McBride plc

Good afternoon and thank you to those of you who are joining us. There is quite a number of you, so if you just bear with us while I allow everyone into the meeting. Great. Okay. Well, thank you for joining us this afternoon. We're here to hear from McBride PLC who announced their results earlier this week. Today we're going to have a brief introduction followed by a video and then on to the main bulk of the results presentation, which was shared with analysts, as I say, earlier this week. Then we will have an opportunity for Q&A at the end. Please feel free to submit them as we go through the presentation, and we will take as many as we can in the time that we have allocated, which is the hour. So without further ado, I will hand over to Chris Smith.

Thanks, Hannah. Good afternoon to everyone. Thank you for joining this call. So as Hannah said, I'm Chris Smith. I'm the CEO, been with the group coming up for 11 years now. And I'm joined here today by Mark Strickland, who's our CFO. He's been with the group around five years. I thought, so first of all, I'm going to kick off with a very rapid introduction to McBride. For those of you who don't know anything about us, we have a small corporate video, which explains a bit more. And then we will, as Hannah says, rattle through the results presentation we gave yesterday. So look, this is McBride on a page. We are the number one, the leading supplier in our space across Europe of household cleaning products. We are, we're almost coming up for a hundred years old. We are a pan-European business. We are not just a UK business. Our heritage is UK. We're coming up to, you know, 1927, it was formed in Manchester. Well, we now have something between three and a half thousand, 3,600 people across 18 locations and 13 countries. selling over a billion consumer units to our customers, which are predominantly retail customers. So you'll see here on the bottom left, 84% of our business is what we call private label or white label. So this is, and I'll come on to a bit more about what that is. And we have a small amount of volume into contract manufacturing where we manufacture for brands. You'll see on the bottom right, we are a pan-European business. Everyone thinks we're just a UK company. We're not. UK is our third biggest market. Germany is our number one market, nearly a quarter of the group, and France, UK, Italy, Spain, the main countries. And we are doing, as you'll hear in the results, just under a billion pounds of sales in the year to June 2025. Next slide, please, Anna. So it's really important for people to understand, I think, in our business model, Private label, or some people call it white label, is at our core. That is the roots of the business and the absolute core mission of the company. You can see our purpose statement here, everyday value cleaning products. So every home could be clean and hygienic. We are your everyday supplier of everyday products that you see in the supermarket aisle. I'll come on to the product ranges in a moment. And I just would like to point you, if you get the chance and you're on LinkedIn, join us and look us on LinkedIn. We've just been doing a series of interesting articles that paint the backdrop to what is private label? What does fast followership mean? What does McBride offer to the market? So there's some really good posts that have been coming out in the last three or four weeks. I would point you to look at those if you get the chance. Gives you some nice background around the company as well. Next slide, please, Hannah. So the products that we manufacture are summarized here. And in reality, the sort of really, the main three thrusts for the group are laundry products, dishwashing products, and surface cleaners or household cleaners. We also have some hair care products from our aerosols business. And in laundry, it's everything you would imagine if you're stood in the aisle in Tesco, from laundry powder to laundry liquid to laundry capsules, fabric conditioner, stain removals, all those sorts of things that you would see. Dish the same, tablets for automatic dishwashing machines, dishwash powders, and of course also hand dishwash, very liquid equivalents. And cleanliness is everything you imagine with a spray onto a surface, table cleaning, surface cleaning, antibacterial sprays, toilet cleaners, bleach, all those sorts of products. So absolutely pretty much everything you will see in the household aisle of a retail partner. Next slide, please. We run our business across five divisions, product driven. So you can see the five divisions here, liquids, which is anything that you pour basically out of a bottle, out of a carton, out of a pouch. We do what we call unit dosing. So those are your dishwash tablets, your laundry pods, and increasingly the soft pods that you have in dishwash. Powders is what it says on the tin. It's absolutely the familiar thing that most people remember in laundry powders and dishwash powders. Then we have an aerosols business and we have a kind of incubator fledgling business in Asia doing predominantly actually personal care and household products. Next slide. The industry, as you will know, and you will see if you stand in the aisle of a supermarket, is all about ultimately innovation in the products that you're being offered as a consumer. And the real focus in innovation nowadays is all around packaging and compaction, better formulation to reduce carbon footprint. McBride is at the forefront of this in the private label space, whether it's recycled plastic. We've been the first to market, for example, with laundry liquid in what looks like an orange juice carton. You can buy that in Sainsbury's, for example. We're the first to market with a paper bag rather than a plastic bag. for laundry powders. And we're the first as well to the market with a cardboard box rather than a plastic tub, for example, for laundry capsules. So the world is moving fast. The retailers are very demanding in this space. And it's a key aspect of our business, as you might imagine. And then finally, on this sort of intro deck, why is McBride successful and the number one in this space? And look, we pride ourselves on being the most competitive, the most reliable and the most innovative supplier to the trade across all the markets in which we operate. We are hugely customer and market oriented and focused. We bring significant scale that brings fantastic distribution networks. It brings buying scale for things like raw materials and also, of course, things like innovation. We have distributed in our asset base. Transportation is expensive to move bottles of washing up liquid around. So we have a distributed asset base. pretty unique in the industry. We pride ourselves on expertise and being absolute leaders in the specialisms that are needed for these categories. And with our new strategy that's been in place now for three to four years, absolutely focused and disciplined on what we're trying to achieve in our strategic outlook. So that's a very, very rapid rattle through, but right at a glance. Hannah, we now got a corporate video, if you would suggest to play that. This is available on our website, the corporate video, by the way, in the Who We Are section. So if you want to watch it again, you can at your leisure. But over to that.

My name is Sandra Azendorf. I live with my two children and my husband. My children get really dirty while playing football, in the garden, everything that children do every day. The household costs have doubled with us and that's already enormous. First of all, we have to switch to our own brands, simply because the prices have gone up enormously.