From the Chief Executive Officer: Louise Walsh

Louise Walsh: Hello I’m Louise Walsh the CEO of the Future Generation companies and welcome to our Virtual Investment Forum.  I’m delighted to be introducing this forum, and back in May we presented the first one, and interestingly enough we had forty thousand viewers.  We were exceptionally excited about presenting it, the first virtual one due to COVID, and this is now our eighth investment forum.  But in the past of course we’ve presented them as live events.  The May one we had a fantastic guest panel and stock picks from our leading fund managers.  This investment forum for the first time we’ll be doing the same thing but also an additional live interview which we are very excited about.

Now, we can’t thank these fund managers enough who have supported Future Generation Australia and Future Generation Global over the last six years.  These fund managers are incredibly generous and without them we would not have these companies, and these managers have outperformed.  They’ve outperformed over all time periods.  And we’re particularly delighted that even in the last financial year to date, so that’s since January of this year, the outperformance by FGX has been 8.8% and for FGG 5.9%.  We really think those numbers speak for themselves.  The other thing that’s pleasing is that we’ve able to increase our dividends.  So in early August we announced our latest dividends for both companies.  And it’s pleasing to do that in these times where some companies are cutting their dividends or in other cases deferring the payment.

The other pleasing thing is that we’ve been able to increase the donation to our charitable partners.  And again it’s very pleasing because as you can appreciate with COVID and the economic impact it’s been tough for these charities.  So this year the donation will increase to 10.5 million and it was 9.5 million last year.  And in total since inception six years ago the donation to charity, to youth at risk and to youth mental health is 41.2 million dollars.  Now that’s an incredible sum of money.  But if you think about the fees that are foregone by our fund managers and our other service providers that figure is 70 million dollars.

So it means that those savings to our shareholders because the fees foregone well and truly outweigh the donation also we’re very pleased about.  Now what have we been busy doing?  We’ve been very busy increasing our marketing and our communications because what we’re doing here is trying to increase the buying of shares in both companies from existing shareholders but also from new shareholders.  We’ve increased our marketing and communications support people.  We’ve put on a Social Impact Manager.  We’re now running more investor calls for our shareholders, more shareholder calls.  I’ve also started a podcast series where I’m interviewing each month leading Australians who are leading the way with all sorts of things they’re doing in the community.  People like Joe Hockey, David Gonski AC, Anna Bligh AC and more recently Peter Morgan.  So stay tuned for my next guest in October which will be Armina Rosenburg.

The other thing we’ve been doing is a virtual roadshow for financial advisors and we’re about to start a roadshow for family officers and philanthropic foundations.  So what I’d encourage you to do also is if you would like a presentation or know anyone that would on Future Generation please don’t hesitate to contact us because we’re very happy to update anyone or make them aware of the model.  So please stay safe and enjoy this next investment forum.  Thank you.