies and gentlemen, the grains performance wasn't in keeping with expectation, and it's and we're not, we're certainly not leaving it as is. Tjaart took you through all the initiatives focusing around the operational turnaround, as well as the strategic elements we're gonna focus on within bakeries.
The consumer brands business had a great turnaround, in particular from groceries. I'll give you some perspectives on that. As I said, home and personal care, and the exports and international divisions had a very good performance. These are our market shares, which are in grains, which is reflective really of the performance that I, I speak to. It's the other thing we'd be looking at going forward with this business and prioritizing is margin recovery. So we're not gonna chase share at all costs. There's gonna be renewed and intensive focus around margin recovery, and once we believe we've, we've reached a sustainable level, we will consider fast-tracking reinvestment behind our brands as well as innovation.
But in the early stages, it's gonna be tactical, the focus is gonna be around margin recovery, and we will not chase market share at all costs. The bakeries performance had three real issues impacting it in the first half that ultimately impacted the volume regression that you've seen. Firstly, we had a tough Q1 with some breakdowns. In the Q2 , the teams, the new teams in place, as well as our engineering teams, and with assistance from our centre, the manufacturing office, we revisited our maintenance regimes, we focused on product quality, and we saw that coming through in the Q2 , increased availability, as well as a better quality of product, with less damages and less returns. The other impact that to volumes was target deliberately walking away from margin dilutive deals.
As I said, there's an intensive focus on margin recovery, and we will not chase volumes at all costs and market share. So we walked away from these margin dilutive deals in order to protect naked margin, but we're well aware that it's a fair balancing act to make sure that you hold gross margin as well. The team's doing a really stellar piece of work, the new leadership team in place. They're using dashboards, they're monitoring cents per loaf as Tjaart mentioned , whether it's route discounting, whether it's route profitability, depot profitability. There are daily, weekly dashboards in place assessing the recovery in bakeries, as well as ensuring that we expand our naked margins.
I spoke about the El Niño challenge impact in maize, which, you know, increased the maize prices, and we also continue to see deep discounting from private label as well as regional players who are closer to market, and that impacted performance there. Sorghum, we had to import in the current year, and you saw consumers trading out of this category purely because it became too expensive, and that was also as a consequence of the El Niño impact on the supply chain. On other grains, the rice challenge, you're well aware of the closing of the Indian borders, the impact to Thai prices, and that created significant inflation in the category. You've seen many of the private label, cheaper brands blending with lower quality in this current environment growing as a consequence of that supply chain challenge.
On oats, we had to increase our imports yet again, and we had some challenges in our pasta business around product mix and plant efficiency, which has now been addressed. I'm sure most of you have seen the launch of our Jungle Corn Flakes and our Jungle Oat Drink. It's been a really good launch, well-received by the trade and consumers, and in the Q1 , and the first half, for that matter, we invested behind it, driving availability, driving activation, the team delivered an excellent set of results with a solid through-the-line campaign, as well as a good presence in social media. Consumer brands, maybe the two call-outs here is groceries. I'll talk you through the challenges we've experienced in our mayonnaise business, as well as the peanut butter supply challenges, and then beverages.
I spoke about the fact that we had a global shortage of orange concentrate, and that impacted our ability to supply all orders, and we had to go on allocation, in particular with the 5-liter Oros pack, 'cause we prioritized the 2-liter KVI. Groceries business delivered an excellent turnaround. Great management of price points, promotional activity, and when we ran short of the eggs, and as a consequence, there was a shortage of mayonnaise, we were quick to pull back on promotional support. We were quick to allocate stock fairly across the trade, and by pulling back on that promotional support, it held, it helped hold our margins. As you know, we commissioned the new peanut butter facility, and during that commissioning, we did run short of supply 'cause the commissioning took a lot longer than anticipated.
Here again, we pulled back from broad-based activity, managed our promotional strategy, and allocated stock in the trade. So you saw the volume regression, the revenue regression, but profitability held because of that promotional management. You will also recall in the prior year there were some supply chain challenges around vinegar, small white beans, yet again, tomato paste, and we had a softer base. But important to bear in mind, these challenges didn't go away in the current year. I spoke about the El Niño impact on small white beans, the late deliveries, the fact that we were 10% less than the prior year, and we're having to import. I also spoke about the eggs, global egg supply challenges due to the avian flu.
But this business really managed to deliver during tough circumstances, and as mentioned earlier as well, the value engineering initiatives are well on track. With the investment behind our peanut butter facility, we'd be able to launch those tiered products and affordable solutions that we referred to over the last 18 months. Snacks and treats. The cocoa global cocoa pricing has increased by about 60%. Sugar is up by about 20%, so we're quite pleased with this result, considering those high, that high input inflation. And the category is in decline. We've also had to pull back on stock levels in certain areas, which impacted our recoveries, but the team has done a stellar piece of work.
