Good morning, everyone. My name is Grant Baker, and I'm the Chairman of Turners . Thanks for joining us at the 2025 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. There are a few housekeeping matters before we start. If the place catches on fire, go back out those doors and down the escalators, and apparently there will be a fire warden there to meet you. The bathrooms are outside and on the right. The notice of meeting and 2025 annual report and financial statements have been circulated and made available to shareholders. For those of you here in the room, there's a complimentary Tina air freshener on your seat, I believe. Oh, they're on the table. Get me a straight one. Not for the first time. A quorum is present, and therefore I declare the meeting open.
Now I'd like to introduce my fellow directors: Matt Harrison, Alistair Petrie, John Roberts, Lauren Quaintance, Antony Vriens, and Todd Hunter. Also at the table, right at the end, there's Aaron Saunders, who's the company's Chief Financial Officer. There are also a number of our senior managers and staff here today. Thanks for coming along. Welcome. Also in attendance today are the company's auditors, Staples Rodway, our legal advisors, Chapman Tripp, and other advisors. Thanks to all these firms for coming along and providing valuable services to Turners . Today you'll hear presentations from myself and Todd covering our business direction and the opportunities available to us and the progress we're making with those opportunities. Following the presentation, there will be an opportunity for discussion and any questions that you may have.
We'll answer questions on the resolutions at the time they're proposed, and there will be a further opportunity at the end of the meeting to ask any other general questions about the company and about our operations. This is probably sounding quite familiar, but we've had another record year for the business, and we keep doing what we say we're going to do. Our business model is standing up to every challenging micro or macro condition, and our Turners team continues to do an outstanding job, and our confidence in the business, the future of the business continues to build. We've shown this historic perspective before, and it's important to reflect on the progress we've made. Apart from COVID-impacted FY 2020, we've delivered growth in every year over the last 11. Our track record speaks for itself and for me as a substantial shareholder and for you as shareholders.
This is a fantastic outcome. The best news, though, is that we're not finished and we remain very focused on our growth opportunities. FY 2025 is our fifth record result in a row, and despite a very challenging macro environment the business was operating within, we've done very well. It was definitely a year of two halves, as we will go into later. Our team did a great job of reacting to the challenges, and they remain focused and motivated. Three out of four of our businesses are materially ahead of the previous year, and the other business had its second best year ever. The value of our diversified business and strong market positions continues to be a major strength. I'm not going to talk about the FY 2025 result, as Todd and Aaron have covered these when we announced in May.
I do want to talk about the simple formula we operate on, and I tend to repeat this every year, but it's still applicable. The formula is if we provide a quality environment and conditions for our people, this will give us the best chance of providing a quality experience for our customers, and this should lead to quality outcomes for you and me as shareholders. I want to drill into each of the parts of this equation a little bit further. Our strong culture is a huge strength in this business. Our very high levels of employee engagement combined with our employees' share scheme ownership gives us one of Turners' superpowers. We benchmarked our engagement scores against some very well-known New Zealand companies, and we stack up very well against them.
We have over 53% of our team owning shares in Turners, and we hope to see this number closer to 60% after we launch the 2025 scheme shortly. The combination of our highly engaged team and great customer experiences underpins the returns we can deliver to you and me as shareholders. I'm also rather fond of this graph, obviously as Chairman and as a shareholder. The compound annual growth rate is a pretty impressive 14% over this 11-year period, and very few NZ Index companies can lay claim to stats like that. Shareholders should be happy with their returns over the last month, as not only have they received record levels of dividends, but we've also had a material uplift in our share price as well. We've talked previously about our level of confidence in our organic growth plan.
We're executing well, and there's still plenty of runway for delivering on the plan. I try to take a 100-year view on this company. Turners has been around since 1967, and we want to be making decisions now that position it for the next 50 years. We try and bring a similar mindset to the team at Mainfreight. While we are in it for short-term value creation, we're also highly motivated by long-term value creation for all shareholders. That leads me to My Auto Shop. My Auto Shop is now getting rebranded as Turners Servicing and Repairs. We're mid-rebrand at the moment, and we're seeing a lot of momentum in this business. We've started selling multi-year service plans through the Turners branch network, and we're very pleased with the early take-up on these.
We're also just about to launch a material marketing campaign in Auckland using Tina and the Turners brand to create some awareness of the mobile servicing offering. We believe this is a very good example of an investment that makes long-term strategic sense for the Turners Automotive Group of businesses. Vehicle repairs is a huge business in New Zealand, and we want to be a big part of it. Our team's worked incredibly hard to ensure that some of the toughest economic conditions we've faced didn't derail our growth strategy. Auto retail remains our largest division, and the pressure it faced in the first half was no small matter.
