Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is John Cryan. It's my privilege to serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Man Group PLC. It's also my pleasure to host today's annual general meeting, which is being webcast. We have the full board on the call, with most of us joining from our respective lockdown locations. As I'm not able to attend the meeting in person today, we are legally required to appoint a chairman for the formal part of the meeting who is in attendance. I have therefore asked Mark Jones, our CFO, to chair the formal part of the meeting in due course.
We will be taking questions near the end of the meeting, but if during the course of the meeting you wish to raise a question, please feel free to type it into the Q&A function, which you should find on the right-hand side of your screen. Please ensure that your question is sent to all panelists. Otherwise, the company secretary will not see your request to pose a question, and it may be missed. When asking questions, please remember to type your name before your question. As with our usual AGM protocol, only shareholders, proxy holders, and corporate representatives are permitted to ask questions. As previously advised, we invited shareholders to vote by proxy in advance of this AGM. When we reach the formal part of the meeting, Mark Jones will advise you of the proxy votes we've already received.
As usual, we will release a stock exchange announcement of the final votes shortly after the end of the meeting. We are living in unprecedented times. COVID-19 has had a global impact on day-to-day life and the way in which we work. As you can see, it's changed the format of this AGM today. I want to extend my gratitude to you for taking the time to attend this virtual AGM. We believe it's an important forum for two-way communications between us and our shareholders. At Man Group, the safety of our employees and the protection of our clients' assets are paramount. We established our COVID-19 response team in January, and its primary role was to implement our pandemic response plans. We introduced a range of measures that developed over time as the advice from medical experts and governments evolved.
We conducted extensive training on our systems and processes to ensure that large numbers of our staff could work remotely. Today, almost all of our global workforce is now working from home. At the heart of what we do are our employees, and we continue to support them through a variety of well-being initiatives and through the provision of additional hardware and software to enable them to carry out their roles as efficiently and effectively as possible in the circumstances. I'm very proud of the way in which all of our staff have adapted to this new way of life. Since we last met in May 2019, there have been a number of changes to the board. In September, Ian Livingston announced his intention to step down as chairman at the end of the year, and it was my great pleasure to be appointed in his place.
Also in September, Jon Sorrell left us. Jon's contribution over many years had been invaluable, both as our CFO and more latterly as President of the Group. In February of this year, we announced the appointment of three new non-executive directors, Lucinda Bell, Ceci Kurzman, and Anne Wade, and we announced the retirement of Andrew Horton and Matthew Lester. Andrew retires at the end of this meeting after seven years on the board. Matthew retired in February, having served as an independent non-executive director since 2011. We welcome Lucinda, Ceci, and Anne to the board and to their first AGM. Lucinda brings valuable public company experience. Until recently, she was Chief Financial Officer of British Land PLC, one of the largest property development and investment companies in the U.K.
On appointment, Lucinda became a member of the audit and risk committee and will, following the conclusion of this meeting, become the chair of the audit and risk committee, taking over from Andrew. Ceci is the founder and principal of Nexus Management Group, a private investment company dedicated to innovative growth-stage businesses in the consumer, media, and technology sectors. Ceci also sits on the board of Revlon Inc. Is a member of its compensation and audit committees. Anne, who was appointed to the board formally yesterday, has spent most of her career in the financial services sector. She brings direct experience of fund management to the board. Anne is currently a non-executive director and chair of the remuneration committee of Man Group PLC. She serves on various other boards. On appointment, Anne also became a member of Man Group's remuneration committee.
I'm sure you'll join me in welcoming Lucinda, Ceci, and Anne to the board and in thanking Ian, Jon, Matthew, and Andrew for their contribution to the company over many years. I'll now hand over to Luke. Luke Ellis, our CEO, will give you an overview of how the business is doing. Luke?
[audio distortion]Is, as John mentioned, has been the health and well-being of our colleagues and the performance of our clients' assets. Despite almost all our colleagues working from home, we acted quickly to position ourselves so we could focus on looking after our clients' assets and ensuring our trading capabilities functioned seamlessly. Our technology infrastructure has allowed us to remain open for business, investing and trading as normal, and our operations team withstood market volatility and volumes that surpassed even the peak of the financial crisis. We also maintained a high level of communication with our clients and remained attentive to their needs through the extreme market conditions. Despite the impact of COVID-19 on all financial markets and the historic high volatility, in the first quarter, we delivered strong asset-weighted outperformance versus peers of 2.5%.
