Croda International Plc (CRDA) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone. Many thanks for joining us here at the London Stock Exchange today. And a warm welcome to everyone online as well. I'm here with Stephen Oxley, our CFO, who has been on board since the start of April. Stephen's been a great addition to the team and hit the ground running, not least in helping us to push forward our plan to grow earnings and improve returns. So more on that shortly. So in terms of the agenda, then. normal outline from us today and set out in the slide up there. Stephen and I will run through our performance and the progress we've made with our five point plan before stopping to take your questions. So OK then, starting with some of the key highlights from the half. Overall, our financial performance was very much in line with our expectations at the start of the year. The second quarter moderated slightly versus the first, but group sales increased by 7% for the first half. Sales grew in all three businesses and in all regions. A strong improvement in volumes across the board, more than offset a modest reduction in price mix, leading to a healthy increase in both adjusted operating profit and profit before tax. And whilst we're mindful of the challenging environment, our guidance for the full year remains unchanged. And despite delivering good sales growth in the first half year, we remain a long way off from where we want the business to be. Executing the five point plan we introduced in February has been our major focus. Our actions are helping us navigate this current environment, simplifying and modernising our business and speeding up our efforts to enhance margins. We have accelerated our plans in particular, identifying a further 60 million pounds of cost savings, taking the total to 100 million of annualized savings by ...