DCC plc

Hello and welcome to the DCC PLC final results, 31st of March, 2026. My name is Becky and I will be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register to ask a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. I will now hand over to today's host, Donald Murphy, Chief Executive, to begin. Please go ahead when you're ready.

Good morning and welcome to DCC's results presentation for the year ended 31 March 2026. Thank you for joining us this morning via webcast. I'm joined today by our Group COO, Kevin Lucey, and by our Group CFO, Conor Murphy. As you will be aware, the company is currently in an offer period. Under the Irish takeover rules, we are not able to comment on or discuss the offer or any related matters. I would ask that you respect these constraints and our inability to respond to any questions on the topic is a matter of regulatory obligation. Our financial advisors, JP Morgan, UBS and Davie, are present with us on the call today to ensure that we operate within the Irish takeover rules. The takeover rules also place restrictions on our ability to provide forward-looking information, including forecasts, projections and statements regarding the company's prospects. We remain committed to keeping shareholders properly informed and we will make further announcements as and when appropriate. Please visit our dedicated offer website, link from the DCC homepage, where you will find the latest announcements and documentation in connection with the offer. So this morning, I will start with the strategic progress we have made Kevin will then review business performance during the year, Conor will cover the financial performance and we close with our outlook and questions and answers. There are four key messages I want you to take away from today. In the 50th year since its foundation, DCC delivered a good financial performance in FY26 in a period of substantial transformation and volatility. We see scale opportunities in energy and are on track to deliver our 2030 ambition. We have significant runway for growth in existing and new markets. We are focused on the future and confident in our ability to build DCC into a global leader in multi-energy solutions, delivering superior returns for our shareholders. So let me start with the strategic progress we have made over the last 18 months. Over the past year, we have reshaped DCC to focus on energy, where we see the most compelling opportunities to drive sustainable long-term growth and attractive returns. During the period, we completed the sale of DCC Healthcare, exited DCC Technologies' infotech business and returned significant capital to our shareholders. These steps have materially changed the structure of the group and reduced operational complexity, working capital volatility and capital intensity. More on this shortly. We were clear that we needed to perform while we transformed. Crucially, we delivered another year of good growth while continuing to develop the group with our financial performance ahead of market expectations, despite the challenging macroeconomic environment. Total adjusted operating profit increased by 3.6% to £634 million. Adjusted EPS on a continuing basis increased 9.9% to 438.1p. Our free cash flow conversion was an excellent 108%. Return on capital employed, DCC's key metric, was 16.8% for the group and 18.8% for DCC Energy. we returned £700 million to shareholders post the sale of DCC Healthcare, with a further £100 million to be returned in FY28. The Board has recommended an increase of 5% in our dividend to 216.72p, DCC's 32nd consecutive year of dividend growth. Our committed acquisition spend was £110 million, focused on expanding our liquid gas businesses in Europe. We've maintained our strong financial position with net debt to EBITDA of 0.9 times, with significant headroom to continue compounding in the energy sector. DCC has significant momentum as it enters its new era as a focused energy business. Since announcing our simplification plan, we have made great progress. In September 2025, we completed the sale of DCC Healthcare. When we announced the sale process, we committed to returning £800 million to shareholders and we moved quickly to deliver on this commitment. The group commenced this return of capital in May 2025 with a £100 million on-market share buy-back programme, which completed in September 2025. We subsequently completed a £600 million tender offer. The final $100 million is expected to be returned to shareholders following receipt of the unconditional deferred consideration payable in respect of DCC Healthcare, anticipated in autumn 2027. In November 2025, we announced the completion of the sale of DCC Technologies' Infotech business. Our remaining technology business provides intelligent technology solutions across professional AV, professional audio, enterprise infrastructure, and consumer technologies. The business is predominantly