Falling global financial markets and a strong US dollar weighed on our clients' assets in our long-only products, driving our FUM down 11% to $104.2 billion. We delivered net inflows for the quarter, mainly driven by target risk and institutional solutions. The environment looking through the summer remains challenging. I should also remind everyone, particularly so given the current crisis, that our balance sheet remains robust and highly liquid, giving us financial strength and flexibility. From the market's perspective, last year, 2019, was a much more supportive environment for most asset classes, in stark contrast to the much more difficult environment we've seen in the last few months. Together with our clients, we too benefited from this bullish environment and were able to deliver $10.1 billion of investment gains, particularly from our long-only, trend following, and our total return strategies.
Performance in our technical strategies, which drive our performance fee generation, was particularly strong. It was also a period where valuation-focused strategies tended to underperform, which led to a negative asset-weighted performance of 1.1% versus our peers, given the higher proportion of our assets in highly active valuation-focused strategies. You could see that rebounded very rapidly in the first quarter. Funds under management increased by 8% to GBP 117.7 billion, mainly due to these investment gains, and we saw inflows into our alternative strategies, but overall, a small outflow driven by our long-only strategies. Adjusted profit before tax increased by 54% to GBP 386 million, driven by the strong performance fees. Adjusted management fee PBT reduced by 21% as a result of the non-operating headwinds and lower management fees during the year. We continue to actively manage our capital to benefit shareholders.
In May, we completed the important corporate reorganisation, providing us with more flexibility in financing the business and removing the need for Tier 2 debt, which recent events have shown can be very expensive for shareholders. In October, we completed one buyback and began a further $100 million repurchase program, which is now about 90% completed. Consistent with our policy of the last few years, the board has recommended a final dividend of $0.051 per share, which, when taken together with the interim dividend, amounts to a full-year dividend of $0.098 per share. The outside world sometimes seems to find it a little hard to see the underlying progress we've made as a firm in recent years. The runoff of Man Group legacy business and the volatility of performance fees viewed with a short-term perspective seems to confuse the picture for some analysts.
What you can see here is our core profitability. We're focused on growing our core management fee profitability and the normalized cross-cycle performance fee profitability. As a firm, we continue to enhance our strategic differentiators by investing in technology and talent, enriching our culture, diversifying our capabilities, and developing deep client relationships. The cumulative results of these actions can be seen on this slide. Core profitability has been on an upward trend, and I'm pleased to say that last year it reached a new post-crisis peak. You've seen the details on short-term flows, but I think it's important to reiterate the change in our approach to clients over time. If you look back to the 2011-2013 period, we had an intermediary-focused distribution model and a legacy-focused product set. We saw large net outflows, low growth inflows, and had a high churn rate. Really not a pretty picture.
As we built out the direct institutional sales capabilities through 2014 to 2016, you saw net flows turn positive and gross inflows start to pick up and the churn rate reduce. In the last three years, we've put a huge focus on relationships and understanding what our clients really need. You've seen a further material improvement in our sales productivity with average 8% annual net inflows, over GBP 30 billion a year in gross inflows, and the redemption rate reducing further. Our focus on deep client relationships has driven these improvements, and that's going to remain our focus from here. We are continuing to invest in increasing our client relationship footprint as we think there are many extra clients globally who we could work with, but where we haven't yet had the time to develop a relationship.
There are still some people who knew Man Group a decade ago and associate us with a single strategy, AHL Diversified. Man Group is much broader today than any one strategy, but the same is also true even within Man AHL. Only GBP 1.5 billion of AHL's funds under management today come from AHL Diversified. You can see the strong growth of other larger Man AHL alternative strategies in Evolution, Dimension, and Alpha, and more recently, the very important development of total return strategies, including the alternative risk premia and target risk areas. That growth is driven by investment into our research, into our technology, and into our execution capabilities to preserve and expand our lead in this very important area. Not only can we adapt and grow our business organically, we've also been able to invest capital profitably in acquisitions when a clear opportunity presents itself.
Creating value through acquisitions requires disciplined sourcing and structuring of potential investments, and we have a team constantly assessing future opportunities. Saying no to overpriced acquisitions is key. When you do find a sensibly priced opportunity, much of the value creation is really about successful integration and finding the synergies growth, and that's often a tougher challenge. We acquired Numeric in 2014. At that time, its funds under management were $15.2 billion. That more than doubled over the next five years, reaching $35.8 billion at year-end. It's up a little bit since then because clearly the market moves have had an impact. We delivered very significant growth from inflows into Numeric. $4.7 billion of the inflows was into Numeric's traditional long-only products. This reflects both our ability to retain an acquisition's existing clients and to deliver the new strategies across Man's broader client base.
