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A year after becoming the first JSE-listed company to join Ghost Stories for a results podcast, STADIO returns to discuss the next chapter of its growth journey. CEO Chris Vorster and CFO Ishak Kula unpack how the group reached its 56,000-student target and, more importantly, how it plans to grow to 80,000 students by 2030 while maintaining academic quality, affordability and attractive returns on capital.

The conversation explores the building blocks of the STADIO growth formula, from new campuses and blended learning to operating leverage and curriculum development. We also discuss employability, the role of industry partnerships, the Springboks sponsorship, and why management believes the group can continue expanding while investing heavily in the future.

In this episode:

• The roadmap from 56,000 students today to 80,000 students by 2030
• How STADIO balances contact, distance and blended learning
• The economics of operating leverage in higher education
• Campus expansion plans and capital allocation priorities
• Why management believes the Springboks partnership will help build the STADIO brand

This podcast has been sponsored by STADIO, but The Finance Ghost was allowed to ask whichever questions he felt were most pertinent for an investor audience. Please always do your own research and do not treat this as an endorsement of the stock.

Read the transcript:

The Finance Ghost: Welcome to this edition of the Ghost Stories podcast. This is quite a special one for me actually because, a year ago, STADIO was the first company on the JSE to do a results podcast with me.

And here we are today – I think everyone on this call has been very busy in the last year. I’ve managed to do a lot more of those podcasts and thank you to the team from STADIO for kicking that off.

Much more importantly, this team – that’s CEO Chris Vorster and CFO Ishak Kula – has been busy delivering on their promises. They promised 56,000 students for 2026; that’s what they delivered, but they’re not done yet. They have an ambition to grow to 80,000 students by 2030, and they certainly plan to grow beyond that, as well.

I’m excited today to get a much better understanding of what that journey is going to look like.

Chris, Ishak, welcome to this podcast. Thank you for coming back, and thank you for doing the first one with me a year ago. I think you guys really did kick off that snowball effect.

Chris Vorster: Yes, thank you, Ghost. Good morning from our side and thank you for inviting us back to the podcast.

Ishak Kula: Good to be here with you, Ghost, and to share more about our journey.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, and what a journey it’s been! So, I met both of you in person, finally, at your recent earnings presentation, which was at your Durbanville campus.

Quite an impressive facility, now that I’ve been there myself. Definitely, a different take on tertiary education to what I experienced at a public university all those years ago. It’s amazing how things evolve.

Something that really struck me when we were doing the campus tour – and this is where I want to start – was the extent of specialist programmes versus your more generic degrees. I’m not sure if I just lived in a bubble maybe when I was at university, but it felt like everyone was just doing a more generic thing and they’d figure out later on what they were going to specialise in. But when we did the tour of the Durbanville campus, the stuff was really specialised, which I found incredibly interesting.

So, I wanted to start by understanding if this tells us something about how you compete in the tertiary space when you build these new facilities. Do you look specifically for qualification gaps and then try to plug them? Or do you say to yourself, “Well, we’re going to compete in qualifications that already exist at competitors in the region; we’re just going to try to do it better, or a little bit differently.”

Chris Vorster: Yes, thank you. I’m actually very happy to hear that you enjoyed the campus and the layout. I think the Durbanville campus was a very special project for us, Ghost, in the sense that we started from a blank piece of paper and were able to design and develop the campus as we believe a new, modern, high-facility campus should look. So, it was a very exciting project for us as a management team, along with our specialists, architects, and designers.

And we think we’ve managed to really get that flow between the different faculties – we have some engineering labs and IT labs next to general lecture halls, so you get that very nice flow between the different faculties on the campus. That was always something we wanted from day one, and I think we have managed to get that right.

Looking at the programmes we’ve identified – yes, we definitely do a lot of research in a specific area whenever we identify programmes. But I also think that what guides us in the number of programmes and faculties that we put on these comprehensive campuses is our ambition to become a university.

And to be a university, you need to offer a number or variety of programmes and faculties.

