Bunzl plc (BNZL) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and thank you for attending Bansal's 2024 half-year results presentation. I appreciate you joining us today. Richard House, our CFO, is also on the call and will cover our financial performance, capital allocation and outlook for the remainder of the year following my initial remarks. After that, I will summarize our strategic progress year-to-date. Let me start with the key takeaways from today's results. Firstly, we have achieved real success in delivering our acquisition strategy and have already surpassed our record total committed spend. August year to date, we have committed more than 650 million pounds, announcing seven acquisitions, including one more today. Our pipeline is active. and I'm confident that we will have even more acquisitions to announce before the end of the year. Despite the step change we've made in increasing our level of acquisition spent in recent years, our leverage has remained well below our target range for some time. This is due to the success of our investments and our consistently strong cash generation over the last few years. Therefore, today we are committing to measures intended to steadily return to our target leverage range by the end of 2027. To do this, we will allocate around 700 million pounds per annum primarily towards value-accretive acquisitions and, if required, returns of capital to shareholders in each of the three years ending 31 December 2027. To kick this off, we are launching Bansal's first-ever share buyback programme today, returning an initial £250 million by 3 March 2025. We expect to extend this programme in 2025 with a further share buyback of around £200 million. Richard will take you to the details later in the call. I'm also very pleased that our operating margin has continued to expand str...