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In this episode of Ghost Stories, The Finance Ghost goes beyond the headline numbers and gets under the hood of WeBuyCars with Deputy CEO Wynand Beukes and CFO Chris Rein. Instead of rehashing the latest earnings, the conversation focuses on what really matters: how the business is adapting to a rapidly shifting automotive market, from the rise of Chinese brands to increasing pressure on pricing and margins.

At the heart of it all is data. From Bayesian pricing models to proprietary software and AI-driven decision-making, WeBuyCars is building a competitive edge that goes far beyond scale. This episode explores how the company uses data to manage risk, optimise inventory, and keep turning stock in a deflationary market – and why getting the buying decision right is everything.

This podcast deals with topics like:

• What “percentile-based buying” actually means in practice
• The impact of Chinese vehicle entrants on pricing and margins
• Why the “up to R250k” segment is strategically critical and the competitive realities at higher price points
• How WeBuyCars uses data and machine learning to price risk
• The “empty bay problem” and why growth requires bold decisions
• Inventory risk, margin pressure and managing a deflationary market
• Why WeBuyCars sees itself as a technology business at heart

Important disclosure: The Finance Ghost has a shareholding in WeBuyCars.

WeBuyCars believes strongly in the value of Ghost Mail in the South African investment ecosystem. They have sponsored this podcast for readers, but The Finance Ghost was allowed to ask whatever he wanted to ask. Please do your own research and do not treat this podcast as an endorsement of WeBuyCars as an investment.

Full transcript:

The Finance Ghost: Welcome to this episode of the Ghost Stories podcast. We are heading into what I like to call the winter earnings season here on the JSE, and that means that the updates are coming through thick and fast.

One of them is a company that I have a significant position in. Well, significant for me. It’s not going to show up too much on the WeBuyCars radar, but it’s certainly one of my core positions in my equity portfolio.

That is WeBuyCars – and I’m here today with Deputy CEO Wynand Beukes and CFO Chris Rein. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me. I really look forward to just getting some additional insight into your results for the six months to March.

Wynand Beukes: Good morning, Ghost. Yeah, welcome. Glad to be on your show. Looking forward.

Chris Rein: Good morning, everyone. Great to be with you this morning.

The Finance Ghost: Lots of cool stuff for us to dig into here. And just to be clear, we’re not going to do the standard, “Okay, what were the numbers, what did HEPS move by?” Read that in Ghost Bites. You can go read it anywhere, really.

We’re going to take advantage of this corporate access to actually ask some really interesting questions. 

So, I’m going to kick us off with a conversation around the business model. And the reason I want to do that is because, if I look at your revenue growth and I look at your sales volumes, then it looks to me as though the average price per vehicle that you are selling, is going up.

And the fancy wording used in the announcement is, and I quote, “a more disciplined percentile-based buying strategy”. At the affordable end of the market, which I think you correctly identify as where you have quite a competitive advantage. 

But what does that description actually mean in terms of how your business is evolving from a quality perspective, and also how your customers perceive you?

Wynand Beukes: I’ll start with that one. I think just for a bit of context, when we use the words “percentile-based buying”, we just need to start at the first point of action. And that’s that WeBuyCars is brand-agnostic, so we buy any car, any age, any mileage, as long as it’s in a running condition.

And this cycle where we are now, like we’ve said on many occasions, there’s been a huge impact from the Chinese. On entry of the Chinese vehicles, we know that for FY25, the new vehicle sales grew just over 15%. The replenishment rate is down a bit, so the car park is growing.

What happened with the Chinese vehicles, is they came to enter into a specific price bracket, let’s call it the R300,000 to R500,000 price bracket. And we are only selling currently around 5% of Chinese vehicles through the WeBuyCars engine, if I can say it like that.

Interestingly, in FY24 we sold just over 3,000 Chinese vehicles. In FY25 we sold just below 4,000. And in FY26, in the first six months, we sold almost as many Chinese brand vehicles as we sold in the full year of FY25.

If you look at the price brackets where these guys play, or the Chinese vehicles are most competitive, they get support from the finance institutions in South Africa as well. So they’re very aggressive in pushing those new brands into the market.