We're looking at value engineering initiatives, whether it's price pack architecture or de-grammage, in order to hold price points and still offer a competitive solution for our consumers. And the other area of focus is where we have loss-making KVIs in our chocolate business. We've reformulated that, looked at the cocoa content, went into intense consumer research, and we will be on track in the second half with this business again. Beverages, really stellar set of results out of the Oros portfolio. The 2-liter in particular, 5-liter, there were supply constraints. Energade and the balance of the cordial business delivered an excellent result in the first half. Home and personal care. I'll quickly touch on the performance here. The home care business was impacted once more by a late pest season.
I'm sure you're quite accustomed to hearing the weather report from me every six months, so I'll hold off on any further comment there. The other aspect was we commissioned two new aerosol lines, which did impact our recoveries, but those lines are now completed, and they're on track. Personal care delivered a stellar set of results, good product mix, good focus on promotional management. Historically, over the summer period, we did see volume regression because of the SKU of Ingram's towards the Camphor product, which is a winter SKU. And then historically, what we did was try to drive promotional activity hard against it, not appreciating the inelasticity of this product outside of the season.
What we did in the current year was redirect our promotional activity to the summer SKUs that we launched to de-seasonalize the business, which is the Triple Glycerine , as well as the vitamin-enriched range, and that received our support during the summer and was obviously appropriate given the product positioning. Baby, you would recall me also mentioning to you in the past, we're one of the few companies that can offer our consumer a combo deal around across nutrition and well-being, so we managed to execute across that quite well. We managed our pricing and promotional activity, and this business also went through a time and motion study in the prior year, and you've seen those production efficiencies coming through. So it was a really great improvement from the baby business. My last slide, ladies and gentlemen, is on exports and international.
Exports continues to deliver under the leadership of Polycarp Igathe, and you would recall him referring to his key distributor model in the prior year. In essence, that's starting to deliver results. What it really means is focusing our resources behind markets where we believe we should be focusing on consumption, market development, category development, and brand development. So rather than using a shotgun approach to the continent, we're identifying our core markets where we have good levels of market penetration. We're working closely with our distributors to understand the local consumer and manage the brand via category insights. The balance of the markets is really gonna be around distributor management via joint business planning, as opposed to market management, where we will be going a lot deeper. L&AF had an excellent first half as well.
We had good carry-in stock from the prior year, and as I mentioned, global pricing has been holding on both purees and canned fruit. Looking forward, there will be some challenges. The intake in the current year was about 20%-30% less on apricots and peaches, as a consequence of the rains in the Western Cape in November, December last year, which impacted the deciduous fruit trees during the flowering season, and the intake was much lower across South Africa. Chococam, excellent set of results. Momodou continues to understand his market, local consumers well, and he was quick off the mark with his de-grammage and price pack architecture strategy in order to ensure we offer local consumers affordable solutions. And he has also started value engineering initiatives around recipe formulations, given the backdrop of the high global cocoa pricing.
So that business is also well on the way to delivering a solid second half. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I'll hand back to Tjaart at this stage.
Thank you. So, I think a very tough first half of the year, and pockets where it went very well and pockets where it didn't go so well, but we understand exactly what's going on in those pockets, and we're working on that. So here's the key focus areas for our business going forward. Leadership in place and teams fully operational, and I've spoken about that a few times, but that is the core of our operating model, is having, call it decentralized teams that's fully empowered to make business decisions, and be accountable for those. I think the streamlining of our operating model into the six business units, we've driven cost savings by removing layers, duplication, and that obviously creates clarity. And obviously, headcount reduction as a result of that was...
'Cause these are very senior levels, so it was a huge cost savings. Deploy category-specific services back to the business. We've done that, but that's an ongoing process. What do you decentralize into the businesses? 'Cause we're still a Tiger Brands with a wide portfolio of businesses that would want to have the synergies where there are synergies. So, the whole drive in this is to really understand what should be decentralized and what we centralize. But what it does mean is a much smaller head office, a much more focused organization, and business units that really focus on those realities in their businesses. Cost leadership, we've spoken about a couple of things. We've targeted ZAR 500 million in the next two years, I think. That process is ongoing. We need to be a low-cost organization.
We need to drive our cost down on a daily basis. We need to get focused in our product offerings, and that work is on the go. We need to focus on the big stuff, where the deliverables are big and where we can focus and drive throughputs and efficiencies and scale, including marketing spend. So I've said earlier that we've identified a 20% SKU reduction over the next three years, and obviously, we've identified those numbers. But obviously, there's... You've got stock, you've got raw material, you've got packaging material, and in all different ways, these will be rolled out or worked out over the next year or two. So the general trade, there's two legs to the general trade. I spoke about the one in the bakeries before.
And that's very specific business-driven in the bakeries. The general trade we're talking about here, we launched about two years ago, with a very focused model where we've got many distributors, with people in the field taking orders, placing on the distributors, and distributors delivering. We're ahead of our targets that we set ourselves, so that is a work in progress, but it's going very well. What we need to get to is, we need to really get to a point where we can really scale this up, 'cause we need—this doesn't need to be ZAR 1 billion or ZAR 2 billion, it must be 10-15 billion. But that's the goal that we drive to, but so far, so good, and I think the teams in place, they really understand what they need to do.
