Rentokil Initial plc

Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Rent-a-Kill Initial plc third quarter 2026 trading update. At this time all participants are in listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question and answer session through the phone lines and instruction will follow at that time. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand it over to Mike Duffy, Chief Executive Officer for his opening remarks. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning everyone and welcome to our third quarter conference call. To begin, I'm going to cover the key highlights and then hand over to Paul to discuss the results in more detail. I will then close with an update on progress against our strategy to build the platform for sustainable organic growth. Overall, it was a solid quarter. I am encouraged by the progress we have made executing against our priorities of customer focus, sales and operational excellence, and business simplification. Where we have taken action, we are seeing results. In North America, we delivered an encouraging performance by optimizing our marketing spend, prioritizing the highest converting lead channels, and improving service quality. In our international business, Pest delivered another strong quarter of organic growth, close to 6%, as our focus on excellent client service, targeted account management, and connected solutions continues to pay dividends. As I've said before, our first priority is to restore North America to market levels of organic growth, which will include investing in training, sales capabilities, and our separated residential and commercial businesses. These investments will be fully funded through savings across our international business and group central costs. Over the last few months, I have been working closely with my leadership team to finalize these investment and savings plans. We will provide more detail at our full year results in February. Finally, we are moving fast on business simplification with our divestment of Solitude. The disposal proceeds will further reduce our leverage, and as a result, the Board has approved a $200 million share buyback program. Before I hand over to Paul to discuss trading, I wanted to say a few words about our leadership announcement this morning. Paul has taken the decision to retire from full-time executive life for family health reasons. He retires on January the 31st and we are pleased that he will stay on as a senior advisor ensuring a smooth transition to a new permanent CFO. Paul's been a great partner helping me get up to speed with the business and during his time at Rent2Kill has had a significant impact improving our financial discipline and strategic focus. The board, myself, and the entire leadership team are sad to see him retire, but also fully understand and support his decision to prioritize his family. The search process for a new permanent CFO is underway. If it is not complete by February the 1st of next year, Sarah Sargent will step up from her current role as group financial controller to become interim CFO. With that, let me hand over to Paul to discuss trading.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone. Before we begin, I'd like to draw your attention to the usual cautionary statement contained in our trading update, which also applies to this call. Unless otherwise stated, all figures are in US dollars and any comparative performance is on a constant currency basis. Starting with Group. Revenue was $1.9 billion, representing 3.4% organic growth. North America delivered 3.2% organic growth and international 3.7%. Looking at North America in more detail, pest control services revenue growth was 2.7%. Contract growth was 3.1% and improvement from the second quarter. Weaker lead flow early in the third quarter resulted in a lower jobbing performance at 2.6%. Organic growth was 2.4% with the pricing environment remaining robust. Residential performance across core pest control and termite was solid, while pleasingly, commercial national account, which is approximately one third of our commercial business, saw improved growth driven by better service quality and continued PestConnect adoption. The drag from rationalising our heritage Terminix commercial client portfolio is now largely past. After seeing a mid to high single digit decline for July and August, residential lead flow moderated towards a 1% decline for the month of September. North America business services continue to deliver strong revenue growth at 9.6% organically driven by ongoing momentum in our product distribution business and continued strength from new client wins in brand standards. We continue to anticipate growth to moderate towards mid single digits. I'm pleased to note that both customer and colleague retention continues to improve year over year. We saw progress in residential customer retention and commercial retention stabilized in the quarter. Moving on now to our international business, where revenue was up 5% and organic growth was 3.7% or 4.7%, excluding our two businesses serving the UK property market, which continues to be challenging. International pest control organic growth strengthened to 5.7%. Growth was broad-based across regions, and it's pleasing to see some markets, including the UK, our largest international pest market, sustaining high single-digit organic contract growth despite tough economic backdrops. International hygiene and wellbeing organic growth was 0.7%, significantly impacted by weak trading in our DC-UK asbestos removal business. Excluding DCUK, organic growth was 2.6%. Overall, as Mike said, it was a solid quarter. We've also made good progress with our cost savings program in North America and we expect to deliver full year profits in line with current market expectations. Moving on now to capital allocation, where I have consistently emphasised our disciplined, returns-focused approach. Our first priority is to invest in the business, both organically and inorganically, then pay a progressive dividend, and finally return surplus capital while maintaining a strong balance sheet with a target leverage ratio of 2 to 2.5 times. We were back inside that range for the first time since the Terminix acquisition at the half-year stage, and with a sail of solitude, we will continue to de-lever through the remainder of the year. The Board has therefore approved a $200 million share buyback programme, which will start shortly. Finally, before I hand back to Mike, as this will be my last results conference call for Rent-A-Kill Initial, I want to thank all of you who have supported us during a period of heightened change. I'm committed to ensuring a seamless transition and I'm pleased that we have the caliber of talent on the finance bench of Sarah Sargent who will step up if required to be interim CFOs as of the 1st of February next year. Sarah is a chartered accountant with a long track record of success across multiple senior finance leadership roles, primarily at Compass Group. Prior to Rent-A-Kill, she was Group CFO for a small listed UK business. I'm looking forward to continuing to work with Mike and the wider executive leadership team on an advisory basis. My conviction in the long-term opportunity to drive value creation has only grown since I joined the business in late 2024 and I'm pleased to remain part of the team working to unlock that opportunity. Let me now hand it back to Mike.