THE ARTISANAL SPIRITS COMPANY PLC (ART) — Half Year Results

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good afternoon, and welcome to the ARTISANAL SPIRITS COMPANY PLC Half Year Results Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via that Q and A tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Just click Q and A, type in your question and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Andrew Dane, CEO. Good afternoon, sir. Afternoon, Paul. Thanks very much, and afternoon. Thanks all for those of you joining the webinar. A chance to present our results for the first half of twenty twenty four. So I'll start with some introductions, myself, I'm Andrew Dems, chief exec, joined here by my colleague, Billy McArthur, CFO. If we talk about the headlines, there are five key messages to to cover. The first is around the improvement in profitability, which has continued with a million pound increase in EBITDA versus the prior year, which I think is a pretty creditable performance based on relatively flat revenue in what are more challenging market conditions, and that reflects membership growth of about 4% versus last year, two percentage point improvement in gross margin and recurring cost efficiencies across A and P payroll overheads, which we'll talk about later. That flat revenue was supported by further revenue diversification, and that's both geographical diversification with the addition of the Taiwan and Korea markets helping to offset some of the downturn in China, alongside corporate diver...