Inchcape plc (INCH) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone. I'm Duncan Tate, Group CEO, and I'm joined by our Group CFO, Adrian Lewis. Here's today's agenda. I'll give an update, an overview on market and market context. Adrian will then run through 2025 results and I'll sum up and discuss the outlook for 2026. Today's presentation is available on our website and the recording of today's session will be available later today. After the presentation concludes, We'll take your questions. So let's begin. Inchcape delivered a strong 2025 performance against the backdrop of tariff-related disruption and economic uncertainty, reaffirming the strength of our diversified and scaled business. Our colleagues in the Americas and the Europe and Africa regions posted record PBT performances. Against a number of challenges, APAC delivered a better H2 performance and we're working with our OEM partners and across the value chain to drive further performance improvements. We continue to execute against our Accelerate Plus strategy, winning more distribution contracts and executing an acquisition in a new market for Inchcape. During the year, we returned around £340 million to shareholders, through dividends and buybacks, grew EPS and DPS by 13%. And with leverage of just 0.4 times, we're ready to go again in 2026, starting with a new share buyback program of £175 million. Now, this slide shows how we delivered against all of our key growth drivers on the left-hand side of this chart. That includes the financial metrics I mentioned, including our resilient margins, as well as vehicle volumes, customer and colleague-related metrics. And on those dynamics, we continue to build on our strong customer reputation in the industry with a 6% increase in our scores on reputation.com. In addition, our employee engagement score o...