SSP Group plc

Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us in the room here and on our live webcast this morning. For those of you who don't know me or are listening in for the first time, I'm Patrick Coveney, I'm the Group's CEO, and I'm joined by Jonathan Davis, our Deputy CEO and CFO. We're also joined in the room by Geert Varellen, our incoming CFO. Geert joined us seven weeks ago, and since then he's been knee-deep getting to know the business. I know he's also looking forward to meeting many of you this morning and in the coming weeks and months. He officially takes the reins as Group CFO from Jonathan on the 9th of June, and we're fortunate that Jonathan has chosen to stay with us until the end of the year to fully support us as we deliver our plan. I've asked here to take the opportunity to introduce himself and to share some of his initial reflections on SSP before we begin the Q&A portion of today's update. So let me start by briefly setting out the highlights from the first half. As a board and as a leadership team, we're focused on the imperative to build margins, returns and cash flows from the structurally attractive set of market positions that we've built in food travel markets across the world. Last December, we set out a specific plan to do that, and we're delivering on this plan, and indeed have plans in place to accelerate it further during the second half of 2025. I will come back to that in the second half of this presentation. Our business has traded well in the first half, with sales growing at 12%, including like-for-like sales growth of 5%. That revenue growth converted into 31% growth in operating profit with a 40 basis point improvement in operating margin. Our reported first half leverage at 2.2 times while elevated reflects the planned phasing of our full year capital budget into the less busy first half and a seasonal working capital outflow that Jonathan will explain in a minute. Importantly, we have specific actions in place to deliver a year end leverage outcome towards the lower end of the one and a half to two times target range. So we're now almost two months into our second half with a clear agenda to build on our plan. We're doing this with a tight focus on trading our business well through the peak summer travel period. And we're encouraged by group like for like sales of 5% in the first six weeks of the second half. We're getting further traction on our European plan with a particular focus on rebuilding the fundamentals of our French business. We're stepping up returns from the recent investments that we've made in net gains and in M&A across the world. And we're substantially reducing our overhead base across the group, recognizing that in a more uncertain world, cost efficiency needs to play a bigger role in underpinning our future margin and returns progression. And in addition, subject to the continued recent positive momentum in Indian stock market conditions, we plan to deliver an IPO of our Indian joint venture, TFS, this summer. So taken together, this first half delivery and our second half plans put us in a position to maintain full year guidance. and also put us on track to consider a share buyback programme towards the end of this calendar year. So I'll now hand you over to Jonathan to take you through the financial review.

Thank you, Patrick. Good morning, everybody. So we've had a good first half led by strong sales growth, despite the more challenging economic backdrop. So looking at the highlights briefly, sales were around 1.7 billion, up 12% year on year on a constant currency basis. Underlying EBITDA was up by 13% to 114 million and operating profit up 31% to 45 million. EPS was a small loss per share of 0.4 of a penny, as expected, and that compares to a loss of a penny last year. Leverage at the end of the March was 2.2 times net debt to EBITDA compared to 2.1 times last year and we're proposing to pay an interim dividend of 1.4 pence per share representing a payout ratio of between 30 and 40 percent of net income and a split of roughly one third to two to two thirds between the interim and final dividend. Now turning to sales Like-for-like sales, as Patrick said, have remained robust during the first half at 6%, and in line with our expectations, which were for sales of 4% to 5% for the full year, with the first half at around 6% and the second half at around 4%. Like for like in the second quarter at 5%, and that's after adjusting for the leap year, was slightly softer than the first quarter, which was mainly due to the timing of Easter, which fell in April this year compared to March last year. We continue to see good overall sales growth across all of our regions, which you see on the next chart. So looking first at like-for-like sales at a group level, they were in line with expectations, but they were slightly softer than expected in North America at 2%, but slightly better than planned in the UK at 8%, and Asia and the Middle East at 13%. Now, Asia and the Middle East performed particularly well, benefiting from strong trading in a number of key markets, including India, Malaysia, Egypt, and Australia. Trading in the UK has remained very encouraging, driven by good passenger growth in the air sector and an improving trend in rail, helped by less strike disruption compared to last year and a very good performance from our M&S Simply Food business. Like-for-like sales in continental Europe were around 3% broadly as expected, despite the weaker levels of consumer spending in many of the markets, which continue to impact our rail operations. The net