DCC plc (DCC) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to DCC's interim results presentation for the six months ended 30th of September 2023. I'm Donal Murphy, Chief Executive of DCC and I'm delighted to be joined by Kevin Lucey, our Chief Financial Officer. Here's our standard disclaimer. Thankfully, I don't have to read it. It's there for your notice. On our agenda for today, I'll cover off the highlights of the first half of the year, which was another period of strong growth and development activity for the group. Kevin will take you through the performance review. I'll give you an update on our strategy and our development activity, and we'll finish with our outlook statement and a summary before we open up the session for questions. So let's get started with the highlights for H1 FY24. It was an excellent start to the year with strong growth in operating profit for the Group and an excellent period of acquisition activity. On our financial performance, we delivered strong growth in the seasonally less significant first half of our financial year to 30 September 2023. We were really pleased with the performance given the ongoing challenges in the macroeconomic environment. Group adjusted operating profit increased by 12% to £247.6 million, driven by an excellent performance in DCC Energy and partially offset, as anticipated, by a decline in both DCC Healthcare and DCC Technology. We were particularly pleased with our organic growth of 4.4% during the period. The Board proposes to increase the interim dividend by 5% to 63.04 pence per share. The strong performance of the group during the period yet again demonstrates the resilience in DCC's business model, the benefit of our diverse sectors of energy, healthcare and technology, and our strong market positions, and most importantly, that we in...