While we're arguably in conditions worse than the GFC, we proved that the demand for used vehicles is resilient, and though margins were squeezed for a period, our ability to proactively manage those margins during the recovery in H2 was very pleasing. With auto retail firmly back in growth mode, we enter FY 2026 with a strong momentum across all segments, and we believe we're on track to reach our FY 2028 target earlier than expected. There's a lot to feel good about. The key takeaways, we're leveraging our scale to our advantage. Our track record speaks for itself, and there's much more to come. The business has stood up very well to the challenges of the economy. We have a special culture in the Turners business, very customer-focused and highly engaged with 53% of our team owning shares. This only supercharges the care factor in Turners.
We have some big growth opportunities, and everyone involved in the business is aligned. I can't finish this talk without mentioning Tina, of course. Tina 2.0 dropped in April, and we've been running the song since then. We've now had over 3.3 million views of the 60-second ad on YouTube and 2.7 million views of the 90-second version. It's been a phenomenal success, which doesn't often happen with updated ads and campaigns. We've spent a material amount more on media over April, May, as well as June, which has no doubt helped contribute to us knocking off ANZ and ASB off their top spot for the first time since December 2023 as New Zealand's favorite ad. The good news is we have more Tina content to come over the next few years.
Before I hand over to Todd, I'd like to acknowledge the efforts of our team, and that's from our Board, thank you, through to operational teams who deliver day in and day out for the business and for our shareholders. This group of people have been totally committed and always prepared to go above and beyond. We're really lucky to have such a talented and hard-working group of people in the business. I'll now hand over to Todd. Thank you.
Thanks, Grant. Sorry, I've got a little bit of a cough, so I might have to stop occasionally and either hack my way through this or take a glass of water. Great to be here again and seeing everyone in the room. Let's sort of kick things off. I think we're really pleased to be in the used car market at the moment. I think the new car guys have been finding things pretty tough. As you can see from this graph here, we're just trying to demonstrate really how resilient the used car category is in New Zealand. Although people are definitely spending less on cars, which is kind of obvious when we're going through the crunch that we are, there's still lots of cars changing hands in New Zealand.
Overall used car volume from April to August this year is tracking around 3% ahead of the same period last year. We've definitely seen a sort of lift in activity. With the continued pressure on household budgets, we're still seeing demand for those lower value cars at the expense of the high value cars be very strong. Our expectation is that will just revert as the economy improves. Unsurprisingly, I suppose with a tough economy and particularly tough to source cars, we've seen a lot of dealers really start to leave the market. You can see that red line really starting to tail off in the last six months or so. There's quite a strong correlation between dealer numbers and the number of used imports coming into the country, and it certainly is getting difficult to make those used imports work. It's another reason we're seeing dealers leave.
In terms of the business divisions, the Turners brand is obviously still very, very strong, in fact, probably growing stronger, I would say. We've continued to improve the way we source vehicles, and we've really continued to speed up our operational agility. Auto Retail revenue and profit were down for the year, reflecting particularly that very tough kind of period we went through the first half of last year. We saw margins and volumes improve in the second half, supported by our disciplined approach to pricing, a lot of focus on age stock, and that proportion of domestic sourcing increasing. I would like to point out this is the second highest ever auto retail result. Although it went down in relative history, it's still a very, very good result. Team Lear did a super job.
We've seen this slide before, and we've done a lot in the last 12 months in particular. All of those sort of green lines are projects that we've delivered, with really the big highlight this year being the three new branches in Christchurch, which I'll talk about shortly. The property team and our operational teams have been very busy bringing these projects on stream. They've done an amazing job. I think I've demonstrated that we've got some real capacity to do a lot of these projects at the same time, with some genuine capability around delivering these projects on budget and generally ahead of time. As you can see, really our focus now is on not what we've done, but what we're going to do. I really want to bring your attention to that list on the right. We have a number of live offers that we are working on.
There are a mix of either in negotiation or conditional offers that we're working through or completing due diligence on a number of targets. There's a good pipeline building. You should feel confident as shareholders that there's plenty of opportunity still ahead of us, and we're working hard on that. Just a little reminder again that we carry all of these properties on our balance sheet at cost. There is going to be an uplift in the valuations on these sites over time. I just wanted to quickly show you some of the newest branches in the network as well. It's hard to portray kind of really what's going on in Invercargill with one photo, but this is an almost triple size site that we've opened up there. We've moved from a 2,000 square meter site to a 5,500 square meter site a couple of months ago.
Good change for us. The trading that we've been doing since then is materially higher than what we were doing on a 2,000 square meter site. Nothing really surprising out of that, but good to see nonetheless. This is what's happened in Christchurch. There's a map of Christchurch. You can see the red dot in the middle was where we were. We've kind of spread ourselves out across the city. We've had three projects on the go. I've got a couple of little videos just to show you. The first one is Turners Cars in Hornby, which is the one in the west, sort of southwest, I guess, of the city. That came on stream April, Aaron. This is a little video of the activity site. You can see why we like that site so much.