So, it’s a bit of both. Obviously, we do our homework. We won’t offer programmes for which we believe there is not a demand in a specific area, but we are also guided by our ambition to put down a comprehensive offering at these campuses.

Ishak Kula: Ghost, if I may add to what Chris has just said there, I think invariably, strategically, part of our underlying philosophy in our organisation, to Chris’s earlier point, is what we dubbed ‘the world of work’. And part of that is obviously to make sure our qualifications remain relevant in the workplace, but also importantly that we financially back that.

So, as part of our capital allocation strategy, you would see over the last number of years, we’ve invested between R10 million and R20 million at least in the development of the curriculum. And that we believe is a strategic responsibility of us as an institution to make sure our qualifications are relevant to the industry, but it also gives our graduates the best opportunity of employment and making sure that what they study remains relevant. But also, the investment is allocated to make sure that students have a fantastic education experience as they venture into the group.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, I think the point you made there, Chris, around labs near lecture halls, is interesting.

Because now I’m reflecting on the university I went to – and maybe that’s why this seems so different to me, because we had this campus where it was just commerce and law, and there were obviously no labs involved there, so it was kind of just stamped-out lecture halls (maybe I didn’t see enough of the engineering campus). So, it’s very cool that it’s a bit more integrated. I quite like that.

And Ishak, as you say, lots of curriculum development going on, and that’s a big part of the capex decision that you have to make as a group.

But the other thing that came through there is employability, and I just want to touch on that for a moment because I think that’s an important part of the offering, right?

If I look at what STADIO is doing – it’s a very practical approach to tertiary education, and I would imagine that from a business-case perspective, that’s important. Because for someone to come and pay for a tertiary qualification, they need to know that on the other side of that, they’re improving their earning potential; their chances of getting a job and what they can earn.

It’s not so much ‘academic programmes for the sake of it’, if I can call it that. At the moment, at least, it’s very practical stuff.

Is that a fair take on the strategy at the moment?

Chris Vorster: Absolutely, I think you’ve got it spot on. What we’ve done from day one to align with the world of work was to invite industry into the institution.

What do we mean by that?

Right from when where we design a new programme, industry will be involved to ensure that we have the relevant industry needs captured in those new programmes. Obviously, there are certain academic standards that we must meet, but we always try to accommodate the needs of the work environment as much as possible.

From there, we then also invite industry into the classroom. We think that’s important – for experts in the field to come and offer lectures and specialised classes to students and give them the opportunity to engage with experts in their fields. We see that is also very popular with our student base.

Thirdly, and something that’s also very important, is then to get industry involved in the evaluation of our programmes. What we mean by that is, where industry employs STADIO graduates, we engage and find out how they are actually performing in the workplace. We get that feedback and take it all the way back to the curriculum, as well as to what we offer in the classroom.

So, it is a continuous process to ensure that our graduates are actually desired and that they are employable in the different industries that they go into, after obtaining their qualifications.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, and I think that’s really important, particularly given the consumer pressures that are out there – and we’ll talk about that a little bit just now.

Before we do that, I just want to take the spotlight off of the Durbanville campus for a moment, because that’s been a big part of the story in the recent financial period, but there’s obviously much more to the group than that.

One of the other campuses that was opened in the year was AFDA Hatfield. We made a joke just before hitting the record button – Chris couldn’t get the camera on his iPad to work, which is mildly hilarious when AFDA is part of the group, so we almost needed to parachute in a couple of film students to sort that out [laughing].

But perhaps this is a great opportunity to walk through the rest of the group, some of the other offerings – maybe for someone listening to this podcast who isn’t as familiar with the STADIO offering. Just high level, the sorts of brands and those centres of excellence and the different verticals they operate in.

Chris Vorster: Yes, in the holdings group we have the three brands. The biggest one, without a doubt, is STADIO Higher Education, our big comprehensive institution. That is the institution where we have four comprehensive campuses, and within that brand we offer contact and distance learning.

