PZ Cussons Plc

Good morning or good afternoon all and welcome to the PZ Cousins Half Year Results Call. My name is Adam and I'll be your operator today. If you'd like to ask a question during the Q&A portion of today's call, please dial in and press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad to join the queue. I will now hand the floor to CEO Jonathan Myers to begin.

So Jonathan, please go ahead when you're ready.

Thanks Adam and good morning everyone and thank you for dialing in to our first half year results presentation for PZ Cousins Financial Year 2026. I'll start off with an overview of our performance and provide colour on some of the drivers behind it and how we are moving to be a more focused and more resilient business. I'll then hand over to Sarah to take us through a review of the financials before we finish with the time for your questions. As many of you will be aware and certainly are joining, we are hosting a capital markets event this afternoon in London which is intended to address many of the questions that may be on your mind about the future of plans for this afternoon. So, let's get going with the results we announced this morning then. Overall, we delivered a strong financial performance in the first half of the year, with broad-based growth and a healthy balance of price mix and volume. I'll come on to more of this in just a moment. In December, we announced the conclusion of the strategic review of our after-operation, following our own I'll provide an update on TantraPay in the coming minutes, but the consequent spell of our sharing the T-BED Wilmar joint venture through Wilmar, along with the ongoing disposal of other non-core assets in Africa and Asia, has resulted in a significant difference in balance sheet, and in T-BED becoming a more focused and more resilient business. While all of this was in place, we have also worked hard to reduce our cost base. savings in FY26 in line with previous guidance. Combined with the overall business performance today and our outlook for the remainder of FY26, we are increasing our operating profit guidance for the full year. Let me say a little bit more now about our overall business performance. It has delivered broad-based growth across our three reporting regions, each of our four new markets of the UK, Australia, Indonesia and Nigeria, and each of our top 10 brands in those markets. Obviously, we're pleased with this momentum, but we know we still have much more to do, especially translating our increasingly exciting multi-year growth plan into sustained in-market performance, year in, year out. Coming back to our first-half performance, though, it's worth calling out that our revenue growth of 9.5% is balanced between price and volume, including in Nigeria, where volume has returned to growth after several rounds of pricing that are niching enough volume to decline. We'll hear a lot more about our African business later today, so let me give you a couple of examples, outside Africa, of what has been driving the momentum elsewhere. In the UK, countries far through double-digit We've been learning and optimizing our plans each year. This year we shipped 98% of our Christmas packs before December and have more than doubled Christmas gifting as a revenue building block in our annual plan versus just two years ago. For example, it was one of the needle gifting brands in the Golden Gifting Quarter in St. Louis this year, beating Link, Nivea, for real leather, and custom creations as well. Slaving more price points, pushing higher and lower, and driving more slaves in store. As you can imagine, we're already well on with finalising plans with retailers for Christmas 2026, and all I'll say is, look out for the 100-pound sanctuary-style gift set. Living in Australia now, whether it's the new and improved auto-dish format for Morning Fresh, or a new flavour for Raffi's Gardens, Innovation has played an important part in driving revenue growth on our top three brands, with each brand growing market share over the last 12 months. And the good news is we're growing share in categories that are also finally back in value growth in the latest quarter, after a prolonged period of the Aussie shopper feeling the pinch. Beyond our top three brands, We have also used past format and various innovations on original sorts to launch a one-year-old pump pack onto shelves. In Australia, the UK's market-leading 250ml size that is common in our bathrooms is regarded as a paradise for all the pumping thrown into the gym there. Instead, the market is in larger packs, often with pumps. So, rather than shipping sizes shoppers don't always want halfway around the world to buy a UK factory, We're now manufacturing a consumer-preferred pack size in an all-matter meter pump from our individual factory, alongside morning fresh with a trading market.