Mr Price Grp Ltd S/Adr (MRPLY) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning everybody, I'm Mark Blair, the CEO of the Mr Price Group and thanks for joining us while we take you through our interim results to the 27th of September 2025. I'm going to be talking a little bit about the operating environment. Pranil Nandkumar, the CFO, will take us through the detailed group performance and then I'm going to share the longer term thinking with you and also the short term outlook. So moving into the operating environment, and I think there's already been much said about this. There's been other retailer presentations, so I probably don't have to say too much, except to say I think these graphs tell the full picture. Since COVID-19, there's been a prolonged period of negative real wage growth, rising debt service costs, and obviously inflation has been more elevated, but it seems to be improving now. But if you look at that graph on the left-hand side, there you'll see the negative wage growth in 2022 and 2023. Started picking up a bit thereafter, but all negatively indexed to the base of 2019. And what happened during that process over that time frame is that there was an access to debt of those consumers who could, and therefore on the right-hand side you see the debt service ratio going up as well. It's great to have a little tick down towards the end there, going into 2025, and we're hopeful that when we get to the outlook and the shorter-term future discussion, that that starts to trend in the right direction. But I think the picture here that it tells is looking at what's happened to general wages and wage increases over the period, just relative to the cost of living, many of the items that make up that cost of living have increased at a higher rate than people's wages. So there's some negativity in that. I think the good news i...