Fugro N.V. (0LNT) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Very welcome to the 2024 full year results presentation of Fugro. Very welcome to everyone here in the room, but also online. Thank you for dialing in. We'll take you through a presentation today as normal. And then after that, we open up for questions for the people here available in the room. So let me start first by giving you a few highlights of the financials for 2024. We improved our margins significantly in the year, and Barbara will dive into some of the details showing you the regional split, but I can already say that we're very pleased that three out of the four regions actually produced double-digit margins. So this is good to see and also good to mention that both land and marine have improved actually the margins compared to last year. Operating cash flow increased by 20%, also very good, and obviously as a result of a good net result and cash generation, we are very pleased to announce the increase in the dividends to 75 cents, euro cents per share compared to obviously 40 cents last year. The strong EBIT improvement also was developed with actually some headwinds in the Americas and the Middle East markets. In the Americas obviously we were confronted with lower activity in the United States specifically due to the uncertainties around the elections. In the Middle East we have spoken about that. The revenue was impacted by cautious spending from several oil companies but also due to the conflicts in the region. Overall, we achieved a growth rate currency comparable of 3.6%. Some key highlights for 2024. We delivered against our midterm targets. And that's important because those targets were set for 2027. And we already delivered the EBIT margin, free cash flow, and also the ROCHI, the return on capital employed well within those targets. And the stro...