gains of 5% reflected the further mobilization of our new contract pipeline, and that contributed 12% to sales in Asia and Middle East and 8% to North America. And finally, acquisitions contributed 4% to overall sales, reflecting the acquisitions of ARE in Australia, Torres Gemilang in Indonesia, and the two small acquisitions in Canada and Atlanta last year. Looking now at current trading over the first six weeks, group like for like sales have been up by about 5%. So very consistent with that first half run rate and in line with expectations. And that's despite the weaker sales in North America. So trading in North America, you can see, has been a bit softer, with like-for-like sales down 2%. This follows the recent tariff announcements by the Trump administration, which appear to have hit international flights to and from the US, particularly to Europe, as well as impacting wider consumer confidence. However, it's worth remembering here that over 80 percent of the passengers in the North American market are from domestic flights, which have been less impacted. In the UK, you can see that trading has remained very strong, up 10 percent. And that's despite the impact from the supply shortages we've seen in our M&S business following their well-publicized cyber attack a few weeks ago. So looking at like for like sales in the round, the slightly softer trading in North America continues to be offset by stronger trading elsewhere in the group, notably in the UK, Asia Pacific and the Middle East. And therefore, we feel confident in maintaining our guidance for the full year. So turning to profit. Operating profit increased by 31% year on year, as I've said, with margin up 40 basis points. North America saw a lower operating margin down 90 basis points, largely due to the release of COVID provisions last year, as we've previously reported. Adjusting for these underlying operating margin would have been broadly flat year on year, boosted by very good further progress on gross margins, which mitigated some of the pressures on labour rates. Looking at continental Europe. Whilst we're still making an operating loss in the first half, we saw a margin improvement of 80 basis points. Both the Nordic region and Spain delivered stronger year-on-year performances. But France in particular continues to be challenging and Patrick will cover some more detail later. In the UK, we delivered another period of good operating profit growth, up 40%, with year on year margin enhancement of 120 basis points, helped by the very strong top line. And finally, in Asia and the Middle East, we saw profit growth of 18% on a reported basis, but with a lower operating margin. However, looking at this on a like for like comparable basis, that is adjusting for the deconsolidation of the high margin Mumbai business and the ARE acquisition in Australia, operating margin would have been flat year on year. Now, running down the group P&L, Gross margin improved by 80 basis points. This was another very strong performance, helped by the easing of some of the inflationary pressures we've seen in some food commodities and also helped by the higher mix of air sales compared to rail. And in air, remember, we typically see higher gross margins. However, once again, we've also demonstrated, I think, our ability to mitigate cost inflation through pricing action and our work on menu and range engineering. Labour ratios were 70 basis points higher than last year, reflecting some of the inflationary pressures on pay rates, particularly in North America, but also, importantly, the release of some of these remaining Covid provisions in the prior year. And Patrick's going to cover some of our more recent initiatives to boost both gross margins and improve labour efficiency later on. Just to complete the picture, concession fees were 30 basis points higher year on year, principally reflecting the higher mix of air versus rail, as I said earlier, with reference to the gross margin. And depreciation fell to 4.1% of sales, mainly as a result of the strong top line growth helped by the maturing of some of our prior investments and a small benefit from the impairments, which I'll cover later. So looking further down the P&L, We saw a small net loss of 3 million compared to a loss of 8 million in the prior year. As ever, the low level of profit in the first half reflects the increasing second half weighting of our sales due to our higher dependence on the air and leisure travel markets. Interest charges rose to 20 million due to the higher average net debt over the period arising mainly from the acquisition spend. But this was partially offset by the savings from our debt refinancings over the last 12 months in the USPP market. The tax charge of 6 million reflects an expected tax rate of 21.2% for the full year, as we are already anticipating further benefits from the recognition of deferred tax assets in North America, in the US. The minority charges were flat year on year. I'll come back to these in a moment. Before I do that, however, just looking to the right hand side of the chart, I should explain the unusually high exceptional charge at around 50 million, nearly all of which was non-cash. This includes a 27 million charge for a change in accounting treatment of some of our major IT programs. This is a non-cash item and solely relates to the capitalization of development costs for certain cloud-based systems and covers the last three years. And this aligns our accounting with the latest standards. The full detail you'll find in the R&S. Further to this, we've impaired fixed assets in