Now what that means is we’ve got a deflationary market in the used market, which is down around 1.9% year on year, and for new vehicles, other OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) brands, inflation is at a record low of around 1.5%. So that gap between used and new is narrowing.

What does it mean for us? It means that if we start competing in that R300,000 to R500,000 price bracket, you are slap bang in the middle of that Chinese aggressive entry into the market.

What we’ve done is, on a percentile-based model – what we call Bayesian statistical models – we’ve remodelled all our pricing models. I’ll give you some interesting facts on how we do it now. But just from an overarching perspective, we’ve rebased our buying models on these Bayesian statistical models.

This way, you start with the beliefs of what you think impacts the price of the vehicle. And that might be things like the condition of the vehicle, the mileage, the age. Obviously, those are the main characteristics of the vehicle. We use around 86 of these characteristics when we take into account, when we get to a buying price. 

Now on a percentile-based statistical model, at the end of last year, we said as well we moved to a lower price bracket. We’re trying to push down the average buying price of the vehicle into, let’s call it a R0 to R250,000 price bracket, and trying to be more conservative in the R300,000 to R500,000 price bracket.

So, in a statistical or percentile-based model, when we rebuild our pricing models to price these vehicles on the buying side now, we can now set the percentile-based order of percentage from a 50th percentile of where we want to pay for these vehicles.

So we can say, listen, for example in a province in a price bracket, we are willing to pay for a R300,000 to R500,000 vehicle only on the 40th percentile of the prices we normally used to pay. But for a R0 to R250,000 car, we’re willing to pay a bit more, let’s say on the 55th or 60th percentile.

And that’s what we mean when we use the statistical model pricing on the buying side. So, we’ve got total control over the buying prices. That’s the one part of the answer.

The second part of the answer, we need to remember, is that we are effectively an online lead generation business. We are dependent on the consumers who want to sell their vehicles to WeBuyCars.

We market, we get the consumer to the WeBuyCars channels, we create a lead, and then we start managing or nurturing that lead until we convert that lead into a buy in our world.

We’ve shifted our aggressive buying strategies of percentile to being more aggressive in the lower price brackets and more conservative in the higher price brackets, where there’s more risk. Where you’re more in one- to three-year-old vehicles, where traditional dealerships play a huge role.

Coming back to the leads, what we’ve also seen is (and we’re not in the game of trying to control things that are outside of our control – we focus on the things that we do control) fuel prices and those things going on in the world do have an effect on your leads being generated.

What we’ve seen, for example, just in this month alone, is that we’ve already bought 5% more diesel vehicles this month, year-on-year, which is quite interesting with what’s going on with diesel prices.

So, you are also a bit dependent on the outside world. The diesel price is very high now. The leads coming in are still a function of people wanting to sell whatever vehicles they want to sell.

We obviously market and try to target our core of the business, which is that R0 to R250,000 bracket. If you mention that our average buying or selling price went up, it only went up a fraction. If we didn’t do this, it would have gone up a lot more. And that was the situation we were in.

We reacted with the data we have. We reacted quite well to the changing or cyclical conditions in a deflationary market.

Chris Rein: So, Wynand, maybe just to add one or two interesting stats behind what you’ve just been saying.

Ghost, you are right. Our average selling price was up at about R148,000, excluding VAT, per vehicle; from R141,000 in the prior six-month period.

There were probably two other factors happening.

One was our need to liquidate some of the higher-priced vehicles that we had in inventory at the end of September 2025, which we did in this period.

And then there’s also the commercial vehicle play that we spoke about yesterday in the results announcement. Obviously, some of these heavy commercial vehicles have a bigger price ticket, but that’s a very low percentage of the volume.

Wynand Beukes: As a percentage of our stock, if we divide it into price brackets, we are quite happy where we sit now from a stock-holding perspective in each price bracket as a percentage.

We still want to increase our lower price brackets because that’s where the least risk sits for us. But, to confirm what Chris was saying, our average buying price went up last year, and we liquidated some of that stock responsibly over the last couple of months, and especially in March as well, to manage our provisions effectively.