I think even more interesting is the GBP 5 billion of inflows into absolute and total return strategies, which reflect new strategies that are the result of Man Numeric's collaboration with other areas of Man. We've been able to develop those strategies because there is a real integration and real collective innovation and collaboration. This resulted, for example, in the launch of this alternative risk premia strategy, which now manages more than GBP 10 billion across Man. Technology is in the DNA of this business. Not just operating, but thriving in the COVID work from home environment shows this in operation. We were able to execute something like 1 million trades a week during the March market turmoil with everyone in the firm at home. That could not remotely be done with manual processes. It takes a true technology-empowered firm and a technology culture.
We believe that our technology delivers huge value to our clients, and our shareholders benefit whenever our clients are happy. When we look at our quant and tech expertise, experience, and resources, we think we have a huge competitive advantage as our industry becomes ever more technology-focused. If you look across the listed asset management firms around the world, I would challenge you to find anyone with our capabilities and our leadership position. Our experience is unparalleled in quant investing, and we continue to invest in quant research and in technology to protect and grow our lead. We benefit, our clients benefit, and you, the shareholders, benefit from our technology leadership. Man exists to help our clients meet their investment goals. We serve mostly the biggest institutions around the world, but it's easy to forget that those institutions represent over 50 million retirees and savers.
Those people are saving for their retirement or their healthcare or their children's education. Our purpose is to help them achieve their investment goals. We do that in conjunction with a range of partners who we rely on every day to do our job. We make sure our partners share our cultural beliefs and treat their employees fairly. We are also very conscious of the wider community in which we work and live. We're proud of the charitable initiative of the firm, and last year, the Man Charitable Trust contributed more than $1.2 million to charities and charitable initiatives focused on literacy and numeracy. We're also very focused on improving our environmental impact. For example, last year we reduced our carbon footprint by 19% and set a new target for 2022. Even more importantly, we consider the environmental impact in how we manage our clients' capital.
In January, we appointed Rob Furdak as CIO for ESG, a newly created role to further strengthen the firm's broad commitment to responsible investing. We put a huge amount of effort and energy into creating a strong and diverse culture across the firm, which has stood us in very good stead during this work from home environment. All of our team are incredibly proud to work for a firm which has such a highly qualified and fully diverse board as you see before you today. We want our staff to enjoy coming to work or doing work from home and be proud to represent the firm. That is what will allow them to be the best they can be, and if they achieve that, then that allows the firm to continue to succeed and outperform in the future. With that, let me turn the meeting back to John. Thank you.
We now come to the formal part of the meeting. As I previously mentioned, I'm not able to be physically present at the official meeting venue, but Mark Jones, our CFO, and Alice Rivers, our Company Secretary, are at the venue, and they constitute the legal forum, the quorum. Therefore, I will now hand over to Mark, who has kindly agreed to act as chair of the meeting for legal purposes from now on. Thank you, Mark. This could be a challenge if they can't get off mute. Mark, can you hear us?
Yeah, can you hear me?
Is that better?
Yes, that's it. Thank you. Okay. Apologies for that. Just to start again. Firstly, thank you, John, for handing over. Before moving on to the question-and-answer session, I would like to introduce the formal resolutions to be considered at the meeting. Please note that any questions you may have on these resolutions should be posed now, as there will be no real-time voting today after the question period. We will thereafter proceed to display the proxy votes and then to close the meeting. Full details and explanation of all the resolutions are set out in the notice of meeting, and with the consent of the meeting, I take the notice as read. Thank you. John mentioned earlier, for those of you who are joining by Webex, if you do have any questions, please type them into the Q&A function now.
Again, as a reminder, please ensure that you send these to all panelists to make sure that they are answered. When typing your question, please remember to state your name before your question. Just to remind everyone again that only shareholders, proxy holders, and corporate representatives are permitted to ask questions at the meeting. Please also note that only questions relating to the company's business activities or to the resolutions before the meeting should be asked. We will read out the questions and then respond to them. We've had some written questions in advance, and I will begin with those to allow people to type in any further questions at this time. The first question to the meeting is from Rachel Hargreaves as an appointed representative of ShareAction, and I will read the question out in full.