Busy arterial roads, corner site, massive blue building, very recognizable what we're about and what we're doing there. I would say the trading that we've done there has been very, very good since we've opened. This was the second site we've delivered, just down the road from our old site on Moorhouse Ave, which is the kind of main vehicle selling kind of road in Christchurch. We're always keen to have a presence there. Pretty expensive land in a much smaller site, but here's a little shot of what that looks like. Apparently, the sun's always shining in Christchurch. Hopefully, you get a sense from that site again that we're almost trying to bring this sort of new car kind of feel to used cars. It's very, very identifiable.
This sort of iterative process now that we've had around branches has really kind of sped up our delivery and what we know works and the right configuration between operations and office and admin sort of space and how we configure the processing part compared to the retailing part of those sites. The team are really kind of getting their cadence going on this, and we've got a very kind of cookie-cutter approach to this now. No prizes for guessing the similarities you can see in the third site. It's almost identical in terms of the footprint and things, but this is out by the airport, runs alongside State Highway 1. Here's another little video showing you. We're probably doing that video slightly early, like there's a few gaps in that yard, so we're busy filling it up at the moment.
It's only been in operation for just on a month, right, Greg? If that. Running along State Highway 1, the profile is amazing. Again, nice corner site. Collectively, those three projects, we've invested about NZD 35 million, NZD 36 million into Christchurch. We own all of those sites, and I think pretty quickly we'll be looking for a fourth, based on the way things are tracking so far. We're definitely seeing upside from the three over the one. It's been a great move for us. Okay, continuing on, moving on to finance. Finance for us has been a very strong performer in FY 2025. We've continued to maintain our discipline around credit quality. That is sort of sacrosanct to us. We've seen further improvements in our overall lending KPIs. The weighted average interest rate is up. Loan arrears continue to perform materially better than the market average.
I thought it was useful just to give you some sense of kind of what's happened in the last sort of four months or so. You can see that sort of plateauing period where we were really kind of dealing with the interest rate hiking cycle. We were having to focus very hard on our pricing and maintaining our margins. We were quite prepared to let our loan book drop a little, and we weren't focused around growth. We were really focused around margin and credit quality. What we've seen this year is, you know, we've got a bit more confidence in the outlook. We've seen our loan book really start to grow, and that's coming out of market share wins that we're getting. We've seen 5% growth in our loan book just over the first four months of this financial year.
Really solid growth and origination, which is great to see. I can reassure you that we are not taking on more risk off the back of that growth. Our average credit score continues to lift. In the first four months of this year, running at 745, slightly higher than where we ran at in the second half of last financial year. That premium borrower risk segment, so super prime, we would call that, makes up 56.4% of our loan book. We have a very, very high quality loan book, as you can see from this chart here. The red line being information we get from Centrix, which shows the average arrears for the motor loan portfolio in New Zealand compared to our arrears running at half of that. We think this focus on quality is absolutely the right strategy for us in running this finance book. Moving on to insurance.
We've had good, strong premium growth across all our insurance portfolios, with particularly some of our key distribution partnerships continuing to deliver significant value. Those are the large dealers and finance brokers that we partner with. Also, our comprehensive motor vehicle insurance portfolio, which is underwritten by Suncorp, has increased 25% over FY 2024. We've launched our new digital platform, enhanced our direct-to-consumer capabilities, and built a partnership with the New Zealand AA as well, which was successfully launched and showing early signs of promise. Claims ratios are a very important area for us to focus on in terms of running this insurance business. They're continuing to just drop down, probably leveling out now. Certainly, this focus for us around risk pricing, it's making sure we get the right return for the risks that we're taking on in that insurance portfolio, particularly around our mechanical breakdown insurance.
That means we price European cars much higher than we price Japanese cars, for example. We've laid in much more levels of risk over the last 12 months. We've moved from six risk categories to 14, which just means we're pricing more accurately that risk that we're taking and making sure that we get the right return for that risk. We're much more sort of sophisticated and detailed in this than our competitors. In credit management, we're continuing to see the business rebuild from that low point in 2023. Revenue up 5% and profit up 11%. We've continued to see debt load building in line with a tightening economy. Collections is a little tougher. Certainly, the arrangements that we're putting in place are for longer and lesser amounts. Probably not a surprise given the economy we're operating in. We've recently onboarded a major new corporate customer, so that's Westpac Bank.