The Finance Ghost: In answering that question, you’ve actually touched on so many points that I want to get into on the podcast, so thank you. It’s such a great opener.

Just wearing my own hat here as an investor, it sounds like there’s obviously been a big change in the shape of inventory. There’s some mix effects, there’s the Chinese component coming in, there’s the statistical models that you’re enjoying running there – that’s helping you with the buying. And obviously that makes a lot of sense, and I think it’s part of your moat that we’ll talk about later, around tech.

But I guess for investors to just hang their hats on something: would you say that the pain has been taken in your inventory? If I can ask it as bluntly as that?

So, in terms of your ability now to buy up Chinese brands, make sure that’s part of your inventory mix, my thesis is that this latest result reflected an accelerated transition on our roads. And a lot of companies would have been caught out. I’m not saying you guys were caught out – it’s just, you had to adapt to what’s happening around you.

Would you say the majority of that pain has now been taken, and so from here you can just get back on the growth path, the way we like to see it?

Chris Rein: Our provision at the end of September was approximately 3% of the inventory value, and at the end of this most recent period it was 2.92% of inventory values. From a health of the inventory perspective, the health has improved slightly over the six-month period, but it did come with some margin pressure, as is very evident in the numbers.

Wynand Beukes: In a deflationary market there is some risk attached when you buy aggressively. So just a bit of background to that as well, and why we’re saying that, is that we’ve opened three supermarkets in four months’ time. To do that, we’ve added just below 3,000 parking bays.

And to put that into context, Lansdowne and Montana are 30,000 squares – that’s almost the size of four rugby fields. In our full financial year, we added 30% parking bays.

There’s a unit economics – the “empty bay problem” – it doesn’t make sense for us to sit with a huge cost (we’ve invested R600 million just in buildings) and then we don’t have vehicles to sell. 

The risk we were willing to take is that we had to buy aggressively in Q2, to start filling those warehouses. Once those warehouses were opened, we dropped to 80% parking bay capacity, and that’s not good for us. 

We had to get that up very quickly. We started buying aggressively. In a deflationary market, when you do that, you do take some risk, and we are willing to take that risk. Because if you don’t take that risk and you retract in this market, you’re going to stagnate.

And I think that caught out a couple of dealers in the last couple of months. We speak to these guys regularly, and there are a couple of our colleagues that closed down their dealerships in the last couple of months, and they were slap bang in the middle of this R300,000 to R500,000 price bracket. They were just on the strategy of hope, to try and sell these cars eventually – your traditional, let’s call it German vehicles, your Mercedes and Audis; those types of vehicles.

In this deflationary market, you’re going to make mistakes, and we are willing to take that risk. We’re not a risk-averse business, but we are in this growth phase. It’s important to remember that. And we did make some mistakes. We had to get rid of that stock. We did so.

We still have some of that in stock. Our tail of ageing stock is still there. I won’t say we’re 100% through it, but like Chris mentioned, we’ve lowered our stock provision a bit, which indicates that our stock position is a bit healthier than it was at the end of last year.

But we’re still in a position where we still have some of that R300,000 to R500,000 ageing stock that we need to get rid of. 

But we have mechanisms in place and pricing models in place to make sure that we do that responsibly.

Coming back to the buying side, we tweaked our buying to buy those stock items that we know are what we call “money spinners”, making us the most money and spending the least time on the floor. Get our stock down again to where we want it.

We are definitely not happy with where the stock is now, but that’s just part of the growth phase. If we had the pen and we could script this better, we would have liked to open the warehouses a bit more staggered over the financial year, and not three big ones in a period of four months, which was quite a cost we had without trading.

And as you know, Lansdowne – we had some municipal delays, which also caused us to be almost a month and a half late. You employ all those people; there was stock parked in the warehouse that we couldn’t sell. So that all added to the margin pressure, and obviously our results coming out this year.

We declared our dividend between our guardrails of 25% to 33%, and we declared a 10% increase on 27.5%, which indicates our confidence in H2.

