3i Group plc (III) Q4 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good day and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Welcome to the 3i group PLC results presentation webcast for the year to 31st March 2026. After the presentation there will be a question and answer session via the conference call and instructions will follow at that time. Participants can also submit questions to the webcast page using the ask a question button. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I will now hand the conference to the CEO of 3i Group, PLC, Simon Borrows, to open the presentation. Please go ahead. Good morning. Welcome to 3i's FY26 Annual Results presentation. I'm Simon Borrows, CEO of 3i Group. On the call with me today are James Hatchley, our Group Finance Director, Sylvia Santoro, our Group Investor Relations Director. The slides supporting our remarks have been put on our website this morning. In spite of the challenging market backdrop, we delivered another good result with a return on equity of 22%. Once again, we significantly exceeded our return target of 15%. Our NAV per share finished at £30.30, Private equity produced a 23 percent gross investment return and also generated cash of some 1.8 billion. We ended the year at 2 percent gearing, and we announced a dividend for the year of 84.5 pence per share. That's a 15 percent increase on last year and represented an aggregate of some 5.4 billion pounds of dividends since our restructuring in 2012. You will also have seen that this morning we launched a £750 million share buyback programme, and James will cover that shortly. The 23% gross investment return for private equity includes a 25% gross investment return for action, and that's in spite of a more difficult trading backdrop in France from September of last year. The ...