Coats Group plc (COA) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello everyone and thank you for joining COATS 2026 half-year results. My name is Claire and I'll be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by 2 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand over to David Paha, Chief Executive Officer, to begin. Please go ahead. Good morning everybody. I'm delighted to welcome you to today's presentation covering our first half results. I have with me today our Group CFO, Hannah Nichols. Let's move to the first slide. We'll start with the first half business highlights. Hannah will then share our financial results, and following this, I will give an update on our strategic progress and address the outlook. After the presentation, we will take questions. Let's look at the highlights for each one. We have delivered 1% organic revenue growth in the period where markets declined by mid-single digit, demonstrating again that we can consistently outperform our end markets. We have maintained a strong group margin of just below 20%, even after making significant investments in technology and growth initiatives. I am particularly pleased with the substantial share gains in apparel, which prove the strength of our value proposition and differentiators. Our footwear division is picking up momentum and we saw good organic growth improvements in Q2. We continue to execute on our strategy to become the leading multi-product tier 2 partner of our footwear customers with an enviable technology portfolio and global scale. Finally, we remain very excited with the scale and capabilities that Ortholite has added to the group and our confidence in the value creation from this acquisition has increa...