We've visited. I've been in the field with them. They really understand what needs to be done. But it does include cost. It's people we put out in the field, and we must roll it out very carefully not to sit with a huge overhead in a few years' time that we struggle with. So those four pillars of restoring our full potential in the organization. Cost leadership, and we cannot talk about this enough. It's all about value engineering, overhead reduction on a continuous basis. Not a once-off, it's a continuous basis. SKU rationalization, a big job up front, and then continuously looking at if you innovate something, you must take something out. We can't sit four, five years down the line again with too many SKUs. And then logistics, we've got lots of opportunities....
In all the logistics. If you look at groceries, if you look at bakeries, the particular logistics, we've got huge opportunities to just become better and better. Consumer obsession, we, we, we obviously, whatever we do is driven by the, by the consumer. We, we will not innovate anything if the consumer doesn't like it and the consumer doesn't tell us to do that. But we do need to get more relevant, and I've spoken about this often. Relevant value propositions for our consumers. We've got lovely products. In some cases, they're too expensive, the consumer can't afford them. We, we have to react to that, and we have to give the consumer a product they want and a product that they can afford, and there's lots of things gonna hit the market in the next 6 months, 12 months, that will do that.
If we look at the focused marketing and innovation, we are a branded, consumer-driven business. We've got the best brands in the country, and it would just be irresponsible of us not to look after those brands. But you also look after the brands to create value, so we must have a focused approach, and we must look at return for our bucks and how we invest behind these brands, and that's what we will do. And then channel development and availability. If you can't... You can market everything, you can make everything, but if it's not on the shelf for the consumer to take, then you've wasted your time.
So things must be available, and we must get them into the right channels, the right pack sizes into the right channels, the right formats into the right channels, and that work is. I think we've got the knowledge in the business as well. It's how do we execute that in a focused way? Portfolio optimization and capital allocation, I'll talk about that a bit in the next slide, but we need to really be focused on our capital allocation and how we drive shareholder returns. I'll talk about that on the next slide. Portfolio of the future, part of that capital allocation model as well, but portfolio of the future is to really be focused.
I think the first criteria is we must be in profitable businesses that generates the right returns, and that's not only margin, profit margin, that is return on invested capital as well. It's an effective balance sheet. So that's the one thing, and then secondly, we want to be in big, big businesses, where we can drive scale, where we can drive proper investment. And then focus on cash conversion. We cannot overestimate the focus that we are putting on working capital. Our working capital is too high. We must get it structurally at a lower level, and that includes better management, but I think it includes a bit of structural efforts that we have to put into managing our working capital to a lower level. And then obviously, we can't do any of this if it's not sustainable.
We have to invest into a sustainable future. Health and nutrition for our consumers. Livelihoods of the population. If we don't have consumers, we've got nothing. And then obviously, the environment. Lots of work that we do in the environment. We use lots of electricity, we use lots of water, and we have to do that in ways that makes the business sustainable and make our environment sustainable. If you look at our enablers, ignite our people culture, I'll talk about that a bit later, but it's all about getting our people really motivated and really full of energy to go and do these things, and you can only do that if you've got a conducive culture. We have got a strong balance sheet.
We do believe we've got a very efficient operating model now, and that as that matures, it will get better and better. We've got the best brands in the business, and we've probably got a bit of a road to travel on digitalizing the business better, but we will do that in an efficient way when it's relevant. We're probably a little bit off. We probably will, later this year, early next year, start with real activities around digitalizing. I think we first have a job to do to make our IT spend very efficient, and very productive. So if you look at the capital allocation model that we're talking about, we're really looking at targeting a Return on Invested Capital ahead of weighted average cost of capital.
It's not that at the moment, so we really need to get the business to a point where we deliver a ROIC that's ahead of what it cost us to get that capital. And there's a few principles that we're looking at. So we're looking at the target for ROIC and ROE above weighted cost of equity, as I've just said, and that is that's hardwired in the short term. We target group growth and operating margins. That's the first way to get there, is to get our margins right. And then drive the right margins with the right mix and the right volume.
We need scale, we need efficiencies, and I think if you listen to what I've said about the bigger businesses, the efficient head office, the focused businesses, that will drive leverage from a scale and efficiencies point of view. Need to optimize our gearing, that goes with the operating model, and then, our working capital. Big job that we have in making our working capital, our cash conversion better, and the ultimate investment in working capital at a level where it's more palatable. If we talk about our portfolio optimization and the use of cash and returns to shareholders, so portfolio optimization, Thushen referred to it a little bit. We really have to get rid of the businesses that's not performing these requirements to these requirements. In the next couple of years, we will exit those.
So, if we, I think there's a few of our businesses we will fix. The bakeries is one. The bakeries is not performing close to these targets, but that's a core business. That should be a super performer, and we will fix that. So, we will treat all the businesses in Tiger, where we will look at what are the ROIC requirements? Can we get there? And if we can't, we will have to make those decisions. We've reduced the SKUs. We've made the decisions, and now it's rolling those out. And then we will deploy capital to strategic areas where we have the right to win. And this is beyond investing in brands, where we've got proper market shares, invest in those business where we've got market shares that's sustainable, where we're the market leader.