There was definitely a momentum shift in Q2. It was almost this half was a tale of two quarters. Quarter one was still in the tail of our FY25, and then in Q2 we had a great momentum shift, and that’s when all these changes kicked in.

We had a record buying month in January, we had a record sales month in March. The hero of our Q2 this year was the highest market share percentage in our history. That is a very good sign for WeBuyCars, and we are actually very proud to have reached that in very difficult conditions.

But having said that, the margin, which is under pressure, is a price we’re willing to pay for growth.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, so lots of good points being made there. And that’s certainly why I haven’t sold down any of my shares at all, despite the share price pressure. To be honest, I’m actually tempted to buy more. That’s where my inclination goes, because I see the long-term journey that you guys are on. 

And a business is never going to be linear, especially a growth story. Anyone who believes that has never run their own business – I absolutely believe that. So, it’s nice to see some of that momentum coming through.

And I want to ask you something around just these Chinese cars and the depreciation on them that I was thinking about while you were talking. Because I always say to people, think about a nursery that’s growing plants, right? That’s the opposite of your business. Because the plants are getting bigger all the time, they’re going up in value. So, if they have a slower sales period, it’s not the end of the world, because that plant is bigger next week and they can maybe sell it for slightly more.

In your business, churn is absolutely critical. The stuff is depreciating over time, so it has to get out the door really, really quickly. Which explains why a slower period, or a period of expansion like this, or the market being a bit weird, can really hurt the numbers and the margins.

But are you seeing anything on the Chinese side in the depreciation curves that is different to either what you expected or what we’ve historically seen in the German brands, the Japanese cars? 

In other words, do they lose a similar percentage of their value each year to what we’ve seen historically? And so you can just now buy different brands but apply a lot of your previous understanding of how they depreciate?

Wynand Beukes: I’m going to start that answer firstly on our traditional vehicles. And it’s important to note that a huge factor in the depreciation curves is the age of the vehicle.

We’ve seen that the newer vehicles, the one- to five-year-old vehicles, their curve is much steeper than the older vehicles. Interestingly, the fact is that our car park – the age of vehicles that we buy – shifted in the last two years by almost two years, meaning that the cars we bought at an average age two years ago were just over nine years old, and currently it is just over 11 years old.

So, if you play in that R0 to R250,000 bracket, your depreciation curve is much flatter than if you play in the upper funnel, in the R300,000-plus price bracket.

What happened with the Chinese vehicles is, as they moved into that R300,000 to R500,000 price bracket. Other OEMs are responding, and that’s why we have a record low inflation of 1.6% on new vehicles. 

And they’re trying subvention programmes. If you look at Toyota Fortuners now, I think selling at prime minus four is some of the deals you can do now on a Fortuner. So that is contracting the market hugely, and then obviously that is a deflationary effect on stock in those price brackets.

So, it’s important to understand the two price brackets, the lower and the upper end.

Then, if we get to Chinese vehicles, there are a couple of vehicles like GWM and Haval that have been in the market for a number of years. They’ve been holding their value quite well. There is support around those types of vehicles – their services, their parts – and what we’ve seen in our sales is that they do hold their value quite a bit.

They do depreciate in the first three, four years, but after that the depreciation curve also flattens. Not as flat as your Toyota, for example, but it does flatten out a bit.

Now there are a couple of new Chinese entrants that entered from 2024, which is quite interesting. And Jetour was one of the big entry points at the end of last year. Now those cars typically take – well, a new car, when a new model comes into the market, they typically take around 12 to 36 months to mature and to flow into the second-hand car market.

But what is very interesting is that if we look at the ownership period – because we can see how long you have held the car for – what we’ve seen with the Chinese brands is that the ownership period is a bit shorter than the rest of the traditional German brands.

Jetour had a very aggressive entry in January 2025, and they stepped up significantly in October 2025, and you see them on the roads.

It’s a bit early days to answer you directly on the depreciation curves and second-hand values of these entrants from 2024. Time will tell. It will all depend on the support and the services.

But what we do foresee, if there’s a huge influx with a number of models, we don’t foresee that all the models will survive over time. But it’s definitely affecting the market now.