a number of markets, most notably in France and in Italy, following a strategic review of our operations there. Now, let me give you some more detail about the minorities in our joint ventures. In North America, the minority interest share of profit rose slightly despite the reduction in overall operating profit, reflecting the relatively stronger year-on-year performance in airports with high JV partner shares and the softer performance in Canada, where we own 100% of the business. In India, the minority interest charge reduced slightly with the very strong performance in our core business offsetting the transfer of our Mumbai lounge business into the new joint venture with Adani Airports, which we now report as an associate and we explained with our results in December. In Asia and the Middle East, the minority interest charge remained flat despite the increase in operating profit in those regions, mainly due to the impact of startup costs in our new joint venture business in Saudi Arabia. So finally, moving to the cash flow. We used 161 million of cash in the first half, and that was after the investment of 130 million in capital projects, and that represented nearly 60% of our expected full year spend. We also invested a further 8 million on the acquisition of Torres Gamelan in Indonesia, which we completed in November. We saw a working capital outflow of 53 million reflecting the normal seasonal use of working capital in the business due to the lower sales in February and March compared to August and September last year. And it's worth noting that this effect was exacerbated this year by the later timing of Easter, leaving our negative working capital somewhat lower than normal at the end of March. However, this effect is already essentially unwound in the first part of the second half. All of this left net debt at 764 million at the end of the half with leverage at 2.2 compared to 2.1 times last year. And just to complete the picture, looking forward, Given the seasonality of our capex and working capital cycle over the year and the planned cash generation in the second half, we would expect leverage to return to the lower end of our target range, which is between one and a half and two times by the year end. And importantly, that would put us in a position to return cash to shareholders, which we would consider later in the year. So with that, I'm going to pass you back to Patrick to take you through the strategic highlights and the outlook.

Thanks, Jonathan. Last December, I spoke about the work that we had done in FY23 and 24 to strengthen and expand our business with the objective of delivering great propositions for customers and clients and sustainable returns to our investors. As we have rebuilt SSP post-COVID, we've prioritized building our presence and our capability in higher growth and higher returning air channel markets, defending our existing market positions and renewing and extending profitable contracts. These investments have created a strong platform but it was a platform that wasn't yet delivering the margins, the returns, and the cash flows that we or you rightly expect. Some of that returns gap was about legacy channel positions, some was about timing, and some was about the opportunity to execute better. So this year, we moved into a critical phase, one that slows the pace of further investment into the business and focuses hard on building returns and profitability on the heightened level of recent investment, thereby setting the business up for sustainable steady-state growth, but critically, at higher levels of margin and return. As I said earlier, we tightened our FY25 business agenda to build this profitability and returns, focusing on driving sustainable growth, progressing our profit recovery plan in continental Europe, and in France and Germany in particular, taking action to permanently reset the margins and returns in these businesses. stepping up our focus on all elements of cost efficiency, and finally, driving returns on the elevated level of recent investment and tightening levels of new capital expenditure to strengthen operating and free cash flows, thereby leaving us on track to consider a share buyback program towards the end of this calendar year. So let me take each of these priorities one at a time, starting with delivering sustainable growth. it would be remiss of me not to remind you that, as ever, our business is supported by clear structural tailwinds. And as you can see from the charts in the middle of this slide, the latest external data points to the outlook being particularly strong in Asia Pacific and the Middle East, with three quarters of the growth in passenger numbers over the next decade expected to come from there and North America. The strategic and investment choices that we've made since COVID have positioned SSP well to benefit from these tailwinds. Those tailwinds are evident in the organic and like-for-like sales growth that Jonathan set out earlier for the first half. Critically, we're building a business to reflect where travel is going to be and where we can generate strong returns for the next decade or more. Moving on now to how we capture that opportunity and serve customers and clients in these markets. In North America, the world's largest travel market and where we have a significant opportunity to grow market share further, we have now built our presence to 57 airports, up from 51 a year ago, with several more in the pipeline. In continental Europe, where renewal levels in the last two years were almost twice historical levels, we focused on the