We're seeing a good increase in that first referral debt we get from our corporate customers. This is some data we get from Centrix. Just mapping New Zealand-wide credit metrics, and you can see, yeah, we're still at eight-year lows. Nothing's really improving in this space. There is a tailwind of kind of debt load to come for EC credit. With funding, really my key message for you is that our banks remain very, very supportive. I think that the track record that we have with them, they can see the way we manage this business from a risk perspective. They have a high degree of comfort with us as one of their customers. We've got plenty of funding capacity, and it would seem plenty of opportunity from them to get more funding if we need it.
We've got funding capacity in place to support the current committed branch expansion plans and certainly to support the sort of Oxford growth we expect over the next 12- 18 months. This is the, I mean, the next two slides are probably all of the two slides everyone wants to hear about. They care about those other ones. In terms of outlook, we've seen a bit of a change in the auto retail business in terms of that mix between consignment cars and owned cars in the first half. Lease volumes are definitely down. I think a large number of those corporate lease customers are just extending leases and not taking on new commitments, which has meant we've got less cars coming back. I would consider that a timing issue. Those cars will come back. It's just they haven't come back in the first half.
Greg and his team have done a super job of kind of making up for that by buying more cars locally. We're still running ahead in terms of unit sales on last year. I think we've also seen a bit of profit sort of impact from that transition in Christchurch. Again, unsurprisingly, when you move from one to three and all the people kind of moving from one branch to three, there's just a lot of disruption that's been going on there. I think we're going to see that lift up really quickly. There has been some disruption around that in the first quarter. We've also absorbed a bunch of spend around that relaunch of that Tina campaign. It was about NZD 600,000 of additional media spend that we put into that campaign this year than last year.
Right thing to do, but obviously there's a kind of one-off associated with that. We're still expecting the second half to deliver strong vehicle margins and volumes as the economy improves and overall demand improves. We'll see a positive impact from the Tina investment and the benefits of that new Christchurch branch footprint. In finance, we'll be maintaining our credit discipline. It's an absolute non-negotiable for us. I think solid book growth with stable margins. In insurance and premiums, holding up very well. Claims ratios are stable. We're seeing good traction in our digital sales. We should see good progress there. Finally, credit management, a payment bank is rebuilding as debt load increases from the tightening economic conditions. While the economy is best to be described as patchy, we've certainly seen consumer confidence deteriorate since Liberation Day.
In a very strong sort of January to March period, then it really tailed off kind of April onwards. I think with interest rates still being restrictive and unemployment increasing, the economy is still clearly bouncing along the bottom. It was good news yesterday. It's clear we need to see more cuts as a country. Despite those challenges, we're still expecting a record first-half performance. Excuse me. We're guiding to have net profit before tax at least 10% ahead at the first half. We should be operating in a more positive environment in H2. We're still on track, well on track, I would say, to achieving our midterm target of NZD 65 million NPBT by FY 2028, earlier in FY 2028. I'll now hand back to Grant for discussion in relation to the annual report or today's presentations. Apologies for the coughing.
Yeah, what's worse? Todd and I were in a car together all day yesterday, and I think he might have given it to me. Thanks, Todd. Are there any questions on the presentations or the results?
Grant, I'm Alan Best. I'm from New Zealand Shareholders Association, as well as myself. Yeah, and happy, I might say. Congratulations on a fabulous effort in a pretty difficult market. I was wondering if perhaps Todd could tell us a bit more about the total used car market in New Zealand. Now we know there's quite a bit of rubbish there, and Turners is trying to position itself above that rubbish, which I think is the right way to go. What is the share of a pretty big and diverse market at the moment? How do you identify the consumer segment that you're really looking at, looking after?
Okay, you're going to answer that, Todd? Yeah, thanks.
Thanks, Alan. Yeah, our share runs at sort of just under 10%. We kind of bounce around up to 10%, and depending on what's happening in the market, when we look at.
Plenty of opportunity.
Plenty of opportunity here. It's a good insight. You're right. We do try and position ourselves as a trusted brand and a trusted place to buy and sell cars. One of the things I'd say is the existing fleet in New Zealand is old. We have roughly 20% of cars in New Zealand that are more than 20 years old. Think about that for a minute. That's 800,000, 900,000 cars in New Zealand that are more than 20 years old, which is effectively past their scrapping age. One of the things we do is we try and sell cars that are newer than that. We have this great combination of those consignment cars, those ex-lease cars we get, which are generally three to four-year-old cars, tend to be the more expensive cars.
Cars that we are buying locally or importing ourselves tend to be under that price point, but generally in that NZD 8,000- NZD 15,000- NZD 20,000 kind of range. Depending on what's happening, where we see demand in the market, we'll pivot to the bottom end of that or the upper end of that. That's how we're thinking about the market, Alan.
With your Tina profile, obviously you have to do some consumer research. How do you identify the consumers that you're really targeting?
