Synthomer plc (SYNT) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to our first half 2024 results presentation. As usual, I will be joined by Lili Liu, our CFO, to present our review of Sintermeer's strategic, operational and financial performance in the period. And then our Head of Investor Relations, Faisal Taba, will join us as we look forward to answering your questions at the end. In terms of the agenda, I will start by providing an overview of our performance and the further steps that we have taken to transform the business in line with our strategy. Lilly will then walk through the numbers in more detail before I come back to show how we are making good and differentiated progress in each of the divisions and how we are positioning ourselves to succeed in delivering our medium-term ambitions. Starting with trading, after a sustained period of extremely challenging market conditions both for Sintermeer and the wider industry, our markets were more stable overall in the first half and our performance evolved broadly as we had anticipated at the start of the year. As such, we delivered revenue, earnings and EPS progress in line with expectations. Overall, activity levels continued to incrementally improve, led by market share gains in our adhesives business and an improvement in volumes from the very low levels of last year in our MBR business, while CCS division was more stable and at a strong and improved margin. We have made earnings and margin progress principally as a result of our self-help measures in an environment of reasonably stable markets. Our net debt was higher than at the start of the year for a number of reasons that we have previously flagged and which Lilly will talk about in more detail, but this has not changed our expectation that we will deliver positive free cash flow for the yea...