Kier Group plc (KIE) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our half year results presentation. For those of you here in person, I'd like also to extend a warm welcome to those joining us by the webcast and audio as well. So I'm Andrew Davies. I'm chief executive of Keir Group and I'm joined today by Simon Kesterton, our chief financial officer. So this morning I will talk you through the highlights of the last six months to 31st of December 2023, and then I'll hand you over to Simon to talk through the group's financial performance. And this will be followed by an operational review, an update on ESG, and we'll finish off with our outlook. Then there'll be an opportunity for questions and answers at the end, and we'll start, if that's okay, with questions in the room, and then we'll go to see if there's any questions online as well. So if we move through the disclaimer and the results summary highlight and we talk to on slide four now the half year 24 highlights. So the first half of the year seen the group delivering a strong set of results with increased orders, revenue and profit. We delivered revenue growth at 23% with strong performance across the business. We achieved an adjusted operating profit of £65 million, an increase of 13%. We continue to deliver an industry-leading adjusted operating margin of 3.4% despite the continuing inflationary pressures. As our performance tends to be second-half weighted, we expect full-year margin to be in line with our medium-term target. Group's net cash position at 31st of December was £17 million, and that's materially better than the £131 million net debt position we had at the half-year 2023, and that's due to our free cash flow generation, which itself has been driven by increased volumes, particularly in our construct...