Synthomer plc (SYNT) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to our first half 2025 results presentation. As usual, I'm joined by Lili Liu, our CFO and Faisal Taba, our Head of Investor Relations. Lili and I will present our review of Syntemer's strategic, operational and financial performance in the period and together 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 continued progress we are making, despite clearly subdued end markets. Lilly will then walk through the numbers in more detail before I come back to present the key developments in our three divisions, in the execution of our strategy, and how we are continuing to position Syntomer to deliver our medium-term ambitions. I start with trading. In the first half of 2025, we were able to deliver gross margin, EBITDA and relative margin progress, mainly through continued strategic delivery and cost reduction measures, which we are becoming quite good at. We view this as a robust performance overall, given the weak market environment the industry experienced particularly in the second quarter of the year. The gross margin improvement by more than 400 basis points over three years and more than 100 basis points in the first half of this year shows our pricing power and operating leverage which are very important now and even more going forward in a better demand environment. Both revenue and volume broadly tracked 2024 in Q1, but demand conditions became considerably more volatile in the second quarter following the announcement of new US tariffs. Many customers have adopted a wait-and-see attitude in the face of the sometimes day-by-day changes in the tariff situation, and this has affected activity levels in the short term, even as most of the longer...