Origin Enterprises plc

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Origin Enterprises plc interim results 2026. 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 good morning everybody. Welcome to the first half trading results performance for 2026. I'm joined this morning by my colleagues, Colm Purcell, our CFO, TJ Kelly, the Managing Director of our Living Landscapes business, and Brendan Corcoran, who's our Head of Investor Relations. The trading performance in the first half of the year we're describing really is solid or robust and we've had a good outcome from the perspective of agriculture trading when placed in the context of seeing what our competition are doing around us. We're having significant reductions in profitability from competitors in the UK and Poland, and a significant number of distributor competitors in Brazil and in Romania place themselves into administration, in some cases into advertising, liquidation or significant restructuring. The performance of the business in the first half has been strong. We had agricultural profitability decline by 1%, with increases in performance in an Ireland-UK context and in Latin America, and a decline in operating profit performance within our continental European business. And our living landscapes business showed strong growth in the first half, led by sports and landscapes, together with growth in our environmental business, supported by the benefit of acquisitions that we made in the second half of last year. Overall, group operating profit grew from 17.2 million to 17.4 million. We continue to see a strong balance sheet with our net debt to EBITDA ratio increasing fractionally on this time last year at 2.44 compared to a covenant level of 3.5. We've extended our sustainability linked RCF funding by a year and we've announced an interim dividend consistent with prior years at 3.15 cents consistent with a long number of years pay out from an interim dividend perspective from an operating point of view we did see an increase in inventory towards the back end of the year which impacted working capital and that was principally as a result of increase in fertilizer pricing an increase in the level of fertilizer holding to support our entry into CBAM which is a carbon tax introduced on European fertilizers over the course of the next few years that will increase and an increase in feed stock values as well associated with volume increases in that business. We will see our current chairman Gary Britton retire today and our new chair John Hennessy joined as chair designate on the 1st of January and will step into the chair role as of tomorrow. And we'd like to thank Gary for all of his contributions and support over a long number of years. From a portfolio point of view, despite the fact that we had no acquisitions in the period, we did see continued extension of our living landscapes, product and service offering, and continued use of scale and opportunity across the living landscapes business to drive additional revenue and cost synergies, which TJ will speak to a little bit later on. So for those of you who don't know our operations, we're split across agriculture and living landscapes. Our sustainable agronomy businesses in the UK, Poland and Romania are on farm businesses. using the best advice, technical capability to inform on-farm performance and give product recommendations. Our soil nutrition businesses in Ireland, UK and Brazil are more B2B businesses where we're dealing with other distributors, merchants and co-ops. And our animal nutrition joint venture businesses are the largest feed grain importer into the island of Ireland. And we also have Northern Ireland's largest feed manufacturing capability. On the living landscape side of the house our sports business is involved in the agronomy of sports turf and sports pitches and supplies a range of products and services into that industry. Our landscapes business supplies a range of green products and green services into the landscaping sector and our environmental businesses have the largest ecological consulting practice touching off biodiversity net gain, touching off a range of services into major developers right across the UK. So we're a top 10 player in that regard as well. And essentially, it's about the sustainable use of land, driving long-term impact on land use, delivering expertise, and enriching land use in the best possible way for both farmers and other users of land right across the board. So very quickly, we'll touch on three of the operating businesses in the agriculture segment, and then TJ will bring you through the living landscapes businesses. Within Ireland's UK, profitability was slightly better than last year with a 900,000 loss compared to a 1.2 million loss in the previous year, a 300,000 improvement, and reasonably consistent with the performance and trading in previous years, as you can see from the graph on the left-hand side. Running through the individual businesses very quickly, there was volume growth overall, led really by fertilizer demand and feed demand. and overall UK winter cropping is improved on the previous year with a larger oilseed rape area and a larger winter wheat area, so a bigger cropped service which is always positive from an origin perspective. The earnings are always weighted more towards the second half of the year and that will remain the case here. Looking at the individual businesses, our sustainable agronomy business saw a revenue increase of 1.5%, supported by fertilizer demand and underlying raw material price moves. The winter wheat area, about 4% bigger year on year, and crop establishment at this point of the year is satisfactory. We did have a significant amount of rainfall and that has led to crop growth, but probably not a lot of activity taking place on farm because of the high level of rain. So plenty of work to be done as land conditions dry out over the coming weeks and months. And thankfully the outlook from a weather perspective is good for the next few weeks. So we should see a significant ramp up in activity on farm over the next few weeks. Output price levels continue to be challenging from a farm perspective. this would be consistent I suppose across our continental European businesses and our Latin American business in terms of a demand driver over the second half of the year so there is some concern that farmers are trying to manage their input costs relative to output costs we will of course be advising in relation to the best product use and trying to promote yield as much as possible because despite the fact that grain prices and oilseed prices may be that little bit lower yield maximization is the key to maintaining profitability on farm and therefore promoting the best technical range of products that the farmer can possibly use will continue to be important from a soil nutrition perspective across both our uk and irish businesses we got saw goods pre-season volumes. Pricing has remained quite firm on the back of tighter raw material supply and also higher gas prices driving increased prices and maybe if we comment very quickly on recent developments, there is a significant proportion of world fertilizer produced in the Gulf region and that has driven up gas prices very significantly in the last 24 hours. and will drive up fertilizer prices quite significantly over the course of the next month or two. So we are reasonably well stocked and have a reasonable order book matching that stock position in both Ireland and UK and no real short position or long position to speak of in those businesses. So we concentrate on continuing to move the order book that we have out to the co-op and merchant level over