effective mobilization of those units and were pleased with the on-plan effective mobilization of our significant renewal programs in the Canary Islands and in Norway. Indeed, with the challenges and changes that we're putting through in France and Germany, it can be easy to lose sight of the quality and improving trajectory that we have in the Nordics and particularly in Spain. In the UK, where we have reset our leadership team and our proposition since COVID, the business is progressing well on all fronts. Our commitment to enhancing the customer experience as we renew our units is paying off with particularly strong customer ratings, including a reputation score now up to 4.6 out of five. Undoubtedly, the quality of those propositions has contributed to the strong level of UK like-for-like sales in the half at 8% and our good momentum into the second half. We're building a foundation for future growth and future returns in Asia-Pacific and in the Middle East. Our Indian businesses continue to trade very well for us, with like-for-like sales of 11% in the half. Saudi Arabia is another strategically important market for us. This is a significant current and future travel market with huge planned further investments into aviation. We've teamed up with several important brand partners, like Pret a Manger, Cafe Nero, and a local brand, Cafe Batil, to start to build a significant platform for SSP for the future. Indeed, from a base of operating four units in Riyadh a year ago, we're currently operating 37 units across Riyadh and Jeddah airports. Our second priority is to build the profitability of our continental European business, whereas we acknowledged, due to a combination of external headwinds, legacy channel positions, timing effects, and some of our own operational challenges, recent levels of profitability hadn't tracked where we would expect or need them to be. We put in place a substantive change programme to address each of these areas, with that work being led by a new regional CEO, Satya Maynard, who started at the beginning of the financial year. It's fair to say that both the level of challenge and the level of change that we're putting through in France and Germany has been greater and deeper than we'd anticipated. The key message here, though, is that we're fixing it and we're fixing it properly for the long term. So what do I mean by fixing in Europe? Key activities include, first of all, across all of our European estate, identifying any underperforming units, contracts and markets and taking action to address these. Simply put, we had too many loss-making areas of our business and we're acting aggressively to address these. Let me give you three examples of what we mean. At a country or market level, We have reset our strategy, and crucially, we've reset our rent profile in the Netherlands, such that we have transitioned now to a sustainably profitable business in the Netherlands. In contrast, as Jonathan referenced earlier, we've conducted a strategic review of our small business in Italy, and we're exploring options in relation to our loss-making units there. At a contract level, in several large European airports and rail stations, where passenger flows are different to what we expected or planned for, we're aggressively seeking, and in several cases already securing, remedies with clients on a case-by-case basis. And thirdly, at a unit level across the region, we have specific sales driving or cost-based interventions in flight to bring these units back to acceptable levels of return by FY26. Secondly, we've completely changed and restructured our management team in France, which is our largest market in continental Europe. Third, across the whole region, we're implementing a lower cost operating model on all fronts. And fourth, we are tightly managing the exit from our legacy loss-making German motorway service station business ahead of a complete closure in 2026. We closed 38 units in the first half and expect to close a further 34 by the end of this financial year. Lastly, and critically, we are building on the strong positions and strengthening returns profile that we have in Spain and across the Nordic region. In aggregate, margins in continental Europe, while 80 basis points better than in the prior year, are still too low, and we have further actions in flight to improve them. The confidence that we're building from these programs enable us to reaffirm a regional operating margin target build from 1.5% of sales last year to approximately 3% this year, and on to approximately 5% in the medium term. At a 5% margin level, continental Europe would be operating above our group cost of capital. The improvement plan that we're putting in place in Europe, taking our operating margin from 1.5% to 5%, would add in the region of four pence of earnings to the group income statement. At the same time, we would expect European capital expenditure to be lower than before. Next year, we're planning for capex of approximately half the FY24 level due to a combination of lower plan levels of renewals and a more restrictive approach to capital allocation into the region. So what does this mean? Overall, what we're doing is creating a stronger, more profitable, but somewhat smaller continental European division that will become a less material part of SSP's portfolio over time. The third priority in building returns is driving efficiencies across our cost base. In an uncertain world, the world in which we're living today, cost efficiency must play a stronger role for us both in the second half and as we set the business up