It is 10 o'clock, ladies and gentlemen, so I think we might get the show on the road. Welcome to the ASX results briefing for the 2012 financial year. My name is Elmer Funke , I'm the CEO. I'm joined here today by Peter Hiom, our Deputy CEO and Ramy Aziz our CFO. We have people joining us for this briefing here in Sydney over the phone and via webcast.
Before we kick off the presentation, I might ask people in the room here in Sydney to put your mobile phones on silent. Thank you. We'll use the usual format. I'll present for about 25 minutes, there's quite a lot to talk about and then we'll open it up for questions. Let me start by giving you an overview of the result.
A few months ago we gave the market a trading update for the 9 months to the end of March 2012. The full year results that you have in front of you are entirely consistent with that trading update and so in that sense there are no surprises in this result.
We describe this is as a solid result in very difficult market circumstances, particularly in the second half of the year. Our statutory profit after tax was AUD339 million, that was down 3.7% but as we flagged before that includes some significant items to do with the move to our new data centre, consolidation of property and some redundancies. If you strip those out, our underlying profit after tax was AUD346 million, down 2.9% and that was driven by a revenue decline of 1.2% ,growth in interest and dividend income of 5% and growth in expenses of around 4%.
2012 was very much a year of two halves. After a very strong start to the year we saw a significant reduction in market activity as retail investors left the market and professional investors reduced their risk appetite. That was reflected in the economics of the business in the second half and that translates directly to the dividends of the second half as well. So the final dividend of AUD0.851 for the second half was down 8.5% and that's in line with the economics of the business in the second half. Full year dividends, AUD1.779, down 2.9% and that's entirely driven by our pay-out ratio, which continues to be 90% of underlying earnings.
...