How their depreciation curves are going to lay out in front of us is going to be interesting to see. We foresee that from now – it’s now been 24 months since the aggressive entry – so from 24 to 36 months, it’s going to be very interesting. That flow is going to move into the second-hand market now quite aggressively.

Like I mentioned, we’ve sold almost as many Chinese vehicles in this first half as we did in the full last year.

But we are very positive about the Chinese vehicles because, if you think about it, if a vehicle changes hands, let’s say 4 to 4.2 times over a 20-year span, the more vehicles coming into the market, it just gives us more opportunity to play in every transaction that happens.

So, we’re positive – if the car park is growing, it’s good for us. We want to be part of all those transactions.

We’ll obviously be collecting all the data, every price point, every sales point, and we’re making sure that if something happens to those depreciation curves – if it’s cyclical or structural, or let’s say models are leaving the market – we will have to react quickly and make sure that we pay the right price for these vehicles. 

Which is the core strength of our business: to react to those changing conditions quickly.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, fantastic. Thank you. That does help a lot. I’ve got one more question around the change we’re seeing in the market, and that is around the finance side.

F&I (Finance and Insurance) income is obviously such an important part of the business. But I know there’s been some pressure there because you mentioned in the results lower bank approval rates, among other things.

You’ve highlighted the crazy new deals on Toyota Fortuners, for example, at interest rates that are essentially just subsidising the gross margin and just trying to get the cars out the door. That’s basically what’s going on there.

With banks wanting to finance new cars more than used cars, should we be thinking about risks to your F&I business, or how are you mitigating what’s going on there?

Chris Rein: Ghost, there are a couple of topics in that question. The first one is that we have seen bank approval rates a little lower. But remember, that’s really a function of the client and the customer. If we delivered to the banks large volumes of great creditworthy clients, the approval rates would go up. The constraining factor there really is the client.

What we’ve done really well on the F&I line in the six-month period is, we keep refining the pricing and the value offering and what exactly the insurance product delivers. We’ve done well there.

We’ve had a great performance on our insurance cell captive, as well as our relationship with OUTsurance and Netstar (vehicle tracking and recovery). What we’ve also done well in the six-month period is we’ve put a lot of focus on selling comprehensive insurance products and tracking devices, not only on finance transactions but also on cash sales.

And that’s really where we’ve seen the increased penetration, is on the cash portion of our business, which, as you’ve seen, represents roughly 50% of the volume. And that’s how we’ve been able to deliver a 13% improvement on the F&I line.

The Finance Ghost: Thank you. I think let’s move on then to the tech, because I want to make sure that we give that enough airtime on this particular podcast.

And I’m going to lump this in with a conversation on Inspectify (a vehicle inspection company) as well, because ultimately tech is a broad concept, right? At one end of the spectrum, it’s Big Data and it’s AI and it’s the analytics and it’s the statistical buying models and it’s all the rest. And stuff like Inspectify I see as part of the technology that has been built inside the group.

So perhaps just talk us through the extent to which this is creating a competitive advantage for you. Because my thesis as an investor is that we’ve spent this whole podcast talking about how hard it is out there. 

It can only be harder for your competitors who don’t have the scale and don’t have the technology and don’t have the models and the ability to actually be this consolidating factor in the market like you.

So, walk us through the tech, Inspectify, and what you’re building there.

Wynand Beukes: I’m a technologist at heart. So how much time do you have? [Laughs]

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, that’s why I made sure we did it early enough, because I knew! [Laughs].

Wynand Beukes: [Laughs] Let me just give you a two-minute background. We had the opportunity in 2018, when I joined, to really build something remarkable in the market.

When I started, we were buying and selling just around 2,000 vehicles. It was a very manually operated business, run from a Google Sheet and WhatsApp, like many great businesses have started.

We wanted to build something that was based on two principles. We wanted to be in control of the software, and the software gives us agility, and we want to adapt the software to the business. 

We had these owner-operators that knew the market, that understood the service we’re providing, and we didn’t want to bolt on a traditional ERP system and drive you into a certain process that’s not built for the business.