based in North America, with a smaller business in Europe. During the year, the business was rebranded as Nexora, reflecting its position as one of the world's leading value-added distributors of specialist professional technologies. The sale process for Nexora has formally commenced and is progressing in line with our expectations. it remains DCC's intention to have reached agreement for the sale of the business by the end of calendar year 2026. Reflecting on this progress, and our sole focus on energy going forward, DCC proposes, subject to shareholder approval, to change its name from DCC PLC to DCC Energy PLC, with effects from the conclusion of the company's annual general meeting on the 16th of July 2026. DCC Energy will be a global leader in multi-energy sales and distribution. After 32 years as a listed diversified industrial group, DCC will be a focused energy business with a substantial growth platform at superior returns on capital. DCC is a unique energy business providing multi-energy solutions to our customers for five decades. We have built a strong capability in engineering-led decentralized energy, particularly in our liquid gas business. As global energy systems continue to decentralize, this heritage and our growing skills and capabilities in energy solutions enables us to win. Our ambition is to be a global leader in multi-energy sales and distribution, delivering high growth and high returns for our shareholders. We will win by safely delivering secure, cleaner and competitive products and services with the highest level of customer service. We have scalable growth opportunities across our sectors and will continue to strengthen our returns through customer focus, efficient operations and disciplined compounding. This strategy will create very compelling returns and will build long-term value for our shareholders. This slide brings together our opportunity, our advantage and our model and, crucially, how we translate this into results. We will grow our customer base by being the provider of choice for essential energy products and to sell more services to our energy customers, driving higher organic growth rates. We are operating in large and attractive energy markets where customer needs continue to evolve. we have a very significant opportunity to scale in new and existing markets. For example, in our existing liquid gas markets, we have just a 5% share of the estimated total addressable market of 74 billion litres. We'll benefit from energy transition tailwinds, which I have no doubt will again accelerate across areas like biofuels, solar and energy management services. we have decades of consolidation runway ahead of us. We will succeed by leveraging our strong market positions, typically being the number one or number two player in most of our markets and with our deeply embedded customer relationships. We are strong and experienced operators with well-invested and difficult-to-replicate infrastructure in the energy sector. We have significant experience in consolidating fragmented energy markets with over 300 acquisitions completed to date within our energy business. In the last five years, we have deployed approximately £1 billion in energy assets, delivering mid- to high-teen returns on capital within two years of acquisitions. By delivering our strategy, we drive organic growth of 3% to 4%, and acquisition growth of 6% to 8% on average per annum. achieving our ambition of delivering double digit growth in earnings. We also aim to turn approximately 90% of our profits into cash and always to deliver returns and capital employed in the high teams. As I mentioned, we have significant opportunity to scale in our existing markets and by expanding into new markets. Here we outline the opportunities whether by driving organic growth in the markets where we have large existing shares, growing share by consolidating in markets where we have significant space to grow by M&A, and highlighting the markets where we have no existing business. This demonstrates the material growth opportunity in front of us across each of our segments. You'll often hear that past performance is no guide to the future. but our energy strategy has delivered consistently over time, and we believe it is well positioned to continue doing so. Here's the record over the last decade. We have produced sustainably high returns on capital employed of 19% on average, as you will see from the purple line on the graph. We have grown profits of 10% CAGR across the last 10 years. Average organic growth of 4%, you'll see this on the green line, and we have 99% free cash flow conversion across the same period. Finally, in May 2022, when we announced our new energy strategy, we set an ambition to double our profits from 2022 to 2030. We are well on track to achieving this ambition. With that, I'll hand you over to Kevin to talk through the performance in more detail. Kevin.