My question today relates to Man Group's gender pay gap. I would like to thank you for reporting your gender pay gap data this year as part of your diversity and inclusion report. Whilst I'm conscious that businesses have faced unprecedented challenges as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic impact of the crisis is unlikely to be gender neutral. It is important that companies continue to make progress on gender pay gaps, an issue which in the eyes of investors continues to carry a significant reputational risk if not appropriately addressed. It was encouraging to see that Man Group's difference in mean hourly rate of pay had decreased to 16.9% from 22.2% the previous year, and to read about the initiatives in place with the aim of reducing Man Group's gender pay gap and building a pipeline of female talent.
However, Man Group's mean bonus gap remains large at 70.7%. With respect to other priorities, I would like to ask the board if the board would commit to publishing an action plan and time-bound targets to also reduce the gap in bonus pay at Man Group. If I hand over to Luke to answer that question.
Sure. Thank you, Mark, and thank you, Rachel, ShareAction, for the question. Look, we have said all the way along, we're extremely committed to having a fully diverse business and ensuring that gender is not a driver of anybody's success, rather that we are a fully equal opportunity place. I think it's very important to highlight that we don't have an equal pay issue. The way gender pay gaps are calculated is not reflecting people doing similar jobs. We have a pipeline issue. The whole industry has a pipeline issue. As we've talked about in our Paving the Way pamphlet, we have a whole set of initiatives to try to improve that.
The reality is that in a business like ours, the large amount of the bonuses are paid to the most important senior fund managers, whether that's in the discretionary or the quant side or in the sales area. As we've talked about before, historically, there were not that many female fund managers. There are not that many senior female fund managers today. We have an enormous number of initiatives to try to help progress the careers of the female fund managers we have to bring others into the firm, and also both at the younger end and also in our women return program to try to bring in senior women where we can into the firm.
It all takes time, I'm afraid, and the result on bonus will depend on both getting senior people, senior ladies into the right positions as well as them performing in the funds that they are responsible, which is what drives the bonus for most of the higher-paid people. I do think it's important also to recognize one of the other things is around senior management in the firm. Managers in a business like Man are not generally paid as much as the people generating the returns, but they do represent a very important part of the firm, and we've made some decent strides over the last few years in increasing the percentage of women in our senior management. That's basically ExCo and ExCo minus one level. It was way too low at 15%.
It's now in the low 20s, and we want to get it up to over, I think, 24% as of today. Clearly we want to keep moving that % up to try to move it in the direction of getting above 30% over time. With that, I think I will pass back to Mark.
Thank you, Luke. The next question is from Phil Clark, and there are three separate parts, and they typically relate to the financials. I will take those and I'll answer them one by one. The first question is referring to pages 28 and 29 of the annual report and accounts. It was disappointing to see net management fees reducing from GBP 791 million to GBP 753 million, which is down 3.4% excluding guaranteed and associates, despite FUM increasing from GBP 108 billion to GBP 117 billion, up 8.5%. Well done. Fabulous. That's his emphasis, not mine. The chart on page 29 shows the overall margin declining from 70 basis points to 67 basis points, down about 4%.
The first part of the question is these numbers don't quite square away + 8.5%, which is the FUM move minus 4%, which is the margin move is still positive, and it's certainly not the minus 3.4%, which we see on revenues. What am I missing? The second part of the question is the annual report and accounts indicates the current run rate of the margin is even lower. How much lower does the board expect this to go and what can be done about it? In relation to the first part of the question, you're absolutely right. If you look at the year-end numbers, that wouldn't square away. What's going on there is if you remember, at the back end of 2018, in Q4 in particular, there was a material drop in markets which lowered FUM in the fourth quarter, particularly.
If you compared the average FUM in 2018 to the average FUM in 2019, that's actually what's driving the revenue change year-over-year rather than the comparison of the year-end to the year-end FUM. If you do the math on that basis, you'll see that it does square away. To the second question on where do we expect the run rate margins to go. We operate the business on the presumption that the revenue margin is going to continue to decline for the foreseeable future, primarily because clients on average seek to put new money into cheaper strategies on average. Therefore, there's a mix effect which affects the business. That clearly therefore requires us to continue to innovate and develop new products and continue to grow relationships with existing and new clients over time to generate revenue growth given that projected margin move.
