Schroders plc (SDR) Q4 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to our Financial Year 2023 results presentation. I'm William Lee, Chief Executive, and I'm joined today by Alan Roberts, our Group Finance Director. I'm going to start by taking a look through some of the financial highlights. Overall this year, we've seen solid performance in quite challenging trading conditions. Our growth and the positive here is in one of our strategic growth initiatives. This is in our capital equipment sales. So this is sales of high value metrology systems and also additive manufacturing equipment. What we have seen, counteracting that, is the reduction in demand from the semiconductor equipment sector after what was a really strong year in financial year 2022. This resulted in headline revenue growth of 3%, but some of this is due to currency tailwinds. At constant currency, revenue was 1% lower. If we look at this by our three sales regions, then APAC, this is the region where many of the semiconductor equipment builder customers are located, and so therefore it was the area most impacted by the Semicon slowdown. On a positive note here though, we did see good growth in metrology products, but not enough to offset this drop in position measurement on CODA business, so revenues were down 4% of constant currency. EMEA story, overall more positive, steady growth in all areas of the business resulting in a 3% constant currency increase. Additive manufacturing was the really particular bright spot here and we started to secure some repeat machine sales to a growing number of key customers. Americas, we saw the strongest overall headline revenue growth, but this was due to the strength of the US dollar over the year, and once you remove this, actually our revenue in the Americas was flat. Very similar picture here to the G...