HEADLAM GROUP PLC (HEAD) — Preliminary Results

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good afternoon, and welcome to the HEADLAM GROUP PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and could be submitted at any time via the q and a tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Chris Payne, CEO. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. We're going to talk to HEADLAM's half year results for 2025. I'm Chris Payne, the group chief executive, and I'm joined here by our CFO, Adam Phillips. So I'm going to cover an instruction, which is really an update on current trading conditions. I'm going to give an update on strategy and transformation plan, then hand over to Adam to talk to the numbers for the first half, who will then hand back to me to get into a bit more detail around the transformation plan in particular. So firstly, just just on sort of current trading, if you like, and and the market conditions that we see. The market's been quite subdued for a number of years now. Certainly, prior to COVID, we've seen perhaps a 25% reduction in volume on the flooring market. I think we have seen some signs in recent months, certainly of an improving trend in terms of like for likes. Last year, obviously, it was quite a negative year. This year, it's open negative, but the performance has been trending a bit more flat. And then certainly in June, July, we saw a flat performance. Bit bumpy where August i...