Generally, we're trying to appeal to anyone in New Zealand who wants to buy a car. The research tells us that 60% of New Zealanders spend less than NZD 10,000 on a car. 80% spend less than NZD 20,000 on a car. New Zealanders actually don't have a lot of money to spend on cars, neither do they spend a lot of money on cars. If you kind of think about that for a second, that's why we are trying to position our stock largely in that sub-NZD 20,000 car. Once you get above that price point, you start getting pretty thin in terms of the addressable market pretty quickly. Our brand is a broad church. That is a reality. Tina has been unbelievable in terms of creating that broad church appeal. It still staggers me that you get a four-year-old who loves Tina and a 74-year-old.
It's a very unusual outcome to happen. That is a massive credit to our marketing team and Greg's team in terms of the way they've executed on that campaign.
She's a very ordinary-looking heroine.
I guess that's part of her appeal, right? Exactly that.
Yeah, that's great. In the annual report, you're talking about 4% of the Japanese fleet being electric vehicles. That seems a surprisingly low proportion of new sales in Japan. Does that mean that you face a lot of competition in bidding for cars in Japan?
There is a lot of competition, particularly international competition now, for used imports in Japan. The number there, Alan, is really highlighting how hard it is to get used EVs. They're not sold in great numbers in Japan because those manufacturers have essentially pursued a hybrid strategy, let alone the kind of shipping complications. A lot of shippers don't want those cars on their boats anymore because of the fire risks and hazards and things. It's super hard to get used EVs. The way the market has gone, we do not really want to own used EVs either. There seems to be a way to take some money and lose it.
Todd or Grant, you've talked about My Auto Shop. When do you think you'll be able to report it as a segment?
It's there, isn't it?
At the moment, we own just over 50% of that business. We have options over the next 12- 24 months to increase our stake. I think at the time it becomes a subsidiary, we'll start to disclose quite a bit more information about their business, within the next 12- 24 months.
Hello everybody, my name is [Uri Sales, Head of JSL Fund], and I'm a shareholder. On page eight, I think it was, point seven, you said that you're expecting a slowly recovering economy. Yesterday, the central bank was talking the opposite. As a matter of fact, in July, something seemed to have snapped in New Zealand. I'm not sure if you've seen the continuous news. Credit card spending was down 4% in Auckland in July, was down 20% on K Road. From aviation, we heard similar news. I was wondering if in your business in July also something happened. When you say compare May, June, and July, year-on-year, was there a steadiness of slow growth or did something, could you see something in July as well? Thank you.
Firstly, I'd like to say that in our view, the Reserve Bank got it horribly wrong in July by holding rates. What's happening, and I have some sympathy for them, there is definitely a two-speed economy. The South Island is just going great guns, and anecdotally, there's evidence around unemployment which supports that. Unemployment in Auckland is 6%. Unemployment in Dunedin is 3%. Essentially, it's a full employment economy across the South Island. For our business, as Todd said, we're a broad church. People need to change their cars. We have seen, I mean, it feels like grumpy growth, but we have seen growth in the first quarter, on the first quarter last year, across just about all of our segments. We're happy that the business is still performing really well in what are still, I guess, best described as mixed trading conditions.
Certainly, the South Island, the lower North Island, excluding Wellington, those parts of the country are performing really, really strongly for us and for others, I believe. Auckland is just diabolical at the moment, Uri, and your spending figures kind of highlight that. I think that probably the thing that's different from when we published the annual report is what's happened with CPI, it's hitting people when money they can't avoid spending. People can't avoid buying groceries. They can't avoid paying insurance and rates, or they shouldn't avoid paying insurance and rates. I think the experience of CPI for people is higher than what their official numbers are, perhaps. I definitely think interest rates are still restrictive. In 2019, pre-COVID, the OCR was 1.75%. Even after yesterday's cut, it's still 3%.
I think interest rates are still restricting the recovery, and the reason for that is the Reserve Bank are worried that so much money is going into rural areas with high agricultural commodity prices. Certainly, interest rates need to come down to restart the Auckland economy. Finally, it seems that they've realized that. They're to be applauded, I think, for that, albeit belatedly realizing that.
Thank you.
Aaron did a much better job of answering that than I would have.
To you, Todd. You've mentioned that the company owns 17 of its sites and carries those sites at cost in the company's books. Is there a potential for sale and leaseback kind of arrangements somewhere in the future?
Yeah, there's certainly an opportunity to recycle capital if we need to. I would say we like owning those sites. Strategically, those sites, we want some protection around them. We want the control over what happens to them. It makes complete sense for us to own them, which is why we are trying to own more of them. Aaron will tell you, if we're going into a new location, we always like to benchmark a lease option against an owned option and kind of use the two to test our conviction and thinking around the kind of costs that we're taking on. I think increasingly you kind of come back to the strategic rationale for owning these sites. One really good example I think is we bought a piece of land out in Rosc ommon Road in Wiri, 2014, 10,000 square meters.
