Neville Brink
CEO & Executive Director
Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us this morning at our interim results presentation. My name is Neville Brink, CEO of the Group. And I’m joined by Zafar Mahomed, CFO and over the next 1.5 hours, will take you through our half year results presentation.
The format that I’m going to follow is — I’ll give a quick overview of the results. I’ll then work through the divisions, the 3 operating businesses I’ll then Zaf — hand over to Zaf and he’ll do the group financial results. And then I’ll end off having a brief discussion on the next 6 months outlook and talk a bit about our strategy, and then we should have about half an hour for questions. So let’s kick off straight away.
So let me just start by saying people asked me how I felt about the results. And it’s — although we are flat on last year, it’s a quite pleasing result. And why I say that is it points to the diversification of our business. And the strategy that we’ve developed over the last 5 years of broadening our ability to deal with the volatility of the fishing industry. And it is a volatile industry, and we’ve had some tough challenges in the 6 months. But overall, our business has done well because where we’ve had challenges, other businesses have stepped up and replace the earnings that we’ve seen a drop off in particular in the fishmeal and oil side. And Lucky Star, our strategy remains to grow that brand and expand into new categories. We spend substantial capital in the Wild caught side, enhancing and upgrading our factories and vessels, and