So that was the first principle. And the second principle was we knew if we could be in control of the software, we could generate clean, accurate data. To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant in 2018, but we knew there was something, and it’s all about the data. We understood that – luckily, the principle was there.

We’ve built out this digital business platform, all with clean data in mind from the beginning.

If you ask me, we had a couple of dreams in 2018. One of the dreams was: can you buy and sell a vehicle autonomously without human involvement? It’s a simple question with a complex answer, because you have to understand your processes and you have to understand how you bring in your data-driven decision-making at every point and every touchpoint with the customer.

Another thing we discussed in 2018 is, if we’re going to build this and we’re going to invest in building our own software stack, the principle is we want to own or control every touchpoint with the customer. 

So if we are in control of the customer experience – and a subsection of that is user experience in your digital channels – we can manage the speed and the effectiveness of the transaction in-house.

And those were the principles that we’ve based our journey on going forward from 2018.

Fast forward to today, we have our own digital business platform, all proprietary software.

And coming back to your Inspectify point – Inspectify is a piece of the puzzle in a bigger ecosystem of tech, or a software data ecosystem, in the automotive section. If we make decisions on software that we want to build, or adjacent where we want to invest, it’s all around the core business and it’s all around what data we will get from these type of investments that can enhance and increase the accuracy of our pricing models.

To give an example, AI is now this huge word being used widely across the world. We’ve been using AI, the principle of AI, in the business for a number of years now. One of the sub-disciplines of AI is what we call machine learning, and this is the Bayesian statistical model. It’s just a machine learning model that we use.

The difficult thing is, if you don’t have control over your software, it’s very difficult to operationalise data or data-driven decisions. There are many businesses that you talk to that say, “Listen, but we’ve got all this data,” but what do you do with that?

If you can’t operationalise it, you can’t get the scale, you can’t get the economies of scale.

From a cost perspective, we’re running very thin. The biggest part of our cost base is variable costs. Our head office cost is geared for between 18,000 and 19,000 units already.

But this is all to do with the efficiency and the scale, and the right decisions we get from our data models. And that’s what we use it for.

So, we’ve been asked this question: why don’t we monetise our data externally from WeBuyCars? My answer always stays the same. We are monetising the data – we are monetising it inside WeBuyCars. We use our data to be more effective, make better decisions, quicker decisions, and to enable the people that are here to be more effective.

From a data perspective and an AI perspective, if you think as a business that AI is going to solve all your problems, you’re in for a big surprise. If you don’t have a clean data pipeline feeding this AI principle, you’re not really going to use AI to the full extent. 

You’re going to use ChatGPT if you want to write a mail or check a contract. But if you really want to operationalise your business, you still need a clean, foundational, transactional-based system that feeds clean data into your machine learning models to make effective decisions.

So, from the technology perspective, we are quite happy. We can buy 10,000 cars today – it won’t affect our technology. Our platform is geared for the numbers we want to do. We’re firmly on track to do the 23,000 vehicles by 2028. That’s our strategic intent.

If we talk about Inspectify, we talk about WeFin, the origination of finance applications. We’ve moved that now internally as well, so that we can have control over the software, we have control over the data. We can overlay the data now into the finance applications, into our warehouse, where we look at all the other aspects of the business, and it’s just more data points coming into the business.

The Inspectify data is hugely valuable, because what we can do now is we can take the Inspectify data – for example, a diagnostic report – we can decode that report, we can pull it into the data sets.

If we had a loss, what decision or probability can we take into account before we buy that vehicle? All these data points we feed back into the business.

It’s all about how we make the buying decision more accurately, because if you buy right, everything after that becomes easier. If you pay wrong for the vehicle. I think that’s what happened. There was a bit of a lag on buying last year because we were so conservative on certain price brackets. 

People haven’t adjusted yet into what the second-biggest asset is worth, because a dealer that advertises his car on AutoTrader, for example, is slow to react. He still has this strategy of hope – to say, “Listen, let the vehicle stand a bit longer and hopefully it sells.”

