SSP Group plc (SSPG) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us in the room here and on our live webcast this morning. For those of you who don't know me or are listening in for the first time, I'm Patrick Coveney, I'm the Group's CEO, and I'm joined by Jonathan Davis, our Deputy CEO and CFO. We're also joined in the room by Geert Varellen, our incoming CFO. Geert joined us seven weeks ago, and since then he's been knee-deep getting to know the business. I know he's also looking forward to meeting many of you this morning and in the coming weeks and months. He officially takes the reins as Group CFO from Jonathan on the 9th of June, and we're fortunate that Jonathan has chosen to stay with us until the end of the year to fully support us as we deliver our plan. I've asked here to take the opportunity to introduce himself and to share some of his initial reflections on SSP before we begin the Q&A portion of today's update. So let me start by briefly setting out the highlights from the first half. As a board and as a leadership team, we're focused on the imperative to build margins, returns and cash flows from the structurally attractive set of market positions that we've built in food travel markets across the world. Last December, we set out a specific plan to do that, and we're delivering on this plan, and indeed have plans in place to accelerate it further during the second half of 2025. I will come back to that in the second half of this presentation. Our business has traded well in the first half, with sales growing at 12%, including like-for-like sales growth of 5%. That revenue growth converted into 31% growth in operating profit with a 40 basis point improvement in operating margin. Our reported first half leverage at 2.2 times while elevated reflects the planned phasin...