Then we have our two more niche, specialised brands. The first is Milpark. Milpark Education is very well known for its programmes, especially in the accounting, finance, and business sectors. And Milpark is a pure online offering.

Thirdly, there is our well-known and award-winning film school, AFDA. AFDA is the smallest of the three entities, and they are doing only contact learning.

So, looking at the year thus far, we’ve seen very good growth in STADIO Higher Education. 18% growth in that institution, 33% in contact learning, and then 16% in our already big distance learning offering. So, very happy.

At the other two institutions we’ve seen more muted growth. Both of these institutions are operating at a higher price point, but we have seen some headwinds, especially in the film industry.

I’m sure many of your listeners will know about the turmoil currently in the entertainment and film industry – with Canal+ and the closure of Showmax, and then also the DTI (the Department of Trade and Industry), who have withdrawn their funding to the industry, also at the beginning of this year.

So, we did see some headwinds in our AFDA brand, but I’m also excited to report back that, with that new campus which we opened in Hatfield in Pretoria, as well as Canal+’s commitment to really invest in local productions, there are a lot of green shoots already.

We see our application numbers for next year in AFDA tracking way ahead of last year, so we’re still positive that that was just a glitch in the road and that AFDA can still show growth, come the 2027 academic year.

At Milpark, it’s that B2B business (I think Ishak talked a lot to that during our results presentations). That still hasn’t recovered since COVID, where a lot of the big corporates decided to move away from your formal three-year, four-year degree programmes for employees and rather go to shorter, specific learning programmes. That has an effect on our Milpark business, but as the years go on, that is starting to phase out and will have less and less of an impact on the group’s results.

But there are also very good prospects for Milpark especially. They are introducing a few very exciting new programmes that we believe will do very well, come the 2027 academic year.

The Finance Ghost: My take on what’s happening in the world is we’re very much in the era of the specialist. It feels like generalists… I don’t know, I don’t have data to back this up, but it just feels to me like in an AI world, being a generalist is quite dangerous and being a specialist is probably where you want to be. And that strikes me as what the STADIO offering is really built around – achieving specialisation in specific industries, which is probably not a bad thing.

So, yeah, headwinds there, that’s going to happen. Anyone who has built a business knows that it doesn’t happen in a straight line. And that’s why I think diversification is important, right?

Chris Vorster: Definitely. That is exactly how we think the group is well balanced. Looking at where these different brands are positioned, and also how we’ve positioned them, price point-wise. So yeah, we are actually happy with the balance of the three brands thus far.

The Finance Ghost: Let’s dig into some of the recent financial results, then (so, that’s for the six months to June).

One of the slides in that deck, which I think was pretty good, shows that over the past five years, your student numbers were up roughly 60%, but revenue was up 97%.

Now that’s obviously not per year. That’s in total. But some of that would be pricing increases, over and above volumes (just to be clear, student numbers would be your volumes growth for anyone who’s just thinking about STADIO like they would think about any other business), and then the other levers you can pull are pricing and mix.

So, if a student comes in and does a more expensive course rather than a cheaper course, that is net positive for revenue without you having to have implemented price increases – that’s what we mean by ‘mix’.

Ishak, this one’s probably for you, I would imagine.

These levers, as part of your planning for the next few years – you have student numbers, you have pricing, you have mix effects. How do you think about these things when you’re doing target setting, when you’re wondering where the business might go, when you’re explaining this to your institutional shareholders?

Maybe you can also just speak to, as part of this, some of the pressure that you’ve seen in the higher-priced qualifications, which I know have had a bit of a struggle lately.

Ishak Kula: Ghost, I think if I didn’t know any better, I would have said you’re an accountant. You gave your listeners quite a good view there.

The Finance Ghost: You’re outing me here. You’re outing me. I’m just a podcaster! What are you talking about?

Ishak Kula: [laughing] No, you’ve done well there. Yeah, to give that a bit more colour, we’ve seen fairly good growth over the last couple of years. And maybe for the listeners again, it’s important to understand contextually – I think strategically, as a group, we have always said that we want to accommodate 80% of our students studying via the distance-learning mode of delivery, and 20% via contact learning.

