PERSIMMON PLC (PSN) — 2026 Half Year Results

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, and welcome to the PERSIMMON PLC Investor Presentation. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. Now I'd like hand you over to Andrew Doctorbury, CFO. Good morning, sir. Good morning. Thank you, everybody, for joining today. So I plan to talk for around fifteen minutes or so, and then I will take any questions. So really pleased. Last week, we reported strong half year performance. We've delivered volume led profit growth in a challenging market while we've maintained our balance sheet discipline, and we've continued to make appropriate investments to support our future returns. And I think these results show that PERSIMMON's strategy is delivering is delivering growth today while building a larger, stronger, and a higher returns business for the future. And, of course, as you all know, the market is challenging, and we are responding to that challenge from a position of strength, and we retain confidence in our medium term ambitions. So first of all, I'm gonna go through our first half performance. As I say, that performance has been very strong in a challenging market. You can see on the slide the progress that we made in the first half year. Underlying profit before tax was up 3% to a £170,000,000, and that was driven by volume growth and some higher interest costs. Average outlets in the period were up to 273 from 272 this time last year. Net private weekly sales were up to 205. That's up 7%. And with the private sales rate, including our bulk sales improving to naught point seven five per outlet per week. And I'm really pleased that growth in outlets and the growth in sales rates has driven completions up 13% to 5,189. And those completions include a 14% increase in first time buyers, and that demonstrates the importance of our produ...