Rentokil Initial plc (RTO) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us. It's a pleasure to be with you. I look forward to speaking with many of you in the coming days ahead. In a few moments, Paul will provide you with details on our financial performance for the six months ending June 30. I'll then come back to provide my first impressions and priorities for growth before taking questions. Please note to ask a question today, you will need to dial the separate conference call number shown on our website or at the end of this presentation. I want to first thank our 65,000 colleagues we have at Rent2Kill that come to work every day with two simple goals. Keep each other safe and take care of our customers. And they do so to the best of their abilities. Our frontline truly are heroes and make me proud to be wearing the same jersey. For half one, the main headlines of an encouraging set of results are good financial performance with further progress on revenue and profit and strong free cash flow conversions. We are pleased with the acceleration of international growth in the second quarter with 5.4% organic growth in pest control. And I was particularly pleased to see customer retention improved by almost 1% in the half. In the US, the team has worked hard and made good progress over the last 18 months. We have made the right pivots from the original integration strategy towards more brands, more branches, and smarter digital marketing. It was reassuring to see residential revenues continue to grow in the first half. We now need to give our commercial business similar focus and investments to drive comparable results. Since joining four months ago, I've spent much of my time in the field with our frontline and our customers. From these interactions, it is clear we have a str...