We've been running our trucks and machinery business out there very successfully. Obviously, things have changed in Wiri over the last 10 years. We would like to repurpose that site now as a car site. The trucks and machinery site will move, the business will move further out. We move the car site onto there. In the long term, we may not be the best economic user of that land. We'll recycle the capital and go again. I think we get the choice around that if we own it.
Thank you. The next question is just so obvious. I don't know why anybody, nobody else asks it. I don't know why you don't comment on it. It goes to the expansion of the company, either via organic growth, which is what you're doing, or takeover. Do you ever consider taking over 2 Cheap Cars? Is that something you've considered?
I think I have answered this at a previous meeting. No, it's the short answer. I mean, we are interested in M&A, but you've got to find the right thing. We're growing 14% year-on-year. We're growing quite fast. It's just got to be the right thing. We're always on the lookout, but we've never found the right thing.
Okay, I wouldn't mind you amplifying on why that is the wrong thing.
I think it is the right thing. You know, if you could find the right acquisition, I mean, my history of businesses, I think. Is your question related specifically to 2 Cheap Cars?
Specifically. Yeah, why that isn't a right acquisition for us. Yeah.
Well.
It's a good option.
I don't really want to be disparaging about 2 Cheap Cars. I guess from what Todd was saying before, they're operating in a different segment than us. If we're in that sort of NZD 10,000 and up, I'm not sure what their parameters are, but you know, more likely to be NZD 10,000 and down as their name would suggest. It's not a market we want to play in.
Okay, thank you.
Yeah. Sorry, a couple of people.
Thanks. You closed your subscription business. Is that dead and buried or will it rise again?
Subscription?
Subscription. Essentially, we worked out that we'd make more money from selling those cars than we would if we were subscribing to them.
Yeah, thanks. There's someone over this side.
I noticed a number of your businesses.
Sorry, we got a microphone?
Sorry. You've got Oxford Finance and Autosure and Credit Control. I'm just wondering why, given the strength of the Turners brand, why you don't rename them like Turners Finance, etc.
We sell those products through lots of other car dealers, so it's got to be kind of a neutral brand. That would be mainly my rationale, unless you've got anything to add to that, Todd.
That's the exact reason.
Yeah.
Hi, [Roger Clark], shareholder and accountant. I just want to thank you guys for your hard work. I think you've done a stellar job. I mean, the challenges that the business has faced since COVID over the last five, six years, you've just nailed it. Thank you very much for your hard work.
Appreciate that. Thank you.
Just wonder if you could unpack the nuances between Tina Mark One advertising campaign and the Mark Two campaign. It's quite a bit more personalized around Tina, isn't it? I quite like the first campaign. You addressed a few issues that worry people, like driving off in your car and not returning it, and the creepy guy in the window knowing where you live. I loved it. I thought that really nailed it. You've kind of moved more to the Tina personality now. I just wonder whether you could unpack the nuances behind the shift in the campaigns.
One of the last miles behind the campaign.
Yeah, sure. It's a good question. Tina has grown in popularity, and we've been trying a few things and expanding what she does and how she does it. It was about a year or two ago we rolled out a song, so to speak, and we had such good feedback on that song. We got to the point that we said we actually need to bring that to life in pictures or in video. That was kind of the gestation on the Tina road trip campaign, which I'm assuming you were referring to. One thing that we did do when we shot that campaign was we actually shot eight other ads at the same time. There's more to come.
What you were talking about, the more functional advertising around buying and selling and other specific messages, we do actually have a bank of those coming, but we're kind of drip feeding them out because we're hoping that they last us for four years like the last campaign did. There's more to come. Watch this space. Excellent. Thank you so much.
Do we have any further questions? Okay. Now, you see this? I'd now like to move to the resolutions before the meeting. These were notified in the notice of meeting, and explanatory notes have been provided. Voting on each of the resolutions in the notice of meeting will be by way of poll. Baker Tilly Staples Rodway, the company's auditors, will act as scrutineers. Please use the voting paper you used in the mail or were given when you registered for this meeting. If you don't have a voting paper, you'll be able to request one from the scrutineers when the voting takes place. Only shareholders, proxy holders, or corporate representatives of a shareholder may vote on today's resolutions. The first resolution is to record the reappointment of Staples Rodway as auditors of the company and authorize the directors to fix the auditor's remuneration.
Has anyone got any questions on that? No. I'd like to move this motion. Could I have a seconder, please? Okay, we've got two. Thank you. The next two resolutions are in regard to director elections for myself and for Todd Hunter. I have to temporarily step down here and invite John Roberts to talk through the resolution for my own reelection. I'll pass you over to John.