for FY26. Our initiatives span all elements of our cost base, and as you can see in this slide, and at the group executive committee level, we pull these together into a rolling program of operating cost reductions. I've already touched on our programs to tackle above market rents at market, at channel and at airport levels. And we're also actively tackling support center and overhead costs. In the second half of this year, we've initiated a project to simplify and scale back support costs across the group. This will streamline and reduce complexity in our support teams with an approach that looks end to end across the business and importantly, protects delivery of our frontline teams. This project will substantially reduce our overhead levels and we have some activity already in flight in the third quarter with the rest to be done in Q4. The full benefit will be realized in FY26 and we will update you on progress against this project later in the year. However, the two biggest levers that I wanted to talk about in relation to operating cost reduction for our business are how we optimize our labor costs and how we're reducing our cost of goods to drive up gross profit. Let me start with tackling labor. As Jonathan set out earlier, due to elevated levels of wage inflation, labour costs have risen by 70 basis points to 32.4% of sales in the half. Against that backdrop, accurate forecasting and planning of labour hours is absolutely essential. Traditionally, our UK market develops best practice on frontline labour management for SSP and leads the way across our group. The example shared here, while complex, is our workforce management program, which uses technology to support our frontline operating teams. What we've done is to develop a customized labor forecasting and scheduling tool for a travel environment, which we've now launched and embedded into our operational processes with all unit managers across the UK. The model optimizes shift patterns, better allocates colleagues to pockets of demand by hour, and is driving up to a 5% saving in labor hours currently in our UK air division. And we're taking this tool now to other SSP markets. Reducing our cost of goods sold, currently sitting at 27.1% of the sales of the group, is another important lever to offset inflationary pressures and deliver margin accretion. North America is the market in SSP where we've been particularly good at this for a number of years. But we started a new program earlier this year, which involved updating and standardizing our core menu and recipe database across 250 similar restaurants, the core of our North American estate, with the aim of delivering a scalable, repeatable, replicable process and set of standard menus. The effect of this will enable us to bring down cost of goods as a percentage of sales from an already strong 22% by up to 100 basis points in this important market. And again, we'll take the learnings from this programme and roll it across other parts of SSP. So moving now to our fourth priority, which is to accelerate the return on our investments and to generate more cash. At our preliminary results last year, we introduced return on capital employed as a key performance indicator for the first time. We did this to highlight that the returns of our capital base, while decent, can be improved. In FY23, our return on capital was 17%, rising to 17.7% last year, and we have built our plan and our incentive structures to progressively build our return on capital employed from this starting point. This is being delivered by improving our operating performance, which I've already spoken about, and by growing our capital base at a slower rate. Based on the progress that we've achieved in the first half, we are on track to deliver a good return on capital improvement for the full year. Consistent with that, since last summer, our focus on M&A has shifted from sourcing and executing new deals to integrating the deals that we've done and building efficiencies from them. In 23 and 24, as you can see from this chart, we made five acquisitions, generating annualized revenues of just over 200 million and adding 130 new units to our group. A good example of how we've approached this at scale has been with ARE in Australia, which was a business that was larger than our base business and where the acquisition set us up to be the market leading player in Australia. On the back of a strong performing original SSP business in Australia, the acquisition case anticipated that we would sustain the growth level of the combined business, reduce shared overheads, increase gross profit, marry the cultures and strengthen our proposition with clients. I'm pleased to report that just over a year in, we're on track in each of those areas. Relative to the acquisition cases, we're pleased to report that on the revenue line for each of these businesses, we're either at or above where we expect it to be. And more importantly, on the returns line, which we measure both in our current level of operating margin and in our forward-looking IRR projections, we are again either at or above the acquisitions we had for each of these five acquisitions. So moving to capital expenditure. The largest component of our investment in recent years has been in our base estate. The higher than usual level of contract renewal in 23 and 24 that you can see in the chart described by me previously as catch-up phase was a reflection of the fact that many renewals were put on hold in the aftermath of COVID. During this catch-up phase, we successfully renewed approximately one third of our estate