Balfour Beatty plc

Good morning. Welcome to our 2024 full year results. I'm joined here by Phil Harrison, my very able-bodied wingman who is going to talk to you about the financial side of things and I'm going to talk about the aspiration and the future. Let's start off. You can read the numbers. I think they're all very, very good. Increase in profit. Love the fact that we finished with nearly a billion pounds worth of cash in the bank. By the way, I'm going to use this nearly a billion many, many times in this presentation. So don't confuse the cash and the share buybacks and all the other bits and pieces. I'll be quite clear on it. And of course, the 18.4 billion backlog or order book. with improved quality of margin and de-risked. And then, of course, the increased share buyback this year. But I want to start by going back to 2014 and really what's behind all of this. And it's quite interesting, when you go back and you look at the presentation, back in 2014, I think to the nine-month point, our cash flow was minus $1 billion. We had a takeover offer by Carillion. I don't know if you remember, but John Lang made a pitch for our investment portfolio at a billion. We had 89 distressed projects. which was closer to 110 when we got through them all. We had eight profit warnings, which I think was a record, a record that you wouldn't really want to have. But we were in a pretty dire state. And we rolled out something called Build to Last. And I think one of the most interesting things is we said that we were going to do this transformation and recovery using self-help. i.e. we weren't going to go to the shareholders to actually ask for money. We were going to actually sell the assets we had and do the things that were necessary to run the company properly. What you see here today isn't just like a blip. This is something which has been fashioned over a long period of time, which is 10 years, and it's really underpinned by our cultural transformation. So the question you've got to ask yourself, well, okay, this is what you've done for me this year, but what have you done lately, and how do I know it's going to be repeatable? Well, the culture that we have behind this, I think, makes this sustainable for the next decade. If you actually look at the employee engagement that we have year on year for ten years, it's actually improved. We're ranking at some 84% score at the moment, which is actually ten points higher than our peer groups, which is a phenomenal achievement. And when you think about our license to operate, you have to have a license to drive a car. You cannot work in this industry unless you're safe. And if you look at our safety record over the last 10 years and how it's improved, observations are up. But more interestingly, in the last three, four years where we've totally digitized our permitting system, whereby we get better safety and better accountability with people signing off, people going to work, improved productivity and better assurance, you can see that the dramatic improvement almost halved since 2021. now it's quite interesting we've put up these stats and it looks good but it's it's interesting when you can explain this in terms that annie layman can understand our best in class businesses are running at 0.03 what that means is that 32 people out of every 33 return home safe every day and for their entire career at balfour beatty will not have a lost time accident for one day that's actually world class So it's really interesting that the culture which underpins our performance is in these areas of employee engagement and safety. Of course, our attrition rates are starting to come down, and that's interesting in a really competitive market that we're in today. where we're sort of fighting to keep the best possible people. To have a 10% attrition rate, I think is phenomenal. And it goes back to our culture. And then finally, we need more people vested in our industry for the future. So we continue to invest in the learn and earn opportunities, apprentices and graduates. And again, we're a gold member of the 5% club. So all in all, that's why the numbers that you see today are going to be sustainable as we go forward in the future. So what are the outputs of all of that? Lo and behold, 10 years of profit improvement, 10 years of margin percent increase, a flat investment portfolio despite having taken $1.1 billion out of it. And of course, our cash generation has been truly phenomenal, average at $7.66, now say just under a billion. And for the final billion on this slide, over the last five years, between buybacks and dividends, we've returned just under a billion pounds worth of cash to our shareholders. So all in all, the results that we're showing today are benefiting from 10 years of hard work, 10 years of cultural transformation, and a foundation that's going to last the company for the next 100 years. when Phil's actually presented the financial numbers and then depressed you sufficiently, I shall return and paint this lovely horizon of where the growth is going to come from in the future and where you're going to see another billion pounds worth of capital return to our shareholders over the next five year period. Over to you, Phil.

Thanks, Leo.

All right.