British American Tobacco Industries, p.l.c. (BTI) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to welcome you to our 2024 Preliminary Results presentation. With me this morning is Soraya Bencik, CFO and Victoria Buxton, Group Head of Investors Relations. I will begin with our transformation highlights and the progress we have made during our investment year. Soraya will then take you through our financial results in more detail before I return to talk more about our performance outlook ahead of Q&A. With that, I would like to draw your attention to the disclaimers on slide two and three. Let's begin by looking at the positive transformation momentum we are driving, starting with some highlights. 2024 was a key moment in our transformation journey, as we sharpened our execution, enabling us to navigate near-term market challenges and deliver an improved performance in the second half. We have delivered group results in line with expectations, which Soraya will talk about in more detail. Smokeless accounts for 17.5% of group revenue, up 1 percentage point versus last year. We added 3.6 million smokeless consumers, reaching 29.1 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 up to 151 million pounds and a seven percentage point increase in our category contribution margin on an organic constant rates basis. We are committed to rewarding shareholders with strong cash returns, and I am pleased with our progress improving financial flexibility. enabling the initiation of sustainable share buyback, continued progress on the leverage to within our target range at 2.4 times, alongside our progressive dividend with 2% growth announced today. Our foundations are solid, and I'm confident th...