Premier Foods plc (PFD) Q4 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Welcome to Premier Foods' full year results. That's for the 52 weeks that ended on the 28th of March this year. As always, I'm here with Duncan, our CFO, and what we'll do is the usual double act. I'll take us through some highlights. Duncan can then run us through all the financials, and I'll come back and show you the progress we've made against our five-pillar growth strategy this year. At least I was hoping that's what it was going to be. Thanks. So you might remember that we had a really strong quarter three and a really strong Christmas, a really important period of time for us, of course, with some really strong second half branded growth. Well, that carried on through quarter four. Actually, quarter four branded growth in the UK was up 5.1%, and that brought the second half to 5% overall. There's a bit of phasing there from Easter. We had a really strong Easter as well. Easter falls into our quarter one. But actually the shipments go out largely in quarter four. But remember that an early cold Easter is generally good for us because that means more people are eating roast dinners and less people are getting the barbecue out. So an early cold Easter was good and that helped us as well and we took quite a lot of market share there as well. And that led us to more profit delivery than we expected. So we raised our guidance after that strong Christmas at the end of Q3. But that strong Q4 came in better than we thought and so therefore, profit came in overall better than those raised expectations. And the other bit of interesting news we've got today, it was given the continued strong performance of the business, our strong cash generation and the strength of the balance sheet, the board is currently planning to introduce an interim dividend starting with the curr...