Balfour Beatty Plc (BAFBF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

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WEBVTT 00:00:00.031 -- 00:00:05.241 Good morning. Welcome to our 2024 full year results. 00:00:05.241 -- 00:00:10.771 I'm joined here by Phil Harrison, my very able-bodied wingman who 00:00:10.771 -- 00:00:14.517 is going to talk to you about the financial side of things and I'm going to talk about 00:00:14.517 -- 00:00:17.740 the aspiration and the future. 00:00:18.222 -- 00:00:20.986 Let's start off. You can read the numbers. 00:00:20.986 -- 00:00:25.192 I think they're all very, very good. Increase in profit. 00:00:25.192 -- 00:00:29.618 Love the fact that we finished with nearly a billion pounds worth of cash in the bank. 00:00:29.618 -- 00:00:33.303 By the way, I'm going to use this nearly a billion many, many times in this presentation. 00:00:33.303 -- 00:00:37.769 So don't confuse the cash and the share buybacks and all the other bits and pieces. 00:00:37.769 -- 00:00:41.475 I'll be quite clear on it. And of course, the 18.4 00:00:41.475 -- 00:00:46.502 billion backlog or order book. with improved quality of margin and 00:00:46.502 -- 00:00:48.124 de-risked. 00:00:48.124 -- 00:00:52.690 And then, of course, the increased share buyback this year. 00:00:52.690 -- 00:00:58.098 But I want to start by going back to 2014 and really what's 00:00:58.098 -- 00:01:02.003 behind all of this. And it's quite interesting, when you go back and you look at the 00:01:02.003 -- 00:01:07.652 presentation, back in 2014, I think to the nine-month point, 00:01:07.652 -- 00:01:11.942 our cash flow was minus $1 billion. 00:01:11.942 -- 00:01:15.389 We had a takeover offer by Carillion. 00:01:15.389 -- 00:01:19.578 I don't know if you remember, but John Lang made a pitch for our investment portfolio 00:01:19.578 -- 00:01:21.723 at a billion. 00:01:21.723 -- 00:01:26.892 We had 89 dist...