Premier Foods plc

Welcome to Premier Foods' full year results. That's for the 52 weeks that ended on the 28th of March this year. As always, I'm here with Duncan, our CFO, and what we'll do is the usual double act. I'll take us through some highlights. Duncan can then run us through all the financials, and I'll come back and show you the progress we've made against our five-pillar growth strategy this year.

At least I was hoping that's what it was going to be.

Thanks. So you might remember that we had a really strong quarter three and a really strong Christmas, a really important period of time for us, of course, with some really strong second half branded growth. Well, that carried on through quarter four. Actually, quarter four branded growth in the UK was up 5.1%, and that brought the second half to 5% overall. There's a bit of phasing there from Easter. We had a really strong Easter as well. Easter falls into our quarter one. But actually the shipments go out largely in quarter four. But remember that an early cold Easter is generally good for us because that means more people are eating roast dinners and less people are getting the barbecue out. So an early cold Easter was good and that helped us as well and we took quite a lot of market share there as well. And that led us to more profit delivery than we expected. So we raised our guidance after that strong Christmas at the end of Q3. But that strong Q4 came in better than we thought and so therefore, profit came in overall better than those raised expectations. And the other bit of interesting news we've got today, it was given the continued strong performance of the business, our strong cash generation and the strength of the balance sheet, the board is currently planning to introduce an interim dividend starting with the current financial year, so that will be off the back of our half year results this year when we talk about those next November. So if we run through the headline numbers then, revenue came in at £1.175 billion, that's up 2.5% versus a year ago, but that second half being stronger, up plus 3.8%. But then, of course, importantly for us, because we focus on building the brands, branded revenue was 1.042 billion, that was up 3.4%, with that second half coming in more strongly at 4.7% growth. That included taking more market share, so we increased our market share both in in grocery and in sweet treats during the year. And not just in the UK, actually. We also did that in Australia, which is our biggest market outside of the UK. And actually, it's the only other market that we've got reliable data for. So in the two markets where we've got good data, we increase market share, both grocery and sweet treats. That got us to that trading profit, which crossed 200 million, up 6.7% versus a year ago, and as I say, ahead of the previously raised guidance. Adjusted EPS. at 15.8p and was 8.7% ahead of year ago and that runs faster if you like in terms of growth and trading profit because obviously we've got lower interest costs year on year. Free cash flow 153 million was up 9.1% and that helped bring net debt to EBITDA down to 0.4 times that was a 48 million pound reduction and bear in mind of course that's after investing that capital back into our manufacturing infrastructure, which is obviously a core pillar of our strategy. It's also after the acquisition of Merchant Gourmet, which we completed during the year. So dividend for the last financial year then is a 20% increase on prior year, so well ahead of earnings. And as I say, the board is currently also planning to introduce that interim dividend from this year onwards. So a nice set of financial numbers overall that we're really pleased with. But at the same time, we also made good progress against our brand and growth strategy. So we've seen the left-hand side numbers. Remember, that's growing the core UK. So brands in the UK grew by 3.7%, 5% in half too. Infrastructure investment, we invested 52 million. That was up 25% versus the prior year as we continue to invest into more projects in our manufacturing sites, which at the end of the day makes us more efficient and helps fund the brand expansion. And the third pillar of expanding into new categories, growth there was 37% as we continue to expand the business outside its traditional core categories into new areas. I'll come back to these in more detail later. And the international business made some really strong in-market performances and some really good progress, but it was offset by that reduction in stock of cake that's held in Australia, which I mentioned at the half year, and I'll come back and talk about that in a bit more detail. And then inorganic opportunities like the brands we bought. We bought three brands now in recent years. All performed fantastically well. Actually they all grew by a double digit and Merchant Gourmet is already running ahead of the acquisition model on which we, you know, based our acquisition. So really good I think progress against the five pillars. We thought it might be interesting to look at the numbers in a bit of context actually and look at this over a five year run. Because what you see is you see this consistent strong performance year after year after year. So it doesn't really matter which KPI we look at. If you look at branded revenue at the top left, this is consistent strong growth, 7.7% on average. Trading profit in the middle top here, that's running actually ahead of the growth rate of revenue and actually moving from 2021 at 141 million to the 200 million that we've announced today. Similar position for EPS. up to that 15.8p and indeed free cash flow down at the bottom left there moving from 65 million in 21-22 up to 153 million today, so more than doubling over that period of time. And that obviously helps drive net debt to EBITDA down from the 1.7 times to the 0.4 today. And then finally on dividend per share, we introduced that actually in the previous period in FY 2021, a penny a share. And we've moved that up ahead of earnings every year with that big step up last year. Remember that was the repurposing of the dividend match to the pensions. And then obviously we've built on that by 20% this year. So when I stand back and look at that, it's a good, strong, consistent performance over multiple years. And I think that just points to the robustness of the strategy and also the brand building model that sits behind it. And so that I'll hand over to Duncan and he can walk us through the numbers.