Thank you, Grant, and good morning, everybody. It's great to see so many familiar faces in the room. Thank you for coming along today. We believe that having directors with relevant industry, commercial, and governance skills is essential for the ongoing success of Turners Group. Diversity of thought, particularly in the broader commercial acumen, is also taken into consideration by the Board when we review the directors' positions. We absolutely believe we currently have directors with hands-on experience in finance, insurance, and debt management sectors, as well as directors with expertise in governance and very diverse experience in entrepreneurial skills and sales, digital marketing, communication, and business growth. I'm going to ask Grant to come up now and address the meeting in support of his reelection. Grant?
A bit of an obstacle, of course. Yeah. Hi everyone. You've heard a lot from me already, but thanks for coming along today. I've been Chairman of this business since 2009, so in a few days, that's going to be 16 years. When I started writing this, I was going to say I'm enjoying it as much as I did when we first started. The reality is I like it a lot more now, and I didn't really like it at all when we first started because it was so problematic. Those of you who remembered, we took over a company called Dorchester, which was still actually the company, although it's called Turners now because we acquired Turners. In 2009, when we first got involved, it was the middle of the GFC, and it was really touch and go whether the business would survive.
I was a bit younger then, so I could take a bit more stress, but a lot of sleepless nights and some very, very stressful conversations with skeptical bankers and shareholders, and not too many people were around who believed in our vision of the future. In fact, at one time in the early days, the bank appointed a PWC insolvency partner who had to sit on all our board meetings, and we couldn't spend money without them, and couldn't even write a check without his say-so. It was an interesting time. Eventually, I abused him one day, and he left the meeting never to come back. We did get rid of him. As we kept trying, we did find some believers.
Probably the first of those was John Waller, who's passed away sadly since then, but he was Chairman of the BNZ and helped us a lot with restructuring finance, the BNZ. Like Matt Harrison. Matt sold us the EC credit business and swapped shares in Dorchester for the EC credit business, which was a pretty brave move at the time. It's been repaid handsomely now, but people thought he had rocks in his head at the time. Hugh Green, I don't know if those of you remember him, but Hugh was fantastic. The group I was involved with called Business Bakery, we invested money into the company, and Hugh said, "I'll invest dollar for dollar with you to help recapitalize the company," which he did. He was a great guy to work with. I also mentioned Paul Byrnes. I know Paul's somewhere here today, so I saw him come in.
Paul went through a really tough time and ran the business, was CEO when it was really tough, and helped us get through. I'd also mention Bartel Holdings, who's an overseas company represented by Al here, but they were a big shareholder in the original Turners business. We got introduced to them by Al, and they've stayed the course, reinvested in the business, and Al's on the board, so a special thank you to them as well. At this point, I'd also like to acknowledge my ex-business partner, Paul Smithies, who passed away very suddenly of a heart attack nine years ago. He was very involved in, when we were doing acquisitions, he was very involved in those acquisitions, and we couldn't have achieved what we achieved without his help.
Of course, as I mentioned before, we've got a fantastic team here led by Todd, and Todd's just the best CEO I've ever come across. It's made my life super easy and less stressful. He takes all the stress instead. The work's not finished, and I do want to be reelected as I really love the job, and I want to be involved in our future. As I've said before, I'm quite a big shareholder here, so I want to steward the value of my shares and the increase in that value as well as yours. I'd really appreciate you voting for me. I still have a lot of confidence in the business, huge confidence, and for the short, medium, and long terms, and plenty of energy to keep encouraging Todd and the team. You might not call it encouraging, but yeah. I appreciate your vote. Thank you.
Thanks, Grant.
Okay, Grant, thanks for that. We'll now deal with the specific resolution. Resolution two is in relation to the reelection of Grant Baker, who retires by rotation and has offered himself for reelection. Are there any questions from the floor? No, okay. Thank you very much. I'd like to move this motion. Do I have a seconder? Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone. I'll now hand back to Grant.
Good shutdown there. That's my morning workout. Okay, now on to resolution three, which is in relation to the reelection of Todd, who retires by rotation. I think that's a technical term. He just appointed, I think it was in May. I thought it would be useful to give a little background to Todd's appointment to the board because people have asked why we've done that. One of the reasons Turners has been successful has been due to the continuity of management and directors. You know, we do have to look forward and work out what our succession plan is, and that's for, you know, division managers, staff, and so on, but also on the board. As I just said, I've been around 16 years and, you know, not going to go on forever. What's the best succession plan for the company?
That's why we brought Todd onto the board because, you know, as he nears his kind of full-time work retirement age, he's a very logical guy to come on the board with us. That's kind of the reasoning, and obviously he has a very good knowledge of the business. I'll now ask you to speak in support of your reelection, too.
