British American Tobacco Industries, p.l.c. (BTI) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to welcome you to our 2025 Interim Results presentation. With me this morning is Soraya Bencik, CFO, and Victoria Buxton, Group Head of Investor Relations. I will begin with our transformation highlights and the progress we have made against our 2025 priorities. Soraya will then take you through our financial results in more detail. before I return to talk more about our performance outlook and why we are confident in the pathway ahead. We will then take your questions. With that, I would like to draw your attention to the disclaimers on slides two and three. Let's begin by looking at the positive transformation momentum we are driving, starting with some highlights. We have delivered group results slightly ahead of expectations, which Soraya will talk about in more detail. Smokeless now accounts for 18.2% of group revenue, up 70 base points versus last year. And we added 1.4 million smokeless consumers, reaching 30.5 million, mainly driven by our continued success in modern oil. Our focus on quality growth, balancing top and bottom line delivery, has driven a further improvement in new category contribution margin up to 180 base points to 10.6% at constant rates. We continue to enhance our financial flexibility, enabling us to make progress on the leverage and reward shareholders with strong cash returns. Alongside our progressive dividends, we recently increased our 2025 share buyback by £200 million to £1.1 billion. I'm proud that we have delivered what we said we would in the first half against our 2025 priorities, as we continue to build a track record of delivery. Our quality growth focus is central to our new category's execution to ensure we roll out new innovations in a targeted way while continuing to improve our contri...