We say, “Listen, although this specific make and model year is the cheapest in the market, let’s continue to drop the price because we want to push the market down a bit, because the market is still behind. Let’s get that vehicle out, sell that vehicle, and use that capital to buy more vehicles in the right price brackets at the right price.”

We’re not shying away from the R300,000 to R500,000 price bracket, for example. We just need to pay the right price and what that vehicle is worth, and that’s where all the data comes in.

So that’s how we manage our losses, that’s how we manage our buying decisions, and all the factors in the business. It’s really one of the things that we’re proud of – we’ve managed to operationalise our data, and I don’t think there are many companies in South Africa that can say that.

One thing that you will find interesting is that our pricing models that we use on the buying side and on the pricing side – that Bayesian statistical model – when we built the first model, we could only find enough GPUs in West Germany to build it, and that was built on four A100 GPUs over a period of 48 hours to build one model.

Now that hardware that I’m talking about is the same size of hardware that was used to build ChatGPT-3. That’s quite interesting.

We are buying and selling used vehicles, but we are actually a technology business at heart.

The Finance Ghost: So, let’s maybe move on then from the technology to the capital allocation, because obviously you’ve got a lot of competing uses for your capital, right? You’ve got bolt-on acquisitions. We’ve seen you do, for example, the 49% stake in GoBid, and there are ways for you to increase that stake over time.

You’ve opened additional supermarkets. I’ve also seen you include capital-light facilities versus larger supermarkets. You’ve also talked about the commercial vehicle business that you’re growing. You signed a lease that will give a new home to that business.

I guess if we just bring it all together – and maybe, Chris, this is a question for you – can you tell us about the way you guys think about the investments that are in front of you, the capital allocation, and maybe some of the metrics you focus on? Just to give investors a sense of how their money is being reinvested in the group.

Chris Rein: Thank you, Ghost. Yes, at the end of September 2025, we communicated that we had bought some land in Montana, as well as in Witbank and in Lansdowne in Cape Town. We signalled to the market that we’d be investing just south of R600 million in land and buildings for those new developments, and just south of R600 million for the inventory for those developments.

That’s all happened on time and on budget. Yesterday, we also told the market that we secured a lease for our commercial vehicles, very close to the R21 highway in Centurion.

A little bit of context around our commercial vehicle business: in the last six months, commercial vehicles – that being light, medium and heavy – made up about 1% of our volume and 3.5% of our gross profit.

The two new growth opportunities that we mentioned – the one being the commercial vehicles and the other being a capital-light leased facility in Bloemfontein – I think you’re absolutely spot on that those sites are leases, so they won’t add to our land and buildings investment.

And when we call a facility capital-light, we mean a combination of some vehicles under roof, but a large portion of those vehicles under shade net – a more affordable facility. Capital-light gives us a better opportunity to earn a better return off that particular node.

You also spoke about our investment in GoBid, and really our logic there is it’s a business we’ve been working with for a long time, and it really just formalises our relationship with the GoBid team. We believe it’s just an acquisition that allows us to better serve the whole vehicle market.

And more specifically, we’re able to sell non-runners. So, we often get to a vehicle when we go and buy the vehicle and it’s a non-runner, or it has a mechanical problem. In the past, we would have had to walk away. And what we’re able to do now is, as an agent for GoBid, we purchase the vehicle on behalf of GoBid, and they’re able to dispose of it through their online auction platform.

So, I hope that gives you a little bit more colour on that topic.

The Finance Ghost: Wynand, Chris, thank you so much for your time this morning. Well done, I think, on navigating obviously a really difficult period. I think that’s the key takeaway here.

And certainly, as a shareholder, I look forward to the next period and the hope that the market will – not necessarily improve for you guys, because I don’t think it’s going to get easier – but I think that your ability to respond to it will improve.

I think you’ve done a lot of the hard work required, taken a lot of the pain, to actually get it right. So well done on doing that, and I look forward to watching the progress from here.

Wynand Beukes: Thank you, Ghost. It was a pleasure chatting to you this morning. All the best.

Chris Rein: Yes, thank you, Ghost. Thank you for your time.

The Finance Ghost: Remember to always do your own research and to use this as only part of your process as you learn more about WeBuyCars.