Spirax Group Plc (SPXSF) Q2 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our 2023 half-year results announcement call. I'm Nicholas Anderson, Group Chief Executive, and I'm joined here today by our CFO, Nimesh Patel. Regarding today's presentation, I will again start by sharing the highlights of the first half, and then Nimesh will take you through our financial performance. Later, I will return to cover the operations and outlook for the full year 2023. And to finalize, we'll be happy to take questions from the analysts on the call. As you all know, two days ago, we announced my desire to retire after 10 years in this role and 41 years of full-time employment. I'm really pleased and proud of what we have achieved together over these years and wish to publicly thank all my colleagues, past and present, for their support and contributions along this journey. I'm really looking forward with excitement to the years ahead when I plan to realize many personal projects that have been delayed due to my busy schedule of my executive career. I'd also like to say that I'm delighted that the Board chose Dimesh to lead our group on the next leg of this journey, which I'm sure will be even more successful. Back to the order of the day. I would like to start by acknowledging and thanking all my colleagues across the group for their outstanding efforts in what has been a good but challenging first half. We have delivered results broadly in line with our expectations, despite weaker than expected biofarm demand and the softening IP environment. As overall demand across the group was higher than expected, Sales were in line, but operating profit was slightly below our first half expectations. We have achieved strong organic sales growth in steam specialties and most of ETFs, offset by sales decline in direct industri...