and extended our average remaining contract tenure from four years to six. In particular, our annuals level as a percentage of sales rose to an average of 14% across that period versus the more normalized level of 10%. This in combination with the rest of our investment program resulted in a high level of pre-opening costs, which also put pressure on near-term profitability. In the current year, we expect the level of renewals in our investment program to revert to a more normalized level. And we see this reducing further in FY26, which will naturally reduce cost pressures in our P&L and reduce the rate of our capital base going forward. SSP is a disciplined post-investment appraisal process that we've spoken to you about before. And this enables us to learn and understand where we're getting the best returns and to use that to inform our future plans. From this vantage point, with the lower level of renewal activity that we've spoken about, and as we move past the wave of renewal activity post-COVID, we're able to plan for a further tightening of capital spend from the 280 million that we spent last year, now to less than 230 million this year. And in FY26, we anticipate a further scale back of renewals and we expect capital expenditure to reduce to less than 200 million. So the level of new capital being invested into the business is reducing, which is clearly helpful for returns on the overall capital base going forward. Alongside strengthening profitability, we're fully focused on driving our cash conversion with initiatives from reduced capex, scale back new M&A, working capital discipline, and a cash-focused culture across SSP. We're planning for a significant improvement in our free cash flow generation in the second half of FY25 and into FY26. This enhanced level of free cash flow leaves us on track to consider a share buyback program towards the end of this calendar year. So turning now to outlook. There are two points I want to make on this slide. First, notwithstanding the decent start to half two, with like for likes at 5%, we recognize that the world is a bit more uncertain than everyone expected it to be six months ago. As a consequence, it's prudent to plan for somewhat lower levels of travel than originally expected. And as you can see from the chart on the left, that will almost certainly play out differently region by region as we see different travel trends emerging in different markets. But second, We remain resolutely focused on what is within our control, and that is a great number of things. We can control our cost efficiency, our capital returns, our operational delivery, our summer trading, our service metrics, and the delivery of like-for-like initiatives and all of the individual elements across the four-point plan that I've set out earlier. It's our progress against these initiatives that gives us the confidence in our judgment today to maintain our guidance. We're on track to deliver operating profit and earnings per share in line with the planning assumptions that we set out last December, which were for sales of 3.7 to 3.8 billion, operating profit of 230 to 260 million, all on a constant currency basis. Finally, a word on progress against our planned IPO in India. We're continuing to address this opportunity. We've recently received regulatory approval to be able to progress with the transaction, and the shareholder engagements that we've had to date have been extensive, informative, and positive. The economic background has had some impact on the Indian stock market, but our best judgment today, given the current positive momentum in that market, is that we will complete this IPO this summer. We will of course keep you updated as this transaction progresses. So a very quick summary from me to wrap up. Performance in the first half has been in line with our expectations and demonstrates good year-on-year growth. We're focused on the tightened set of priorities that we set in December. And hopefully, as Jonathan and I have set out, you can see how we're delivering against them in the first half and the progress that we're making against each of these elements as we transition into the second. So notwithstanding the macroeconomic uncertainty and the likely impact or possible impacts on travel demand going forward, the actions that we are taking give us confidence to maintain our guidance and also put us on track to consider a share buyback program towards the end of this calendar year. Before we start the Q&A, if you'll forgive me, I'd like to say a few words about the man on my right, Jonathan Davis, on what is his final analyst results presentation. Jonathan has been CFO of SSP since 2005. He's been the public face or public faces CFO of SSP since its IPO in 2014, and he's been the deputy CEO of the business since 2021. In many ways, he's been the architect of the SSP of today, and he has been a constant through four different CEOs. This is actually his 23rd interim or final results presentation, which is some achievement in the current market. And speaking more personally, he's been a font of wisdom, a huge support to me, and has become a great friend. But to many of you, he is all that and more as well. He's a genuine class act. And so to embarrass him a little, could you put your hands together for Jonathan Davis? So the world moves on. So I'd like to introduce Hert Varellen, who joined us recently, who's going to take over from Jonathan as CFO in a couple of weeks. And Hert, would you like to maybe say a few words on why you joined us, your background, and why you think that's relevant to SSP?