the coming month or two, and we'll wait for the markets to settle down and see where we go to from a market perspective. But certainly prices have remained pretty robust over the first half of the year, and we would expect fertilizer pricing to increase over the course of the second half of the year. And we, on the animal nutrition side, have had significant volume uplifts, obviously the challenging weather from an Ireland-UK perspective and strong output prices in the protein areas, so beef pricing, milk pricing in the first half of the year and other poultry, egg and pork prices have been a good supporter of driving volume in that business. Milk prices have weakened in recent months and we are expecting demand to soften in the second half of the year as a result of those weaker milk prices. But the trading in first half of the year has been strong and generally protein prices will be reasonably supportive of strong volume in H2. In our continental European businesses, again, a reasonable performance when set in the context of significant bankruptcies and restructurings across both Romania and Poland from the competition set. And in particular, some intervention by the Romanian government in cash collection at the tail end of last year, I'm sorry, the previous years, the tail end of calendar 2024 proved to be not helpful in terms of collecting debt essentially what the Romanian government did at that point in time was place a prohibition on anybody in the ag inputs supply chain putting pressure on debt collection or enforcing debt collection for about a six-month period at the back end of calendar 2024 and it really has made the industry see some challenging outcomes as a result. So despite our warnings to the Romanian government and the industry warnings to Romanian government at the time, it certainly has had an impact on our competitors. We have taken an increased bad debt charge as a result of that in the first half of this year. And that has been an impact on the profit performance in the business in the current period. Our Polish business saw a reasonable trading performance. Fertilizer volumes were that bit weaker as farmers didn't commit to early fertilizer purchases and perhaps were expecting prices to drop. But as we've seen, they've actually strengthened. So purchasing yet to be done in the Polish market. And generally speaking, trading other than the bad debt charge and fertilizer volumes in Poland has been reasonably robust and we've been happy with trading. We've also launched some new products in our Folic range and the first range of biostimulant products being produced in our production facility in Aleksandro. So you can see those new products and packaging there on the right hand side of the page. And trading outlook for the second half of the year, I think is reasonably robust. Winter cropping has been strong and the overall planted areas in these markets and soil moisture levels in these markets are strong. So we are expecting a rebound in trading in the second half of the year compared to the performance in H1. And finally, from an agriculture perspective, trading in our Latin American businesses has also been strong and we saw reasonable growth in profit in the first half, which as you know, is the key trading period in the Latin American business. So operating profit up by 5% to 11.3 million, strong growth in controlled release fertilizer and biologicals and less success, I suppose, in our speciality product areas where we saw some volume decline in the first half, but overall profitability has grown quite well and overall volumes have done well in that business. And again, that is said in the context of a large range of competitors and distributors into whom we sell, experiencing chapter 11s and restructurings over the last 12 to 18 months. I think we're now coming close to the bottom of the cycle there. We'll begin to see an uplift over the second half of this year and into the first half of next year, which is positive. So we are looking forward to continued recovery in that business. But for us to have come through the last two years trading in Brazil with low grain prices, low soy prices, and the farmer and a lot of distributors going through a lot of pain fiscally and continue to produce good growing profitability in those circumstances, I think has been very encouraging and it's a credit to the way the team have managed their customer base down there. We've had a very cautious approach to selling and being selective about the types of customers that we're dealing with and the amount of credit that we're putting into the market. and the business has done very well in growing profit in those circumstances. So I'll hand over to TJ who'll run through the performance of the Living Landscapes business.

Thanks, John. Living Landscapes delivered a good performance in H1 with operating profit up 8.3%, driven by early season organic growth in our distribution, sports and landscapes businesses with the environmental Businesses also delivering year-on-year growth are primarily underpinned by the benefit of acquisitions with a modest decline in underlying like-for-like performance within the environmental businesses driven by largely timing on key projects, which I'll come back to in a moment. That said, overall demand and our pipeline of activity across the living landscapes portfolio has remained robust. and we are optimistic about performance as we enter the important second half of the year. We also continue to have a very active M&A pipeline, and as we continue to further integrate the businesses in the portfolio, we continue to focus on driving commercial synergies in the form of cross-selling and operational synergies Again, as a highly efficient form of growth for us across the portfolio. Within each of the segments within living landscapes then, sports had a good performance in the period, really benefited from a strong early season start. As you might recall, it was a pretty dry summer last year and there was quite a bit of focus on surface recovery generally for sports. in the early autumn period, and we benefited from that during our Q1 and early Q2 period in the season. Landscapes also had a good performance in H1, and that was despite what have been somewhat challenging tree planting conditions in particular, given the weather we've had over the last few months. That said, the landscaping sector performance has generally been solid. And across the landscapes businesses, we continue to work on enhancing our operating model there. You'll have seen some evidence of that across social media as we seek to better integrate the offerings that we have within landscapes to better serve our customers with end-to-end solutions. And that's really been delivered through a better integrated selling approach. Within our environmental businesses then, as I said, overall, pleased with activity levels. We had some pockets of very strong growth and then a couple of sectors such as in the renewable space where the timing of grid applications in the UK and certain large infrastructure projects were hit by delays and we were impacted as a result of the flow through our revenue and earnings in H1 as a result of those delays. Overall though, we remain confident about performance in the environmental businesses and given these were timing delays, The commitment in terms of spend is still there to those infrastructure projects and across the renewable space, and we see that just picking up again through the second half of the year. So overall, remain confident and optimistic about performance across the division as we look into H2. With that, I'll hand it over to Colm, who's going to cover the finance review.