Bernard Berson
CEO & Executive Director

So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Bidcorp trading update for the first 4 months of the FY ’26 year. It’s going to be another beautifully boring presentation. I don’t think it will take all that long because we don’t have all that much to update you with other than, I guess, to say that we remain on track, and we remain — we continue to remain delivering on what we said we would. Conditions aren’t particularly buoyant out there generally, and we’ll talk about each jurisdiction separately, each broad jurisdiction. But generally, it’s not wonderfully buoyant out there.

So I think under the conditions that we face, our businesses have once again performed very well. And I thank my team out there, 31,000 people around the world who continue to do an absolutely amazing job and continue to deliver in times that aren’t necessarily all that great. So we can only think about what’s going to happen when much better days do come, and they will in many geographies. And we can already start seeing the green shoots of that in some countries in which we operate.

So you’ve seen the numbers that we’ve given, and let’s not get too caught up in the exact minutia of the numbers. It only has been 4, and I think it’s more important to talk about the trends and what we’re seeing in the absolute numbers, things do move around a little bit. Tax rates move around a bit, interest finance costs move around a little bit. Seasonality impacts numbers in various different ways. The rand is behaving in different ways. It has