Caledonia Investments plc (CLDN) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Okay, well, welcome everybody, both online and in the room, to our half-year results presentation. I'm Matthew Masters, Chief Executive of Caledonia, and we'll be joined during this presentation by Tom Leder, who runs our private capital portfolio, and then by Rob Memmott, who's just joined us as Finance Director. And what we're going to do is take you a little bit through the strategy. I'll give some highlights on the half year and then we'll go through the portfolio. There's been some activity in the private capital portfolio, hence Tom joining us. And then Rob will take us through the finance section. So moving through the cautionary statement and onto an overview and just a reminder of Caledonia, which we are a self-managed investment trust. And I'll come on to explain why that's special a bit later on. And our net assets are 2.9 billion pounds. And we're focused on delivering our shareholders real returns over the longer term. And you can see on the chart, that we compare ourselves really against inflation. So we're aiming to beat consumer price, CPIH, inflation over the medium and longer term. And then there's a reference point over 10-year periods we're looking to outperform against the FTSE All-Share Index. But we're really focused on protecting and growing the real value of our shareholders' money and also the real value of the dividend over time. And those are our principal objectives. And you can see our dividend track record also on this chart. showing you how we've progressed that over the years. There's 56 years of growing the dividend. And in fact, over the last 10 years, we've distributed by way of normal dividends and to special dividends, 460 million pounds to our shareholders. which sort of evidences the fact that we're not at all averse at returni...