Or in some of our businesses, we might not be the market leader, but we're a strong number two or three player, generating huge returns and generating ROIC that's really acceptable to the organization. And then this includes all our investment. This includes our investments into our, into our associates, which we will look at what returns, how do they generate, how do they improve the, the capital allocation model? So how do we use cash? Prioritize CapEx to drive organic growth. So that's the first thing. We look at our base business, and how do we make the base business better and better? How do we mechanize it? How do we make it more efficient? And that's where we'll put the, the capital, obviously within this model of generating the right returns.
We will have minimal reliance on M&A in the next while. But obviously, if there's a unique opportunity arriving, we will look at it. And then, if you've used your cash through this whole model, then what's left? Dividends. We've got a consistent dividend cover of 1.75. We review that all the time, whether we can reduce it. And then share buybacks and special dividends. We will look at those as the time arrives, and we'll be highly disciplined on how we use our cash across the business. So my last slide, our competitive advantage that we will drive into the business. So our operating model, that's very efficient, that's agile, that responds, that executes, that's quick, and that's also not...
That's not a structure or an activity. That's the way of living. So, I think we're on the track, on track. Our businesses are all in place. The guys are highly focused, and it's all about executing. But that's probably the key two words. It's highly focused and the ability to execute. Our strategic imperatives around simplification, driving costs down, driving margins, driving gross profit margin. We really have to look at our gross profit margin. You can't just cut cost and make the required returns. We must make our products more affordable at the gross profit level. And then the capital allocation model, which must be highly disciplined, disciplined, and be driven by very clear targets, which we've got.
So, all of that, we will be able to deliver if we've got a culture in the business that's conducive to that. So empowering people, driving execution. We will not be able to do any of this if we don't have the right people in the organization, and I believe we do. Our challenge now is to lead those people to be able to do what they should be doing. So we must get people to turn around from the organization and face that way and not face the head office. Head office is a very unimportant place. It's only me and Thushen sitting there. Okay, that's our story. Thank you very much for attending. Nikki will now just take the chair to take some questions and answers, and Thushen and I will try and answer them. Thank you, Nikki.
You've only got one slide, Nikki.
Good morning, everybody. I think we can start in the room. There are quite a few questions online, but since you made the effort to be here, we'll give you that advantage.
Yeah, good morning. Thank you for that. Sean Chauke from Nedbank. So I've got a couple of questions, but I'll limit it to three, and if time permits, I'll ask the balance of the other questions. So maybe if we start, can you please explain how a sales mix to the general trade doesn't really discriminate pricing versus the modern trade, and if there are any breaches in terms of Competition Commission as a result of different pricing to the different channels? The second part to that on, on the same theme: if you... You spoke about route optimization, sales optimizations, et cetera, but obviously, you know, challenges lie ahead with regards to competition.
If you had to apply a weighting to this piece of the pie, what's very much more important within those dynamics, what do you foresee as the most challenging, and, and what do you think are the easy win? Bit of a long question, but that's the first question.
Okay, maybe we answer that and-
Hmm.
Yeah.
I'm not so sure I've got the first question. The second one was about the mix between, I guess, volume and margin.
No, the second one was more on route optimizations, in terms of your sales channels, similar to that general trade. What are the challenges that you foresee? What could we be missing in terms of the success of that strategy as well?
... Okay, let me try. So your first question is all around the price discrimination between the different channels. The competition in this country and the competition between the channels is just too strong for you to be able to discriminate on pricing. So we can't discriminate on pricing 'cause the market will prevent us from doing that. So what you do is we've got more expensive routes to market and less expensive routes to market. And what tends to happen at the moment with the general trade, bread is a bit different. Bread is bought... Remember, bread is bought by most consumers every day and consumed every day, so that's an on-the-go purchase quite often. So the general trade, the SPAR store as such, sells a lot of bread.
If you look at other products, it tends to move... Look, all these retailers are in the townships now, so you can't, they—you won't get one township that hasn't got a Boxer or hasn't got a Shoprite in it. So it tends to happen that consumers would do weekend or bulk shopping at the Boxer or at the Shoprite or whatever, and they do the top-up shopping at SPAR store. So that's where the formats that we're talking about becomes more important, the sizes, the pack sizes. So for us to go... Obviously, for us, it's cheaper to go to market in certain ways.
In bread, it's for us cheaper to go to the, from a pricing point of view, to go directly to the SPAR store, 'cause there's not a lot of people in the chain, but it also costs us money to go to the SPAR stores. It's much cheaper to deliver 600 loaves to a Shoprite than to deliver 12 loaves to 40 stores. But the competition in the market is strong enough. There can't be price discrimination. The second question around the, I think I probably answered both questions in what I've said.
So your cost considerations between the different channels, that's why I made the comment with this project we've got into the general trade, is we must really watch the costs, and make sure that it's got a payback. It has so far, but that's something to keep an eye on.