At the half-year, we were around about 87% of our students studying in the distance mode of delivery and 13% via contact learning.

I think over the last two to three years, and particularly post-COVID, we’ve really seen that more students want to have a contact learning experience. Particularly those school leavers, they want to have an experience with fellow students. They want to hang out together. They want to socialise. And they have so many things in common that we have definitely seen incredibly good growth there.

So, from a strategic levers-perspective, invariably, the distance-learning mode of delivery has high economies of scale. You can scale that business quite quickly. It never comes at zero incremental cost in the distance learning world, but there is limited incremental cost in that distance-learning mode of delivery.

Ghost, that gives us quite a nice ability to unlock a lot of leverage in the distance learning space in particular. But I think what’s helped our numbers fairly nicely (particularly in a year of investment when the margins, although we’ve invested, have still sort of expanded) is that we’ve really seen this contact-learning momentum coming through.

I think Chris cited it quite nicely earlier. Particularly in STADIO Higher Education, we’ve seen contact learning as a whole growing by 33%, which really demonstrates the demand for our product.

But similarly, if you look at the financial metrics that sit behind that, in education, Ghost, you obviously incur a lot of your costs up front. You need to put down the infrastructure and the academic staff complement, and incur a lot of those operating costs before the first student walks through the door. So, there are a lot of costs that you front-run, and invariably as student numbers grow, you start to unlock those efficiencies and the J-curve, so to speak, plays out.

So, in a year where we’ve seen very good contact learning growth and investment, I think that J-curve has played out and has allowed us to expand our margins.

But, to your point and specifically to respond to that part of the question, we have definitely seen a lot more pressure on the high price-point products, particularly in our AFDA business. That we believe has been compounded by the broader macro film industry, as Chris cited earlier.

We are under no illusions that the broader macroeconomic conditions definitely play a role in students’ and sponsors’ ability to pay these accounts.

Therefore, strategically, we believe that in AFDA’s particular case, even though the price point is higher, if we offer a world-class service there… I mean, that product in particular, you get an amazing experience. You work on industry-grade equipment there, and it is quite a high-end and very expensive product, so we believe the price point is justified. But in saying that, there’s recognition that the consumer remains under pressure.

And then the question is: What do we do? How do we respond as an institution? So, sticking to our philosophy of widening access, I think it’s also our responsibility as an institution to make our product as affordable as we can.

One of the levers we are able to pull, given the fact that our distance learning and contact learning are on different growth trajectories and we can also unlock leverage there – we think of our price increases quite cleverly and, I believe, responsibly.

What’s important strategically, over the years, is that we have always tried to track CPI from a price-point perspective. We haven’t gone significantly beyond that, and I think that’s important. We want to really make our prices and our products attractive to students, within the confines of a challenging economy.

The Finance Ghost: You know, someone listening to this might be tempted to think, “Well, if it’s such a volumes game and it’s leverage and it’s all the rest, then why not just lower your prices and just really fill these things?”

But I guess the challenge there – apart from the fact that it’s just not good business practice – is that once you rebase yourself lower, it’s really hard to come back from that. And I guess the other issue is, in a multi-year degree, it doesn’t help you to make the first year more affordable and then in year two and year three you need to do a huge jump. That’s actually more unfair. Then you create this lower baseline for the whole thing.

I mean, it’s tough. That’s why I love asking you this question, because I think the pricing decision is not straightforward.

Ishak Kula: Yeah, that’s correct, Ghost. The pricing decision isn’t straightforward. But I think we keep ourselves honest, partly as a management team and being listed as well, it is easy to quickly pass that pressure back onto our consumers and hike prices, but that isn’t the strategy. We believe we need to stay well priced.

And to your earlier point, when we’re thinking about our pricing increases and where we do see good demand or some pricing pressures, we’re also not afraid to reinvest in those margins. I think that’s an important component for us, and that sticks to our values and our norms within our business.

