Synthomer plc (SYNT) Q4 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our full year results presentation. It's great to see you here at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London, with many others joining online. As usual, I'm here with Lilly, our CFO, and Faisal, head investor relations, and we look forward to answering your questions at the end. I will provide an overview of our performance and the significant steps that we have taken this year to safeguard, strengthen and refocus the business. 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 that underpins our confidence for the future. Starting with performance. As you are well aware, market conditions have been amongst the most challenging in decades, both for Syntome and the wider industry. A prolonged period of suppressed demand meant that our volumes declined by 10% in the year, albeit at a slower rate in the second half. Total revenues were 15% lower at £2 billion. Whilst we saw greater resilience in our specialty businesses, the impact of this demand environment on EBITDA was significant, with margins also lower versus prior year, mainly due to higher production and utility cost. Our key priorities at the outset of the year was to protect and strengthen our financial platform, and here we made significant progress. Cash generation has been a key contributor with the group delivering a 24% improvement in free cash flow or £86 million in 2023. This impressive performance was driven by an intense focus on cost inventory reductions and resulted in a 96% conversion of EBITDA to operating cash flow of £136.3 million. It fundamentally underlines our ability to navigate severe trading conditions and is highly promising for the futu...