Thanks for that. The second one, maybe if we touch on... If you could provide us some context in terms of your operating cost structure, particularly in bakeries, with regards to where it was, where it is, and where you would like to see that cost base in the future. Examples could help in this, you know, ideally, where's the bulk of the cost sitting? What are you not happy about? What are the consequences of not having mega bakeries, and so on?
Yeah, I'll start at the end of your question. So the mega bakeries is a huge area for having a lower cost, 'cause it's all about throughput. A big factory has got much lower unit cost than a small factory, 'cause your dilution of overheads is much better. So that's the first thing on mega bakeries. The second thing is you can afford better technologies in a mega bakery and more automation in a mega bakery, 'cause you dilute those and you utilize those assets much better. And it's got a big impact on your unit cost coming out. So it is a big benefit to have mega bakeries.
If you look at our bakeries, and I don't know where the word mega bakeries actually came from, but it's similar to a big bakery and a small bakery. But if you look at our bakeries, we've got Cape Town, Maritzburg, Germiston, Pretoria. Those are not Mickey Mouse bakeries; those are big bakeries. They've all those bakeries have got two plants in them. Most of them are 6,000 an hour plants. A mega bakery would probably have 8,000. I don't think you can go bigger than that, 'cause your mixers don't match it. So it's not that we've got nothing like a mega bakery. I think we've got those bakeries I've mentioned. If we get our maintenance regimes really sorted out, 'cause we struggled with breakdowns, we haven't got old equipment.
Maybe here and there, there's a bit old equipment. Pretoria bakery's got a little bit old equipment, but the one plant in Cape Town is new. It's about seven years old. The Germiston plant is older, but they're still the same technologies. So it's not that we've got nothing. We do have a couple of other smaller bakeries, which is not overly efficient, but if they run well, that's not your biggest... That is a bit of a medium, longer-term opportunity where you can get your cost base down. Our immediate opportunity is to get our cost base down, to get our routing and our whole distribution system worked out properly, 'cause they drive across each other, they drive into each other areas.
If you get your discipline there in place, you motivate your drivers, that you get your loaves per kilometer solved and your truck utilization sorted out, that's huge low-hanging fruit for us in the next... immediately going forward.
Maybe the last question for now. If you look at associates, I mean, it's getting close to one-third in terms of group operating profits. How fundamentally different is Carozzi if you had to compare it to your grocery business? 'Cause Carozzi, I think it's doing double, double your margin in groceries. What's driving that? Is it a function of market dynamics in that country? Is it a margin efficiency, and what can you pick up from that business to replicate into your grocery business? Thanks.
Let me give the first off. You can add to that, Thushen. I can give you the first answer. It's a decentralized organization, and that's how it's managed. They've got MDs running each one of the... They've got a pet food business that's run by a MD. They've got a puree business, or they call it the agro business, that's run by a MD. And they've got MDs in every... And they only operate in Chile, really, and Peru, and Argentina, and they've got MDs there with highly focused approaches on how they run the businesses.... So that's the top answer. I think it's a well-run business. It's family-owned. It's second, third generation group CEO running the business. High levels of experience, and a highly focused family-run business. So that's the easy number.
You can talk about the numbers if you want to.
Yeah. And the categories do differ to an extent. It's important to bear that in mind, and market dynamics, obviously, in LATAM versus South Africa are very different in terms of disposable incomes and consumption. But having said that, if you ask me, where should the focus areas be in groceries to target those sort of double-digit operating margins? And it's really things we've been speaking about previously. Efficiency around conversion. We spoke to the time and motion study last year. We're in the midst of moving our labeling line, which should help with automation and further headcount reduction. So conversion cost efficiency, absolutely critical.
We spoke previously about value engineering, getting the best recipe cost for our core products, and then also offering affordable tier two products, like the Black Cat reduced peanut inclusion, to our consumers, so that we continue to remain relevant across all LSM profiles. I think the last thing that we need to apply our mind to, those are big buckets, is the seasonal nature of the groceries business and the drag on working capital. So, you know, many of the canned vegetable products, we buy the vegetables up front during the season, we process it, and we keep it for up to 14 or 15 months in Brightstock and label it thereafter. That's certainly a drag on our return on invested capital. There has been a move to try and de-seasonalize the business.
We've discontinued peas, and there's other opportunities where we can either look at import models or dehydrated and rehydrated in South Africa and or, or rationalize the SKUs, and that's a journey we've already commenced with there as well. Yeah.
Can I just add to that? I think if you look at some of the categories in Carozzi, that they are on a very high seasonal peak or on a very high cyclical peak. So we see margins in the puree, in the fruit puree business, which is not sustainable. It's not gonna last forever.
There's a question on the platform related to associates—which we can close the loop on. They want to know: What can they expect from associate income in H2?
So, we still believe there'll be a solid set of results coming out of our associates. The one thing to bear in mind, though, in the second half of last year, we had the translation benefit in National Foods when they moved, dollarized and moved to the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange. So that was a ZAR 100-odd million benefit that hit the P&L, which won't be repeated in operating performance, of course. So all in all, if we look at the operating income of both businesses, on track, but you do have that benefit which will- which won't repeat itself in the second half.
