Ann: WHSP 2023 AGM Chair Address, page-3

Hi Peter,

I agree with you on parts of this as a very interested observer and shareholder of SOL.

If we are going to keep beating the market it's going to be with a handful of really high conviction picks that we have a heavy exposure too rather than a basket of commonly held ASX50 stocks.

Some recent reading I did really drove home just how much SOL has grown in both scale and also market recognition in my time as a shareholder (since 2016).

It's been pretty amazing to see them go from outside the ASX200 to into the ASX50 in that period.

This has led to an increase in compliance obligations and produced many of the changes we've seen recently (such as Tom leaving the board and the big increase in head office staff plus marketing efforts with the rebrand) as SOL has grown far beyond the scale of a huge family business.

Just in defence of BKI (I'm not a shareholder there but have always been an observer due to the SOL link) it was never supposed to be a Berkshire Hathaway/SOL style vehicle and is much more an old school LIC (think a small scale AFIC or ARG) and those have traditionally held the big 4 banks plus two big miners. It's really aiming to be a conservative and consistent income generator paying fully franked dividends.

Just to give some different food for thought I'm a little concerned that the big scale increase and dilution of the Milner's as a major shareholder may lead to a key competitive advantage being diminished which has been a lack of bureaucracy and tendency towards ultra long term thinking.

The BKW industrial property portfolio is an example of something that's pretty uncommon on public markets and in my opinion was only possible to the unusual (in a positive way) attitude of SOL management.

In most other cases we'd have seen that land sold off as it started to appreciate in value 10 plus years ago for a bit of a once off special dividend whereas BKW (with the protection of SOL as the major shareholder) went slow and steady and built up a portfolio of income generating assets over a long period which now underpins the whole BKW dividend.

It's interesting to debate this stuff and here different opinions on possible future directions as it helps clarify my thinking so thank you for your post!