Workspace Group plc (WKP) Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

It's great to see so many familiar faces here in our Events Centre in Salisbury House, and a big welcome to those on our webcast this morning. I'm Lawrence Hutchings, Chief Executive, and I'm joined today by Dave Benson, our CFO. This week, Monday to be exact, marks my first anniversary at Workspace. Our agenda for this morning, we have a high level overview of performance in the first half. I'll hand over to Dave to take us through the financials in detail. Then I'll take us through our first update on strategy since we launched back in June, which was five short months ago. And we'll then move to Q&A. It's been a very busy time for Workspace. The economic backdrop continues to be challenging, not least because of the uncertainty around the upcoming budget. So we are controlling the controllables and taking a series of actions to deliver the fix, accelerate and scale strategy that we laid out in June. We're starting with our focus on stabilising, then rebuilding occupancy. But before I go into that, I'll summarise the first half performance, including some early and encouraging success indicators. There should be no surprises on this slide. We are clear on our expectations. The performance in the first half has played out broadly as we expected. Back in June, I said things were going to get tougher before they got better. Let's start with the performance metrics. I'll highlight a few. On the light blue line, like-for-like occupancy is down, as we said. And that's driven a fall in rental income and also in valuations. Importantly, we've taken cost out of the business, so our admin expenses are down 5.6%, roughly £2 million annualised. We've held our dividend flat and it's well underpinned by our cashflow because we understand how hugely important dividend is to our s...