Synthomer plc (SYNT) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, and welcome to our 2024 full year results presentation. I'm glad to see you here at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London, with many others joining online. As usual, I'm here with Lily Liu, our CFO, and Faisal Taba, Head of Investor Relations, and we look forward to answering your questions at the end. I will provide an overview of our performance and the robust progress we made in 2024, despite slow demand in most of our end markets. Lily will then walk through the numbers in more detail before I come back to present our continued progress and how we are making Sintermeer a much stronger, more resilient, and more focused specialty chemicals business. Then at the end, we will discuss what we are anticipating for 2025 and beyond. Starting with our performance, against the backdrop of a period of suppressed demand in the chemical sector that lasts now since three years, we have delivered fully results with robust growth in revenue, EBITDA, EBIT, and improved underlying EPS, all in line with expectations. Overall volumes increased by a significant 8.4%. Despite generally slow end market demand, all three divisions showed growing volumes. We gained market share, particularly in AS division, and we are pleased to report today an increase in our revenue of 5%. Our EBITDA increased by 9%, around 10 million pounds, mostly reflecting our self-help, reliability, and cost actions, as well as our strategic reorientation with margins also ahead year on year. And we did this after absorbing the additional operating investments we have made in our people and our assets in the year. As we mentioned in our January update, we were pleased with the strong exit margins coming out of 2024, particularly in our specialty businesses. We maintained our stable financial posit...