MACFARLANE GROUP PLC (MACF) — Full Year Results

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, and welcome to the MACFARLANE GROUP PLC Full Year Results Investor Presentation. At this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged, could be submitted at any time by the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Just click Q and A, scroll to the bottom, type your question and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company review all questions submitted and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Peter Axon, CEO. Good morning, sir. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us. We announced our results for 2023 last week, and our objective today is to talk you through the results and put some color behind the numbers. And I'm joined this morning by our group CFO, In terms of the agenda for the presentation, I'll make some brief introductory remarks to sort of set the scene. Ivor will then talk you through the the key metrics. I will then come back on and talk you through the performance of the individual business units. I will touch on the pension scheme, and then we'll conclude and move to Q and A. In terms of the performance in 2023, as we exited 2022, we always knew 2023 was gonna be a difficult year. We could see that demand was gonna be weak, and we were also recognizing that cost inflation was gonna gonna come through the business. So our plan for 2023 was to work on a self help program that's going to offset the worst of cost inflation and and the worst of the weak demand. And what we've achieved in 2023 is good new business growth, good sales momentum in Europe, an improvement in gross margin throug...