Chris Vorster: If I can add to that, obviously STADIO’s purpose is to widen access. Now, that is something we take very seriously, and to truly really stand for widening access, affordability is obviously very important in that regard.

So, if we look at the different pricing of the programmes that we offer, we really believe it is well and fairly priced.

And we have done work, especially in our distance-learning offering, to ensure that the majority of South Africans will have the opportunity to have access or to study at higher education institutions with those fees. We believe that is affordable for a lot of people.

And then I think something we would also like to mention to you today is our excitement about a new mode of delivery which we call our blended mode. We will start implementing it at the beginning of next year. This, we believe, will attend to the affordability issue – especially for school-leavers who want a contact-learning experience and want to be on a campus, but at the same time, affordability is of utmost importance to them.

So, we will launch a new blended mode next year, which will be a combination of contact learning, on-campus learning, and distance-learning support in the background. We believe that can really address the market who can’t afford the R70,000 to R80,000 per year tuition fees at a normal comprehensive campus.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, I guess that blended offering is very much about just driving return on assets, right? You’ve got the campus, you’ve got the online tech, you’ve got the ability to do all of this stuff, and it’s about trying to find the sweet spot for each individual student’s needs and how you then bring them into the STADIO ecosystem. Which makes a lot of sense because of things like operating leverage and everything else, right?

Chris Vorster: Exactly that. Our research has also shown a lot of people or students attending higher education institutions – especially campus life – of your total costs, more than half will go to auxiliary costs.

What do I mean by that? It’s more accommodation, travelling, where less than half of the total cost of studying on a campus is going towards tuition fees. We think we can address this with our blended and city-campus model, bringing education closer to people in major towns and cities in the country.

The Finance Ghost: I want to dig into the point around leverage a bit more, and Ishak this is something that you raised where, what you’re essentially saying is you need to have the same stuff in place whether you have 1, 10, or 40 students in a class.

You still need a lecturer, somewhere for them to sit, the curriculum, everything. You need all that stuff.

And so, your contribution margin of additional students is very strong, but you essentially can lose money if you don’t have enough students. That is possible. It’s that J-curve that you’ve referenced there.

So, when I look at those numbers (and again, I’ll reference your recent results and take the longer-term view here), student numbers are up 60% over 5 years, we’ve talked about revenue being up 97%, but core headline earnings are up 152%. So, that is the beauty of leverage coming through.

If anyone listening wants to understand more about leverage, that’s what we’re talking about. It’s when you’re basically taking a revenue growth number and turning it into much higher profit growth number.

Now some of that is capacity utilisation, but some of it would probably be operational efficiencies as well. And so, beyond just the obvious of bums-on-seats and people on the other end of a video where they’re learning (which is just basically getting more people in the room), how do you think about the rest of your cost base? Where do the opportunities lie?

I would imagine AI is a conversation at the moment around saving costs and everything else. Just help people understand a little bit more about the efficiencies you think are in there.

Ishak Kula: Yeah, good question, Ghost. I’ll have a stab at it, and then there’s an element of it that I think Chris can speak to. So, when I think about our organisation, to the point I made earlier about how we think about particularly the long-term trajectory of our business, I think the big benefit we have is firstly this mix of contact learning and distance learning.

To make that point again, I think we are very fortunate that we’ve overseen very good growth in the distance-learning mode of delivery over the years, and we continue to see that good growth and remain the leaders in the distance-learning space, but this is really supported well now by contact learning.

And, as those two growth trajectories align and are both going let’s call it full steam ahead, that unlocks a significant amount of efficiency. And I think that’s the benefit we are starting to see in our margins.

If I look at our cost base in specific terms, we’ve talked about our revenue mix. I think there the price point and what drives revenue and our strategy is clear.

If I think about the biggest cost line next, it’s probably our academic contingency. We’re an academic institution, and as a consequence, we always need to be innovative and creative in that space. And I think this is where Chris can touch on that new academic model.