We don't forecast a particular level that it ends at. We just assume that that is a background trend for the planning of the business going forward. Phil's second question is referring to pages 24 and 25 of the annual reports and accounts. One of the KPIs is adjusted management fee EPS growth, where the target is an increase of 5%-12%, but the outturn was nearly minus 17%, an enormous miss. My question is whether the target was realistic in a world of declining margins, and if so, what has gone so wrong? The KPIs are clearly set to be longer term measures than we don't typically adjust them year by year.
There will be years where they are relatively challenging as targets and the drivers specifically for last year, some of which Luke touched on in his presentation and some of which is actually implicit in your previous question. We entered 2019 with run rate revenues, which meant that there was a bit of a headwind to profitability in 2019 because of that sell-off in Q4 2018 that I mentioned. Then there are a number of non-operating factors which again, Luke mentioned previously, including the FX hedge rate that we had in 2019 compared to 2018, and then the impact of the new lease accounting rules that affected us last year.
There's a number of specific reasons why last year was more difficult to generate the growth that we have in the KPIs, and we don't typically adjust the KPIs year by year, even if we know that in individual years they may be particularly taxing to reach. The third and final question from Phil is, finally the dividend. I was rather struck by page four of the annual report and accounts. This shows FUM up 8%, statutory EPS up 8%, adjusted EPS up 56%, but rather incongruously, the proposed dividend is down 17%. The main reason for the different movements in EPS and dividend is the performance fee earned, which were good in 2019. I understand the linkage between dividend and management fee, but are disappointed to see the dividend cut unnecessarily in a good year.
The two sub-questions are, would it not have been possible to at least maintain the dividend through declaration of a special dividend as the performance fee profits? Secondly, what does the board intend to do with the surplus profits not declared as dividend? Surely you cannot cut the dividend and then buy back shares. Just to comment on those collectively. The board believes the existing capital policy is clear, and we've been consistent on it for a number of years. Just to reiterate that we pay out 100% of the adjusted management fee profits each year as a dividend. As you say, capital from the performance fee profits then accrues initially on balance sheet, and then we have been steadily returning that to shareholders through buybacks for a number of years now. The capital clearly is shareholders capital.
We're trying to do what is beneficial to them with that capital. It is worth noting that the buybacks do actually increase the dividend for shareholders who remain shareholders because it reduces the share count and therefore the same dollars of earnings are spread over a smaller number of shareholders and therefore increases the dividend per share. If you look over the past five years, that has been quite a significant effect as we've reduced the share count over time.
We think that the capital return policy overall is a sensible approach, and I think that the current environment provides some validation of that, where we're clearly confident in the business, happy to continue paying the dividend in a way that you're seeing some other companies pull pre-existing dividends and adjust capital returns going forward, while also keeping the company with the strong balance sheet and liquidity position that Luke mentioned previously. I would just end, Phil's also added a kind note at the end, which is to say thank you for taking the time and trouble to organize a video meeting with a presentation and Q&A. This sets you apart from most other companies and truly a beacon of excellence for shareholder engagement. Other companies should hang their heads in shame. So thank you, Phil.
Then our last question that I have is from, at this stage, anyone else who does want questions, please do just type them in as I said previously. The last question that we have at this stage is from Ian Brindley. Let me just read that question through. My question relates to how the company accommodates climate risk in its investment strategies. It is generally accepted that climate change poses an investment risk, both from the physical impacts of climate change and the mitigating actions that might be put in place by governments. There is a widely accepted narrative as to how this might play out. Governments are signed up to the Paris Agreement. To meet their obligations, governments will implement measures that significantly reduce oil and gas consumption.
Reductions in consumption will impact the business plans and assets of oil and gas producers, resulting in financial losses and stranded assets. This is a plausible narrative, but remains hypothetical. As a result of the COVID crisis, we now have a situation where governments have introduced measures that have resulted in dramatic reductions in oil and gas consumption, particularly oil. We have some real evidence against which to test our expectations. The impacts on companies have not been as we predicted. Companies across a range of sectors are now surviving only with government support and dividends are being canceled. The biggest impacts are not being felt in the oil and gas sector, i.e. producers, but by those companies whose business models depend on continued oil and gas consumption. Dividends have been canceled across a range of sectors: banks, insurers, travel and leisure, property, even IT support.
