Melrose Industries PLC (MRO) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Hello everyone and welcome to Melrose half-year results for 2026. The last six months have been a busy and an important period for the group as we've continued to execute our growth strategy as a leading global aerospace technology business. We've maintained our positive momentum against the backdrop of strong civil and defence demand. Now before we get started I'd like to welcome Ross McCluskey to his first set of results as Melrose CFO. We're delighted to have Ross on board and leading strongly right from the start. We delivered a good first half performance with continued growth in revenue and profit. We also maintained our increasing cash trajectory with a strong year on year improvement in free cash flow. The markets we serve continue to evolve and the underlying demand story remains compelling. On the civil side, order backlogs are at record levels with production ramping up and the aftermarket continues to perform strongly. In defence, ongoing conflicts and geopolitical uncertainty is driving up spending commitments and stimulating the rapid development of emerging technologies. In May, we had an incident at our Garden Grove facility in California. This site is a global market leader in the production of aerospace acrylic products and the issue involved the storage of an associated chemical. Now most importantly, the incident was managed carefully with no reported injuries or contamination and we're working hard with regulators now and our customers to resume full production in a safe and timely manner. I'll come back to this in more detail later. More broadly, I'm encouraged by the progress we're making in the areas we're investing for future growth. We've identified target opportunities where we have proprietary technology and a clear opportunity to win, par...