SSP Group plc (SSPG) Q4 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Okay, listen, we'll get going. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us here at Nomura in London and on our live webcast this morning. I'm Patrick Coveney, I'm the Group CEO of SSP, and I'm joined this morning by Geert Verheerlen, our new CFO, and by Satya Maynard, who joined us in October of last year as the CEO of our Continental European Region. Our board's Senior Independent Director, Karen Bradley, is also with us this morning. In a moment, Hirt will take you through the 2025 financials, and I'll then set out the operational, commercial and strategic drivers of that performance, and importantly, our focus 2026 actions. During that review, Satya will join me to set out our specific plan to build and accelerate returns from our European business. We'll then together share our outlook and here Satya and I will finish by taking questions both from the room and on the webcast. So let me start by briefly sharing my perspective on the year. I set out to ensure that FY25 would be a year of execution against the specific performance priorities that we outlined a year ago. We, and I specifically, didn't nail all of them. However, that's not to say that we didn't progress. Revenues were up 8%, operating profit up 13%, margin accreted by 30 basis points, and EPS rose by 25% to 12 and a half P, all of those metrics on a constant currency basis. And our reset teams drove strong trading performance in three of our four regions. Importantly, we pivoted to positive free cashflow, delivering 80 million of cash pre-dividend with leverage now at the lower end of our guided range. That put us in a position to initiate a 100 million share buyback in October. We've tightened our capital expenditure and we've built returns on recent investments. And as a result, our return...