We’ve invested quite heavily into a brand-new academic model, which we believe will yield efficiencies and further scale over time. And Chris, maybe it’s a good opportunity you could touch on that point as I delve further perhaps into one or two other opportunities.

Chris Vorster: Yeah, without going into too much technical detail on the academic model, it is something that is very important in our world. The challenge here is to scale, but to scale a higher education institution, one of your biggest threats would be that you lose quality. And that is something we have really unpacked, and we believe that with our new academic model, we will tick the quality box first while we scale the business.

We looked at everything – from the curriculum design and how we offer programmes in the classroom, to evaluation and assessments – to ensure that we have that all aligned and of the best quality across our different campuses, but also very importantly, across our different modes of delivery.

So, we’ve launched our new academic model, and it’s now to capacitate it to make sure that we get the right academic quality and resources in place. And yeah, we are very excited because we believe that by doing this now and investing in this model now, it will bring a lot of potential margin growth over the coming years because we will grow into it. So yes, the academic model is definitely important.

Just to add to that point, we still have a lot of growth ambitions, Ghost, in the sense that we’ve set ourselves the next target of 80,000 students. So, I think for the next couple of years we will continue investing into our operations and systems as well as infrastructure.

But we have proven to ourselves this year. If we look at our EBITDA margins, even in this year of investment, we’ve reached 31.3%. So, we believe we can continue expanding, investing in systems and infrastructure, and still maintain a healthy margin.

Ishak Kula: To add to Chris’s point, despite the year of investment, we’ve opened these two new campuses. And to Chris’s earlier point, we continue to invest significantly into the business.

The investment areas also included our brand awareness, right?

We’ve invested and strategically aligned with SA Rugby, which we believe will assist us in becoming a household name. We believe there’s brand synergies and that’s alignment. And I think it will put us in good stead in the long term as an institution.

To your earlier point, significant amount of time and effort is going into investing into the AI domain, which we believe also over time, not only is it a relevant topic of conversation globally, but also in the academic world and how we think about AI and incorporating AI into every single module.

How we teach our students to be AI-literate so that they ultimately take relevant workplace AI capabilities into the world of work when they eventually graduate.

So, a significant amount of investment has gone into that.

And then also, more broadly, a significant investment in the IT domain. At the heart of our institution, being an academic institution, the reality is, to run this business at scale, you need to have the IT capability. And although we’ve got infrastructure in place, there’s always an optimisation element. And speaking to our levers, there’s significant amount of recognition that we need to continue to invest in this space as technology evolves.

The Finance Ghost: I think we’ve got time for one more question. You’ve been on your roadshows, you’ve spoken to your institutional investors, and I’m sure some of what would have come up would have been things like EBITDA margin expansion in a period of investment, which is excellent. I’m sure you got asked some interesting questions about the Springboks partnership as well.

I guess if it was me wearing my analyst hat, I would probably have asked you about capex and the extent to which you believe you can hit your target over the next few years without any major investment in new facilities versus what you have today.

So, it would be quite cool to understand a little bit more about that, and obviously there’s the blended offering to think about, etcetera, and how that all comes in with your targets and capex.

And perhaps then, to just finish off the show, if there’s anything else that was raised by the institutions that you think is worth highlighting to the wider audience who will listen to this podcast and who don’t necessarily have the ability to attend that roadshow.

So, let’s start with capex in the context of your big goals, and then anything else that you just want to bring to the fore here.

Chris Vorster: Ishak, do you want to talk to the capex, especially with the expansion we are currently busy with at our four contact-learning campuses in STADIO Higher Education?

Ishak Kula: Yeah, thank you Chris. I think, contextually, it’s important to recognise that in our ambition to reach 80,000 students, we believe we have the existing footprint to reach that target when considering our contact-learning and distance-learning mix. But importantly, there is still an amount of capex investment that is needed to get there.

If we think of our four campuses in STADIO Higher Education specifically, to support the growth that we’ve seen in contact learning, you would have seen our Durbanville campus, where we’re concluding the second phase of that project. That total spend for phase one and phase two was circa R325 million, which we spent over the last two-and-a-half years. That will conclude in Q4 of this year. Then there is still land available at Durbanville which allows us further expansion, but the capex up to date will allow us 5,000-plus students on the Durbanville campus.