Yeah, thanks, Grant. Thank you for the kind words as well. Next year, I'll have worked two decades in this business, so I do know this business pretty well. Feels like it's a long time, but it's gone pretty quickly. I have been heavily involved in the operations of this business and Group CEO over the last nine years, and with the support of a fantastic group of people who work here, we've built up a very strong track record of success. As Grant said, I think a massive part of the success is the continuity and consistency that we've had here, particularly around people. We are an organization that believes in growing its own timber. I just acknowledge Paul. Paul was a massive sponsor for me to come through from being CEO of Turners Auctions to coming through as Group CEO, nearly nine years ago.
That didn't come without some risks, but I think it is a hallmark of this organization that we actually back people from within it. We've been very consistent in our strategy. We have a very deliberate way that we go about things. We invest in making sure that our culture is strong. I think continuing to focus on that succession right through our business and maintaining that strong culture will ensure our success continues. I have experienced some cycles in this business. I was working for Turners through the GFC, through the pandemic, through this most recent economic downturn. I've seen what works, what doesn't work, and I bring that experience with me as CEO and as a director.
As a shareholder, I am a shareholder in this business as well, I want directors around this table who've seen the bad times as well as the good times because I think that's where this group actually really delivers. This might sound a little odd, but we've done some really great things in this business, but we've also taken some missteps, and not everything that we've done has worked. I think it's really important to reflect on the things that we have done well, but also take forward the experiences around the things that we haven't got so right and take those lessons and apply them to our decision-making going forward.
Whether that's our response when we lost a major customer in 2013, we lost AA, which was our biggest customer at the time, how we managed our way out of that, how we managed our way out of a suboptimal lending partnership with MTF, buying a business that really didn't culturally align with us when we bought Buyright Cars. Those are all sort of missteps that have all helped shape the successful decisions that we've made kind of post those years. I definitely bring those experiences with me and as part of this team. Thank you for your support, and I hope I get your vote.
Thank you. A ppreciate it.
Need to talk to you. I'll put that screen there low. Not looking at anyone. Okay, time to vote. A number of shareholders who are not attending the meeting in person have voted by proxy. I can advise that the proxies have been received for 28,053,145 shares, representing 31.01% of the total shares on issue. If you want to vote in the room, please complete your voting paper by ticking for, against, or abstain in the appropriate place on the form and ensure you've signed the form. Please do not tick the discretion box. If you have any difficulty or do not have a voting paper, please raise your hand and someone will assist you. Once everyone's finished, scrutineers will collect the voting papers. I'm going to...
Can we have a seconder?
Oh, sorry. Did I? I might have left that page behind. Does someone want to be a seconder for Todd? Oh, there's lots of them. All right. Thank you. All right. We're ready now. Yeah. Okay.
Sure. Sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, Todd, I think you're going to get voted on the board, no problem. I guess my concern is, is this a signal in any way that you're running out of gas in terms of your role as CEO?
It is still full water.
Excellent.
What I should have said was, I mean, I am so proud of what this group of people have done over 20 years. It's amazing. Why would I want to leave it?
Excellent. That's the correct answer.
Yeah. I think so. Okay, we can vote now. Give it two or three minutes, and we'll come back and close the meeting. Okay, that paused. All right, thanks everyone. The results of today's voting will be posted to the NZX as soon as possible. That brings the formal part of the meeting to a close. Are there any other shareholders who'd like to discuss anything about the business today or the presentation or anything else? We'll give you a microphone.
Thank you, Grant. My name's John Blundell. We've been shareholders for quite a few years in Turners. I've never attended an AGM because I've had nothing to say to the situation that you guys run. What I would say is we all owe you a huge thank you for, in my humble opinion, having only been investing for something like 50 years, that Turners is by far and away the most outstanding listed company on the New Zealand Stock Exchange, first among equals, but slightly ahead. I'm an unabashed follower of Warren Buffett, who says, "Buy good companies at fair prices." Having followed that advice, we have purchased Turners over the years at fair prices and then sat on our bums for many years. That has delivered an IRR return for our current holding of in excess of 28%.
It is delivering currently a gross cash return, because you guys pay tax with imputation, of 10%. Very importantly, you've delivered compound dividend growth of 7.5% over the decade. As Buffett says, "Growth and value are joined at the hip." You guys have had the ability to execute so well. I wouldn't say that Turners was a good company that Mr. Buffett describes. It's an absolutely brilliant company. I've taken the opportunity to come along today to simply say thank you. I'm sure I speak on behalf of others for the absolutely outstanding performance you've delivered over long periods of time. Success is not assured in business, and success and work only comes first in the dictionary. I know how hard you guys have all worked over many years, the whole team, executed brilliantly, and just say thank you.
Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. I hope someone from the media was listening. If that's all, we'll call the 2025 Annual Meeting of Shareholders to a close. Thanks for coming today, and please join us for some refreshments. Thank you.