Bluescope Steel Ltd (BLSFF) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to Bluescope's first half FY25 financial results presentation. I'm Mark Vassella and I'm joined this morning by David Fallew, our Chief Financial Officer. David and I will take you through the results materials, after which we'll have time for Q&A. We're joining you today from Bluescope's head office in Melbourne, part of the Eastern Kulin Nation. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Wurundjeri peoples. We pay our respects to elders, past, present and emerging, and all First Nations people joining us today. Now to the highlights. Despite the challenging macroeconomic environment and bottom of the cycle conditions in the first half of FY25, Bluescape remained profitable, demonstrating our business model's resilience. The business produced an underlying EBIT of $309 million, and a return on invested capital of 8.1% against these challenging macro conditions. During the half, we delivered $162 million in shareholder returns and finished with an $88 million net cash balance sheet. Critically, we're ensuring we're balancing near-term performance with longer-term growth. I'll touch on this in more detail shortly, but in short, We're well underway on our $200 million cost and productivity program and are actively identifying additional opportunities to bolster performance. And we have an exciting pipeline of growth opportunities that we're working through. Together, this will deliver a target $500 million in incremental annual EBIT by 2030. We're also maximising cash generation through a re-sequencing of capital expenditure and a refocus on working capital. An example of this is the work we're doing to expedite the realisation of cash from our land portfolio in West Apto and the work underway to position the balance o...