Okay, any further questions? Otherwise, I'll move to the online version. Okay, good morning, folks. Going forward, will you keep to the current dividend policy?
Yes, we review it all the time, and obviously, as the business becomes more cash generative, which I think it will as we put all these things in place, there might be an opportunity to reduce that cover. But that's all part of that capital allocation model, where we look at these things all the time, and depending on the big CapEx projects, if there's an acquisition, which is not a focus area, but if something arrives, and then after that, we look at our dividend cover, look at share buybacks, and look at special dividends with surplus cash.
Thank you. Johan Buys wants to know if the CEO still holds shares in Premier.
Who, me?
Yes.
Yes, I do. The shares I've had for 15 years.
Okay.
You want me to sell them?
Now would be the right time.
It is the right time.
Okay, you're right when you said that people make the difference, but changing people, culture, and competencies takes time. In the meantime, your competitors are not standing still and arguably already have the right people and culture, for example, Premier. You said this is not a one-day game. How long do you think it takes to change your people and culture?
Look, what we've got, what we've got in Tiger is we've got... If you look at this whole restructuring that we've done, we've moved a lot of people around. We've changed the structure of the business completely. We didn't bring one person in from outside. All the people were in Tiger. At lower levels, I think we brought in one financial person or two financial people at lower levels, but I think we brought them in even before the restructuring. So we've got the people in Tiger. You know, we really do. We've got wonderful programs in Tiger for development, for succession or talent management. Wonderful processes.
What you need to overlay on that is a leadership culture, where it actually works well, and I think that's what we're doing. And that starts with our behavior as the senior leaders in the business, and that's already in place. So I'm not, I'm really not... I'm more concerned that we are the biggest food company in Africa, probably. We certainly have got the best opportunity to give people great experiences and get people to have experience the level that other companies can't do. And from that point of view, I think our people are actually vulnerable from losing our people, being headhunted by our competitors. That, I think, is our bigger risk. And our mitigation of that risk is not to pay people more.
I think we pay our people well... what we want to do is we want people to earn more variable pay rather than fixed pay. But those structures in Tiger is good, there's no problem with that. But the real, the real way you keep people in the business is they must say, "I'm, I'm working here 'cause I want to work here, not because I get paid a lot of money. I work here 'cause it's a nice place to work. I can perform here, I can, I can deliver, I can live a high-performance life and be recognized for that, and we can also have a bit of fun." So that's my bigger concern, is not whether we've got talent. We've got talent.
My bigger concern is, as we turn the place and the results start showing, I think we are, as an organization, we're at risk of our people being headhunted.
Okay, related to the turnaround, Zintle Sesane of Citi wants to say: "A lot of good things have been outlined. What is the time plan for the execution and the results of these initiatives?
I think it's all, it's all busy happening. So if you look at, if you look at the SKU stuff, that's all in place. If you look at the product, the product... the architecture of our products, the, the recipes, there's peanut butter will be launched in 2-3 months' time. New, Crosse & Blackwell will be launched, I think, in 2-3 months' time. Peanut butters already will move into PET. We've just got contracts in glass to work out. We're busy with, with designing the line for PET in, in mayonnaise. That will need a bit of CapEx, so that will probably happen early next year sometime.
If you look at portfolio analysis, we've got lots of stuff happening, which is obviously confidential, that we can't talk about now, but there's quite a few things busy happening that will, that will hit the news in the next couple of months. It's all, it's all happening. It's all in progress. How long will it take? It will take forever, 'cause these things, you don't do it and it's done. You do it all the time. So when will we have the business at the level where it's, where we've turned it, with these returns to be at an acceptable level? We certainly, in the five-year plan context, we would certainly want to be there towards the last two years of the five-year plan.
Thank you, Tjaart. Anthony Clark's quite interested in the bakery business. "Can I ask, one, you stated your plan to restructure the segment, possibly close bakeries and maybe build a new mega bakery. What is the CapEx you foresee to get the bakeries to where you want them to? You know your bread, given your time at Premier. Bread prices have not risen in a year in the wider market. What prices - wheat prices are up 10% year to date, and from mid-February, they're up 13%. How is margin being recovered?" And then there's a question around gas, which I'll direct to Thushen. Maybe you can answer that in a little bit.
A question about using gas in the bakeries?
No, no.
Sasol challenge.
Sasol challenge.
So in the bakeries, it's obviously wheat is about 30%-35% of your cost base. Distribution is a massive part of your cost base, and people is a big part of your cost base. How do you get your cost to come down is to really manage the business efficiently. So we must get throughput there. We must get our efficiency in terms of breakdowns, returns, our routing, the stuff that I spoke about. And we must have the ability. We've put a price increase through, not a very big one. We put a price increase through last month, effective the beginning of June. And that's also reason why the volumes took a bit of a knock.