The oil and gas majors continue to pay dividends, albeit in Shell's case, at a reduced rate. Until two weeks ago, Shell was still using spare cash to buy back and cancel shares. The most obvious example of stranded assets are the fleets of aircraft parked around the world. If aviation does not resume, the capital invested in aircraft manufacturing plants will also become stranded. We now have evidence which suggests that the biggest financial impact of state-imposed reductions in oil and gas consumption may not be felt by oil and gas producers. My question is: Will the company be reviewing the climate-related scenarios on which it bases its investment strategies now that we have some actual evidence of the potential impact of any measures that might be imposed to reduce carbon emissions? I would hand over to Luke to answer that question.
Thank you, Mark. It's a very interesting question, I think clearly the simple version of the answer is to say yes. It's very important to be looking at how things are looking forward rather than looking backwards. As you say, we have had certain measures that have been tried and tested in a way that I don't think anyone would have imagined them being tried and tested. I think the behavior of, particularly the Saudis, but maybe the Russians as well, suggests a concern about stranded assets somewhere there in oil producers. Certainly oil country producers. I think it highlights a broader question, which is as we come out of this, clearly there are going to be significant changes in government policies.
I think the good sign from a climate change point of view is that we've seen significant reductions in climate effects or the things that drive climate effects during the course of this period. I think the worry is whether governments will have the same balance between their Paris Agreement commitments and growth in economies coming out of what, to us, feels like it's likely to be a very, it already is and will be, a growing painful recession, even potentially depression. Governments clearly are going to have, even in the most rosy scenarios, as you come out of all of this, government balance sheets are going to be in a mess. Governments have thrown enormous amounts of money, either directly or through central banks, at trying to protect employment through this. I think that's a very good thing.
Coming out of it, the governments are going to have to find ways of, A, raising more revenue, and I think that's likely to mean higher corporate taxes and higher taxes more broadly. I think if you look back at the financial crisis, basically what we saw was that global economies were put in significant stress and at the risk of collapse because of what was seen as excessive leverage and risk-taking in the banks. I think a lot of that leverage and risk-taking in the banks. Post that, there was significant changes in the leverage that banks were allowed to run, and also in stress testing in banks that forced them to run much more conservative businesses.
This time around, the banks, as of now, are not a cause of issues within this crisis, but the very levered corporate balance sheets and very operationally geared companies out there really are the source of what clearly been unable to withstand an economic shock, even for a month. I suspect that coming out of this, we're going to see changes in regulation about corporate balance sheets. I think we're going to see changes in regulation around minimum pay levels. I think we're going to see company boards, either of their own choice or through mandates from governments, going to increase the amount of stress testing going on in businesses and require them to run with much more risk protection.
All of which is going to create significant changes in business models and opportunity for well-managed companies, and problems for companies that have been badly managed, problems with their share price. I think as we start to look beyond the crisis, and I keep reminding everybody within our business that while the TV likes to say stock markets ignore current and discount the future and look through the crisis, the reality is the crisis is ongoing and we have to look at the actual effects of the crisis. As we come out, I think we're going to have to look at our models. They're going to have to operate quite differently. Yes, to take effect of climate change issues, also to take effect of financial leverage, also to take effect around what will be a natural.
I think everybody on this call can attest that we've realized that what is a critical worker was not what we thought it was two months ago. The person who makes sure that there's food in every food retailer is a critical worker. The person that delivers your goods from Amazon is a critical worker, as well as the ones that we might more naturally have thought of around nurses and teachers. I think you're going to see a significant change in regulation around companies, and I think that's going to lead to a lot of rotation within the stock market, which I hope provides an opportunity for us to pick good companies and avoid the bad ones and deliver significant value to our clients. I guess that's the end of that. Mark, do we have any other questions at this point?
No, we don't at this stage. Thank you all for attending and for your questions. That brings us to the end of our question period. I will now move on to the formal voting part of the meeting. The resolutions which are set out in the notice of the meeting will now be subject to a poll vote. This method of voting allows all shareholders, not just the two of us present, to exercise their vote. Shareholders were invited to vote by proxy in advance of the meeting, and I have discretion to vote a number of shares today as chairman of the meeting. On the slides, if we could just pull those up on screen, you will see the proxy votes received in advance of the meeting. Given the proxy votes and the votes in my hand today, I can confirm that all resolutions have been passed.
That concludes the formal business of the 2020 Annual General Meeting. As you heard earlier, the final votes will now be collated and the results will be announced to the market and posted on our website later today. As I just said, thank you all for your participation in our first webcast AGM, and for taking this time to join us at this unprecedented time. That concludes our 2020 Annual General Meeting, and we look forward to hopefully seeing you next year.