Henry Boot PLC (BOOT) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

So morning everybody. It's good to see quite a full room this morning. I assume that the sun has brought you all out. And actually you're all smiling at me, which is nice. Now, we're going to do the normal. This is the agenda. So I'll start off with an introduction and give you some operational highlights and talk about our medium-term targets. Then Darren's going to come in and do the financial review, but he'll also talk about land promotion. Then I will finish off going through development, house building and construction and then finish off with an outlook. So, first of all, I'm not going to go through the investment case, and I can see that you're all relieved, but the good news is that the investment case is still in your appendix of your slide pack. But what I wanted to do is I just wanted to talk you through a few points just to give you some context for today's results. Now, the first thing is that our focus on high-quality development projects and premium homes has helped us to achieve relatively strong property sales over the last two years, at a time when, to be honest, the markets were pretty challenging. We continue to have conviction in our three key markets, and with a wealth of opportunity within the portfolio, I remain confident that we can hit our medium-term growth targets. Now there's no doubt that there have been difficulties in the planning system and that has held us and many other businesses and indeed I think the country back. But Darren and I are going to start to give you an impression of how we think that this can change and that the planning will ease. So you'll hear that in the presentation this morning. Now, throughout this period, as you'll all expect, our balance sheet has remained absolutely rock solid. And I would say this, wouldn'...