But we must get better at that, so we must have the ability in the business to pass through inflation. But we must also get to price points where we are extremely competitive, and with our scale and our brands, we will, not should, we will get to situations in all our businesses, not only bread, where we can get to price points where our brands will just pull our product through to the consumer, at the price point that's very competitive. So that's where we're going.
The CapEx profile?
In the bakeries, look, the- I think every bakery has got a capital need for maintaining the bakery, and whether that is in maintenance, some of the maintenance projects are major maintenance, and it gets capitalized. If you look at, we've still got one or two bakeries that's got very old-school or very old-style coolers, where we have to replace them with new spiral coolers. But we've parked that, 'cause we first want to look at the footprint of the bakeries and how we run the footprint of the bakeries. And obviously, you want fewer big bakeries rather than lots of smaller bakeries. That's the principle. You know, if I start telling you now where we want to shut bakeries down, we're into negotiations, and we're not there.
So we haven't made those decisions, but we will probably shortly start the process of building a big. I'm gonna stop calling it the mega bakery, 'cause I think that's the wrong word. We're gonna start the process of building a big bakery.
And then, Thushen, any comment on the Sasol gas cliff in 2026? What contingencies has Tiger put in place?
So I'll touch on that. Just completing the question on capital, our normal forecasted capital spend is gonna be around ZAR 1.2 billion-ZAR 1.4 billion, excluding any big project that Tjaart refers to, either in bakeries and milling. But we anticipate along that trajectory, focusing on efficiency, replacement, maintenance. With regards to gas, we're fortunate not only to have a bakeries consultant, but a gas consultant as well. Obviously, we're aware of the coming challenges. We've been dealing with suppliers around synthetic gas, compressed gas. We've met a few players in that particular industry, and it is certainly a challenge that we will encounter both in bakeries and groceries, so we are looking at contingency plans.
And Sa'iyyah Chodhia, can you give us some color on post-half trading and how inflation is tracking across the group?
Yeah.
Shishin?
Happy to just touch on that. We spoke about the commodity inflation, rice, maize, which obviously doesn't go away till the next season. We anticipate the Indian borders, maybe there'll be some change towards the latter part of this calendar year, and that will give us a different, you know, that'll impact the rice pricing going forward. What's, you know, important to note, although there's this general view that inflation's coming off in the market, but when you look at the agricultural supply chain as well as the commodity supply chain, we're not seeing inflation come off, whether it's peanuts, small white beans, tomatoes. In fact, our inflation is averaging, for agricultural products outside of commodities, around 16%-17% if I look at the second half.
The relief that we get is from packaging, other ingredients, which is coming off slightly and helping mitigate that cost push in on the agricultural supply chain. Yeah.
Do you expect the tax rate to normalize in the second half?
So we don't expect there to be many changes. As you know, last year we had the incentive for Jungle, the 12I incentive. This year we had the Albany incentive. We don't think that's gonna change materially over the course of the year.
Can you give some color on debt plans for FY24 or the remainder of the year? Will it remain as is? Should we expect further disposals in H2?
If we look at our projections, we're probably gonna see debt come off a bit rather than increase, with the renewed focus around working capital management, cash conversion. So it's our intention to ensure that we increase our cash generated from operations. We will still remain highly under-geared as a consequence, and as part of our capital allocation model, we'll be revisiting what that optimal debt structure is going forward. With regards to the portfolios, Chad commented on it. We're busy in processes. We're looking at our optimal required return on invested capital versus our various portfolios and making decisions accordingly. But I just want to remind you of the caution or the comment I made right up front in the presentation. We will not be selling businesses at any cost.
There isn't a burning platform to dispose of things at any cost. If we don't get fair value, we will continue to retain the business, focus on turnaround and profit expansion.
Johan Buys wants to know that after the peanut butter safety concerns around smaller brands recently, has there been stronger demand for established brands like Black Cat?
Yeah, uh-
No, maybe just-
Okay. Yeah. So the Black Cat, we are seeing solid demand. The thing that I actually wanted to highlight was, our testing around aflatoxins, et cetera, is extremely robust. And before we actually, you know, approved this CapEx, we went back in and looked at our safety regime and spent an additional just under ZAR 30 million, making sure that we have the appropriate in-line cleaning system to address the challenges such as aflatoxins.
Can you provide some color on which categories are going to be included in the GT expansion?
Yeah, I think that's all our categories. So again, bread are separate. This GT expansion that we've got, this project that Luigi started two years ago, we look at pretty much all our categories. And the debate going forward is, you know, it's a bit of a push-pull, yeah, 'cause we're looking at SKU reduction. We don't need more SKUs, but there might be an issue where we'd need different pack sizes. But it pretty much cover all our SKUs.
Absolutely.
You mentioned Matrix Fund Managers would like to know, in the Q2 , the team commenced a deliberate and extensive maintenance program across the bakery portfolio. What is the percentage of your bakeries that have received this intensive dose of maintenance program?
