Associated British Foods plc (ABF) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

I will get on to the actual financials. One for Owen. Owen, are you able to say anything about the kind of investment you're expecting for Primark in 2026 above the line in terms of digital? Because it seems like your margin guidance is slightly lower. I think it was flat and now it's slightly below flat. Is that because the investment is a bit higher? And if so, where is that investment kind of targeted? And finally, just on sugar, we've been in a big downgrade cycle in sugar. Do you think we've now trough on sugar and beyond 26, is there any reason to think there's any long-term erosion in the sugar profitability? Thank you. On the review briefly, it's about governance. It's about long-term governance. And within that governance headline, I think there are two different issues. The first one is food, where I think we haven't quite frankly been getting the scrutiny from the investment community that would serve us well because most of the scrutiny has been about retail and we want to put that perhaps we want to put that right and then on Primark it's really about oversight of what is now a very big and very complicated business and just maybe there's a better oversight model available to us than the brilliant model that we've been running with for 60 years. So you go, well, that was 60 years. That worked absolutely fabulously. And now looking into the future, maybe it's time to do something different. It's a big call. In terms of timing, I would imagine that we would have come to a conclusion about whether to stay together or pull ourselves apart by the interim. And the process of actually getting there will, I don't know, take 18 months or so. I don't think we've got anything to say about tax because we haven't been able to investigate these. This is the purpose of...