Thanks, Donal, and good morning, everyone. Before turning to performance, I will just give a brief outline of the structure of our energy business and also the operational focus that shaped the year. DCG Energy is a multi-energy sales and distribution business operating in 11 markets in Europe and also in North America. We are organized across two business areas, solutions and mobility. Within solutions, we provide customers with multi-energy products and services. In energy products, We sell and distribute a range of fuels and energy solutions including liquid gas, conventional fuels, biofuels, grid gas and power. Our customers are typically domestic, commercial and industrial users, many of whom have complex off-grid energy needs. In energy services we design, install and maintain on-site energy solutions such as solar PV, storage and energy optimisation systems. These services are complementary to our energy products, deepening customer relationships and supporting their transition to lower carbon solutions. Finally, mobility comprises our network of service stations and truck refuelling sites, alongside a growing portfolio of valuable fleet services, including fuel and EV cards, telematics and digital parking solutions. A few high level comments on the key focus areas for our teams during the year, which in turn drove performance. The year was characterised by significant volatility, including difficult macroeconomic conditions, slower transition related demand and towards the year end, a new energy crisis and sharp commodity cost inflation. Despite this, disciplined execution by our local teams and the resilience of our operating model continue to deliver good growth and excellent free cash flow conversion. Integration and optimisation of acquisitions is an area where we have a long track record in DCC Energy. FY26 was no different. Acquisitions completed in prior years, for example ProGas in Germany, were fully integrated, delivering operational efficiencies, procurement benefits and margin improvement, while maintaining and improving service levels for our customers. We have increased our focus on procurement in recent years, seeking to better leverage our scale and supply positions, and this was again an important contributor to margin optimisation and performance. We continue to invest in our quality and safety capabilities and also in the digital enablement of our business. While these investments had a short-term impact on performance in certain areas, including energy services, they were deliberate and are strengthening our platform for sustainable long-term growth. Turning now to performance. Overall, DTC Energy delivered a good result for the year with operating profits of 3.5%. The growth was very much driven by our performance in the second half of the year. Operating profit was down approximately 5% in the first half before growing by 7.9% in the second half. Overall energy volumes were back 3.2% for the year and 1.8% in the second half. I'll come back to some of the specific drivers later, but as always, particularly in our mobility and fuels businesses, we carefully manage the trade-off between volume and gross margin. This is less relevant in the liquid gas market. The result for the year was modestly ahead of our expectations at the time of our IMS in early February. This was driven by a limited pull forward of demand into March, reflecting commodity volatility and concerns around product availability following the conflict in Iran. This led to short-term increases in demand, particularly from domestic fuel and mobility customers. Net M&A contribution for the year as a whole was very modest, just 0.5% of the growth in the year. Our organic growth was driven primarily by energy products within solutions and by an excellent performance in mobility. The strength of these business areas more than offset weaker conditions in energy services. Free cash flow generation, always a hallmark of DCC Energy, was very strong, with conversion of 113%, reflecting disciplined execution across the business. That performance underpinned another solid year of return on capital employed delivery. Conor will talk a bit more about that later. In terms of our inorganic growth strategy, we completed and integrated the acquisition of a liquid gas business in Austria during the year, and the business has performed well since acquisition. We are also preparing for the completion of our further liquid gas acquisitions in Central and Eastern Europe. We expect these to complete during the summer, and this will open up four new markets for us. Looking in more detail at solutions, operating profit increased by 1.9% to 419.8 million. Within this, energy products delivered a strong performance, particularly in the second half of the year, with profits up 11%. While volumes were down year on year, this primarily reflected lower margin commercial activity in the Nordic region, the impact of milder weather, and the prior year disposal of the Hong Kong and Macau business. Profit growth was strong in North America, UK and Ireland, and Germany, supported by pricing discipline, procurement benefits and cost control. We also saw a modest contribution from the Austrian liquid gas acquisition. Energy services had a difficult year. Performance was weak, particularly in the UK. The operating environment was challenging, including a pullback in some governments' transition commitments. At the same time, commercial customers delayed discretionary sustainability spending as they focus on cost and capital control in a difficult macro environment. This led to project delays and a highly competitive market. In response, we took decisive actions to protect long-term value. These included strengthening leadership, sharpening our focus on priority activities, and continuing to invest in systems and operational capability. We also incurred some one-off costs in the second half of the year as we rationalised parts of the business in light of the weaker market. While the investment in one-off costs had a short-term impact on overheads, These actions position energy services well to benefit as demand recovers and customer investment resumes. And a final slide for me before I hand over to Conor. We delivered another year of strong growth in mobility with operating profit up 8.6% to 134.4 million. Almost all of the constant currency growth of 5.8% was organic. Our performance was driven by disciplined pricing, procurement improvements and continued network optimisation. We performed well in all regions really, but with particularly strong profit growth in the Nordic region. It was pleasing that our growth was well balanced across fuel and non-fuel activities. Non-fuel growth profit increased by more than 17%, reflecting the continued success of our strategy to build higher value fleet services, including fuel and EV cars, telematics and digital parking solutions. We continued to invest in these capabilities during the year. We also continued to grow selectively in network development, and in the second half of the year, we're successful in adding new motorway locations in both France and Denmark. That's it from me. Over now to Conor.