J. Erasmus
CEO & Director

Good day, and welcome to the results for Pepkor. The interim results for the 6 months ended 31 March 2026. As per usual, I'll just make a few opening remarks, Riaan will take you through the financial results. And then Sean and Garth will talk about what drives the business, and then we'll close with an outlook of how trading has been since the reporting period and then allow for some questions and answers.

So we're very happy to give a result of 12.1% in normalized HEPS growth for the 6 months. As we communicated to the Capital Markets Day a couple of weeks ago, the environment remains tough, unemployment, cost of living, competition still similar to what we saw a couple of weeks ago, but our customer focus -- strategy with customer focus continues to deliver the type of results that we can report.

Just some highlights for the 6 months. First of all, our retail platform or our store base increased to 6,657 stores, which is 89 new stores. We successfully implemented our targeted acquisitions. Our financial services continues to grow exponentially, especially driven by FoneYam with 1.3 million activations during the period. And as we discussed at the Capital Markets Day, we've got approval for our banking license. And hopefully, we can report back on that later this year.

And then lastly, before I hand over to Riaan, the informal market platform, which is now disclosed separately, continued to perform very well at a throughput of 20.3% for the 6 months or ZAR 34.7 billion.