Looking at our second-largest campus, Centurion. In student numbers, it’s currently the largest, but if you think of the growth story there, we’ve invested significantly there as well. This year, in 2026, we have converted the existing hall into more lecture facilities to optimise for space.

But our investment into the future to allow for growth there involves constructing a brand-new 1,500-seat hall there. That will commence next year, which will probably allow us to take that campus to about 4,000 to 5,000 students. And there is further land available to expand our Centurion campus.

This year, on our Waterfall campus, we acquired one of the Curro buildings that’s situated on the existing land that we rent there. We acquired that land for R18 million and there’s an opportunity, perhaps, to acquire another building on that site. So that will also allow us in future to probably get to 4,000 to 5,000 students on that site.

Then, if we think about our Musgrave campus, in 2025 we signed a new lease there to cater for that expansion. It was a block situated across the campus, so very convenient for our students. But that, over time, will likely remain more equivalent to a city campus, while we seek, perhaps, a comprehensive campus in the KZN region.

And if you look at the capex levels over the next two to three years, we believe that, if you look at 2026, we cited a R301 million capex investment, it will probably remain at those levels for the next two to three years to get us to that expansion strategy and to be able to unlock the growth that we have cited.

I want to add, importantly, for the listeners: strategically, I think we have always been a very lean business when it comes to debt. I think at the half-year we had R120 million of debt which we repaid post the half-year. So, it’s important for us to remain lean.

This allows us to continuously reinvest into the business, yet it also balances the capital returns to our shareholders and what they expect of us.

And also, I think in the macroeconomic conditions it allows us to move quite quickly if other opportunities come our way, because we have a lean balance sheet.

Chris Vorster: Thanks, Ishak. Also, some of the topics which came up during our roadshow, as you put it, was definitely to understand the whole Springbok partnership and why we decided on that.

For us, as a very young brand, it made sense to partner with one of the most respected and beloved brands in the country. We see a lot of synergy between the two. We’re South African first, very passionate about our product, and it made sense for us to partner with them and use the Springbok branding to become a household name. So, that was the vehicle that we identified.

Already, in this test series that just concluded (The Greatest Rivalry with the All Blacks), there were three STADIO students playing in that test series, which we are very excited about. But I think over the next few years we will really start to see the benefits.

If we look at the under-20 group who won the Junior U20 World Cup, 16 out of the 30 are STADIO students. So, these are all brand ambassadors, and we believe they will do great branding work for us in the years to come.

So, we are excited about that partnership. It comes at a cost now, but I strongly believe it will serve us well in becoming a household name in the next few years.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, look, the Springboks are the best brand in the country at the moment, so I think that’s a fantastic partnership there. And what’s also very cool is that it feels very full circle from when I went to high school where, let’s be honest, rugby was not associated with academic excellence.

Generally, either you crashed into other okes very successfully, or you did maths. And I really enjoy the fact that these things are starting to come together. There are no prizes at all for guessing which of those two groups the Sorting Hat put me into, genetically, so we’ll leave it there.

Chris, Ishak, it’s been a really, really cool conversation. It’s lovely to come full circle over the past year. And I think one of the interesting takeouts for me from this is what you said right now, Chris, which is STADIO as a young brand and how that’s the brand that has partnered with the Springboks.

So, it’s not just AFDA or Milpark or STADIO Higher Education – it’s really lifting it now to what used to be, I suppose, seen as a consolidator in this space and what has now grown into its own brand, and I think that says a lot about where the strategy is going.

So, I hope we’ll be doing another one of these a year from now, and I wanted to just wish you luck in the current financial period as you continue to deliver towards those 2030 goals. And yeah, looking forward to following the progress.

Ishak Kula: Thank you, Ghost. Looking forward to our next conversation.

Chris Vorster: Thank you very much.