No, all the bakeries. It's not a... It's just getting— That's day-to-day management. If you run a bakery, you have any effective, but a bakery just punishes you quicker if you don't do it right. The bakery regime in every bakery must be to make sure our plants are in a condition where they run well, and we don't have breakdowns. So that's in all the bakeries.
Okay. Well, also Matrix Fund Managers, what would the other grains business need to get back to profitability? In Jungle Oats, you have higher raw material costs as well as increased marketing, while pasta has higher conversion costs and adverse product mix. What are you doing about these?
So let me answer the thing on other grains by saying. The Jungle business is a super, super brand. I think our Jungle brand can go in the breakfast category across various product offerings outside of oats, and we've seen that with launching the cornflakes. And there's lots of stuff coming under the Jungle brand going forward. So that's a lovely business. I think in the past year, we struggled with performance 'cause we've had a huge marketing spend launching cornflakes, and we're struggling with cornflake supply chain. But that's a very good brand, good business. The big issue in other grains that we had a terrible six months on is in rice....
And I think if you look at the rice picture, it actually comes more than six months. It probably comes the last couple of years. In plastic, we've got wonderful market shares, but we don't generate the profits that we need to generate in the business. And it's a function of how do we procure? I think over the last 10 years, we've changed our way of procuring, and I think we must refocus exactly how we procure, where do we get our products from? Because historically, in rice, we were able to procure a different standard to our competitors because we locked up supply chains from across the world. We've stopped to do that. And we must investigate how we can get back up.
I don't think you can get back to that because you're not gonna be able to do that again. But we must look at the whole value chain in rice. We've had you, you remember the story last year of the Tellus in rice, which gave us huge volumes. So if you look at volumes now, we would have lost volumes, but by design, we're not gonna give stuff away for free. But in our rice business, we're really looking at it, it's 'cause rice is, if you look at a bag of rice, 70%-80% of it is raw material.
So you can, you can save any other cost, which we will save, but you're not gonna save the business if you don't get your raw material procurement versus how you can sell the stuff and at what premiums to our competitors. So that's, so the big elephant in the room in other grains is rice.
Okay. There are a number of questions across the board about EBIT margins. So what EBIT margin would bakeries need to achieve to exceed WACC on a sustainable basis? And if your WACC is 14%, what would be implied margins on new, bigger bakery?
Look, we don't have those numbers, and we probably won't disclose them, but it's certainly much higher than what they are now. In bakeries, but certainly be double-digit EBIT margins to get to the required returns.
Then, just closing the loop on the operations, how long do you think the bakery turnaround will take?
Well, the turnaround, or let me put it like this: the bakery industry is very competitive. It's. And I know all our competitors are probably on the line now. So it's a very competitive industry, which is good. It's good for the consumer. So the turnaround is not being achieved at some stage. It's an ongoing thing. I think our bakeries will start delivering good results probably next year. This next six months to the end of this calendar year will certainly be better than the first half, but we will probably start seeing good results coming in next year and certainly the year after that. We should be able to get results closer to a level where we want it to be.
So it's probably, if you want to talk about an absolute turnaround thing, it's probably two years.
Okay, Thushen, this is for you. What is the annual cost saving from the headcount reduction at head office?
We anticipate that to be, or we approximate that to be just under ZAR 100 million. This is something else we're applying ourselves to. You know, when we talk about cost savings, is it cost savings against the prior year, cost savings against forecast, cost savings against budget? And therefore, when Thushen referred to cost avoidance upfront, we're reluctant to call out numbers until unless we can reconcile it very specifically back to the P&L and understand what is that saving relative to the prior year or relative to budget. So, you know, in the past, we've called out numbers, but obviously you haven't seen that margin accretion flow through into the P&L.
So therefore, we're a bit circumspect before we reference these savings, until we can reconcile it back to a P&L line item and understand perfectly what that number benefit is versus the prior year.
Okay, then, the last couple of questions from the online. Tjaart, this is for you. Having been with the business for some months now, do you think 26 months contract is long enough to execute on your plans? And a follow-up question on that, is there any plans to extend your contract beyond the initial period?
I think I've told the market right from day one not to overinterpret the 26 months. 26 months is probably not enough time to turn around the organization. I'm also not going anywhere else after 26 months, so... But I think what's very important to note in this, so I'm not fixated about the 26 months, so don't worry too much about that. But I think what's more important than that is that we're building an organization that's all about people, but doesn't depend on individuals. That's the organization we're building. There must be succession for every position. So it's almost that contradiction. It's all about people, but not about individuals. If anyone leaves, there's three, four very talented people that can take over from him.
Hopefully, if people leave the organization, it's to better their careers, and that I'm very comfortable with. But that's it about building that capacity in the organization that if one guy disappears, it doesn't, the business doesn't fall apart. So that's the culture we will build, and that includes me. It's not that I'm so important, if I go to sleep, everything comes to a standstill. That doesn't happen. These folks work hard. They, in fact, prefer me to sleep, then I don't interfere.
Thank you, everybody, for your attendance, and thank you for those on the online platform. The replay will be up on the website about two hours after this. Thank you very much. Management will be around for a few more minutes before they engage with the media. Thanks.