Origin Enterprises plc

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Origin Enterprises PLC Preliminary Results Call 2025. Just a reminder that this call is being webcast live on the internet and the presentation is available to view on the Origin website. I will now pass over to Sean Coyle, CEO of Origin Enterprises PLC. Please go ahead sir.

thank you and uh good morning everyone welcome to the 2025 preliminary results call um i'm joined this morning by my colleagues colin purcell our cfo tj kelly the divisional managing director of our living landscapes business and brendan corcoran our head of investor relations um we're delighted to announce a strong set of results this morning and really these set of numbers are showcasing the two key strengths in the origin model, the resilient nature of our agriculture business and strong cash generation coming from the agriculture business and the fantastic growth opportunity within our living landscapes business. You can see in the boxes on the top right of the page, the agriculture business grew by two and a half percent in the period. pretty much driven by a strong recovery in the performance of our Ireland UK businesses. And our living landscapes business grew by almost 40%, about one third of that coming from organic growth and roughly two thirds coming from the acquisitions that we had in the period, plus a couple of acquisitions which were not reporting for a full year period in 2024. A number of our metrics have improved and Colm will touch on those a little bit later on. And the business continues to see growth in strategic outlook from the point of view of additional leadership strengthening within the business. We've commissioned a new glasshouse facility within our Throes Farm Research Centre, which will accelerate our investment in innovative products and the innovative products that we bring to market, particularly biologicals, and we continue to see expansion of the products and services that we have within our living landscapes portfolio. Our chair, Gary Brittain, has informed the board that he will step down as chairman before the 2026 AGM, and the search for his successor is in process. We redesigned our brand and I suppose reorganized the reporting of the business into agriculture and living landscapes last year. And we continue to report on this basis in the current financial year. I think it gives a better picture of the nature of the businesses that we are operating in. and gives better visibility to investors on the breakdown of profitability across the group, the growth dynamic within the group, the increased diversification, and the market opportunity in the group, and we'll see a little bit more of that later on. From an ESG perspective, some of the highlights for 2025, we continued the movement and migration of our agricultural businesses towards green-listed solutions. And apart from our fertilizer business, which has had carbon ratings on all of our fertilizers now for a number of years, the expansion of our BAM portfolio and the biologicals, adjuvants and micronutrients portfolio, which is a key part of the transition to new products, We have also in recent years delivered sustainable ratings on all of our seeds and within our crop protection portfolio ratings from a sustainability perspective on crop protection as well. So we continue to allow our economy teams select the best products and best outcomes as well as practicing integrated pest management and all of the preferred practices from an agronomic perspective. We had 26% in our scope one and scope two emissions since 2019. Unfortunately, that number is slightly higher than last year's number because of an increase in volume, particularly within our PB Kent operation, which is a gas powered plant, but we do intend to try and migrate to alternative fuel sources within that business in the coming years and continue on the trajectory of hitting our 2032 science-based target metrics and commitments. Our employee engagement store continued to be strong within the period at 81%. And unfortunately, our accidents and reportable incidents rate increased to 10.7 from 4.2. There is a significant increase in reporting awareness and culture from a health and safety point of view across the group. So we are certainly getting very strong visibility now right out into all of our businesses around health and safety. And we've no particular concerns about the increased reporting level, although clearly we would like to see a better number at the end of each year. So within each of our agricultural businesses, I'll go into a little bit of detail now and just explain some of the dynamics within the individual reporting units. So across Ireland and UK, we had a strong recovery in planted area, particularly in UK autumn planting, which, as you know, is a key driver of the applications and agronomy results within the financial year and we saw a significant improvement in the reported profit from our Agri UK operating business. Despite the fact that the spring was dry and that I suppose drove limited amount of spending over the spring period as pest and disease prevalence was not all that high, the business saw a significant jump in operating profit. And our agronomists were helping growers manage their input spend carefully with targeted applications. And that in particular was relevant because of the falling grain and oilseed prices through the year. And that can be a challenge for our farm customers. And the amount of spending that they have on inputs can change as a result of end market pricing. The soil nutrition businesses saw very strong demand and certainly strong market share growth as well. And we saw the business with a well positioned order book and good stock management through the period, which meant that we saw certainly growth in market share and the businesses delivered a good result. And our animal nutrition businesses also saw very strong volume growth in the period. underpinned really by strong customer demand because of high end prices in all of the key markets dairy beef poultry pork and egg prices all really delivering strong demand at a customer level and that pulling through feed demand for the businesses both in our feed importation business and in our joint venture businesses and so we're very happy with the the outcome in those businesses and it's certainly prevailing in the first half of the current year although um we're not going to forecast any prices for the for the year as a whole so we're certainly seeing that initial demand uh being strong in the first half of 2026. within our continental european businesses uh profit was slightly down the um continental European business really was characterized by differing outcomes across the two geographies. The Polish market had strong growth in profitability and strong growth in volume. And although our Romanian business also saw strong growth in volume, there was a migration towards a cheaper product set and a more economical product set for the farmer because of the economics on farm and the ability of the Romanian farmer to spend following two successive years of drought in the 2023 and 2024 reporting periods left the Romanian farmer really with a poor balance sheet and an inability to spend significantly on crop inputs as a result. The team did very well though and we did see strong growth and the market I would say is characterized by or collections, although not necessarily in our own business, and a little bit of a chaotic distributor base and supplier base in the Romanian market as a result of the collection dynamics within that market. Our Latin American business reported like-for-like profit in line with last year on a constant currency basis. Unfortunately, the depreciation of the Brazilian REI meant that that resulted in a decline in profit in line with the currency depreciation of about 14%. And the business saw strong volume growth, close to 12%, although the price pressure within the market and the challenges within the market did mean that margins saw some squeeze with margins falling from 11.6% to 10.1% in the period. We've had a number of competitors, a number of distributors, and a number of players at farm level use the Chapter 11 process to cram down debt and use legal restructurings to cram down debt. And while the impact on us directly was reasonably small, We did have to constrain sales in a number of cases. We did have to watch our relationships with a number of our retail distributors and farm distributors in order to guard against significant bad debts. So the business really has performed very resiliently in the context of what is ongoing in Brazil. And you will know that a couple of the listed entities at an ag retail level have seen collapses in their share price over the last couple of years and I suppose a comparable biologicals player in the same place has also seen a significant contraction in its share price. So we're very happy with the operating results in Brazil and the team there have managed very well through what has been a very challenging period.

So I'll hand over to TJ now to bring you through the performance of the living landscapes business. Thanks, Sean.