Associated British Foods plc (ABF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Thank you all then very much for coming to this review of ABS full year results for the 52 weeks ended 14th of September 2024 and I'm aware that there are some people online and welcome to you too. It's a much easier job delivering today's results to those of the last four years. They're really very strong, substantial improvement in profitability with operating profit up 38%, adjusted earning per share up 39%, and then even better than the operating profit increase has been the increase in cash generation up to 1.4 billion. That's an increase of a cool 1.1 billion on last year. material improvements in our return on capital employed, increasing to 18.1 percent from 13.6 in the year before. They're not just strong financial results. We've also had a year of very good operational progress. Across the group, this has included strong execution in marketing campaigns, new product development, and capital projects. The marketing campaigns, the product development, got awfully stalled in the supply chain disruption and the inflation battles that we've fought in years gone by. We've seen a return to normality in our markets, in our supply chains. There are still some bumps, but overall many fewer. I think it's not just been about the environment. We've also seen the results of our consistent multi-year investment across the group. And this year, just gone, we invested another $1.3 billion. That will underpin future growth. It will also enable us to deliver on our most important ESG priorities. But even in a year of this record investments, we continue to increase our capital returns to shareholders. Our proposed total dividend for 2024 represents an increase of 50%. Over the last two years, we'll have returned approximately 2.3 billion pounds to shareholders through dividen...