Anthony Thunström
CEO, Member of Operating Board & Executive Director
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our 2026 first half results presentation. We will try to work through our formal agenda in just under an hour, take a short comfort break and then conclude with the Q&A session. It has been a difficult 6 months for the sector globally and for TFG across all 3 of our territories with the economic and consumer recovery that so many thought would play out this year further delayed. Against this pervasively soft backdrop, we also experienced extremely inconsistent trade in South Africa with significant and unpredictable fluctuations between each of the 6 months of this first half.
This partly reflects a greater concentration of spend around pay days, which do shift between reporting months and then very weak demand as household budgets run down toward month ends. In particular, June and September were blowouts with both our own as well as the RLC industry numbers reflecting 0 to negative growth for these 2 quarter end months, something that we haven’t experienced outside of the COVID or load shedding scenario. The softer-than-expected demand, especially in the middle of the winter season, resulted in winter sales being pulled forward and deepened across the market, and we had no choice but to follow with an inevitable impact on margin.
As painful as this is, we take our
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