Ann: 2023 Half Year Results Presentation, page-7

re "Employment expenses down pretty significantly"

In the transcript, Shaun mentions costs on several occasions and especially in the answer below. I think the share price collapse has been something of a near-death experience for FDV. Alongside the "brown-out" on Zameen revenue, might have reinforced the need for cost discipline.

In recent years, the company could spend for more growth, confident that if they needed to top up the coffers they could do yet another capital raise, and holders would cough up. Nathan over at Intelligent Investor could duly evangelize what a good deal everyone was getting (and in the fullness of time, Nathan might be proven right). But the price collapse has put an end to that game, for a while at least. FDV has to grow up and stand on its own two feet now.

Shaun is a savvy, capable manager. I'm optimistic he can pivot to running a leaner business that organically grows off its earnings. My slight caution is that FDV is currently vulnerable to further economic, geopolitical or natural disaster shocks.

"I’m never quite happy with the cost base – there’s always more we think can be
done. If left to natural trajectory, there’s always an accepted norm that your costs will increase yearto-year and that’s probably fair if you’ve got inflation. But our goal is to reduce them, and we’ve found
lots of opportunities to do that over the last 12 months, particularly in some of the businesses we
acquired from Adevinta.
The other way to think about it is ‘can you do things cheaper in one market to another’? The beauty
in LATAM now is we’ve got one group of the companies, we’ve taken some roles that were in countries
that were slightly higher cost and put them into countries that are lower cost. Venezuela, for example,
is a country in which we have a call centre. We don’t have business in Venezuela, but the price of
labour there is much less. So yes, I’d like to think we can still reduce costs, but you’ve got to be
innovative and creative about how you do it."