Tate & Lyle plc

Good morning and welcome to the conference call for Tate and Lyle's first half pre-closing statement. Today's call is hosted by Nick Hampton, Chief Executive Officer, and Sarah Gowers, Chief Financial Officer. I will now hand over to Nick Hampton.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the conference call. I will make some introductory comments, and then Sarah and I will be happy to take your questions. First, I want to look at the bigger picture. We continue to make very good progress delivering the benefits of the CP Turbo combination. Customers are increasingly recognising the strength of our combined portfolio, especially our expertise in mouthfeel, and this has led to a very encouraging early cross-sale successes, with the value of the pipeline more than doubling in the last two months alone. The strong interest our combined offering and reformulation expertise is generating with customers, clearly demonstrates the strategic logic of bringing Skeptate and Lyle and CP Calco together, and reinforces our confidence in the growth potential of the combined business. While the level of customer engagement is high, we are operating in a tough market and have seen a slowdown in demand as the first half progressed, particularly over the last few months, which in turn has slowed our recent performance. We are seeing different dynamics across each region, In the Americas, we expect revenue in the first half to be slightly lower, reflecting softer consumer demand, making North America still our largest market. In Europe, Middle East and Africa, revenue is expected to be mid-single-digit lower, despite slightly higher demand. In Asia-Pacific, revenue is expected to be broadly in line after absorbing the impact of tariffs, which we continue to navigate well. Against this more challenging backdrop, we are accelerating a series of steps to drive delivery of top-line growth. These include investing in enhanced customer segmentation, further strengthening our customer-facing capabilities, such as solution selling, applications, and marketing, working even more closely with customers to accelerate innovation through technology, and optimizing capacity in our manufacturing network to accelerate productivity. The margin of the TPP portfolio is expected to improve further in the first half. Trans-revenue and cost synergies and delivery of savings from our productivity programme remain on track, and demand for superlatives continues to be strong. Overall, then, for the first half, in constant currency, and compared to the pro forma comparatives, we now expect group revenue to be 3% to 4% lower. Reflecting this top-line softness, the investments we continue to make for growth and the planned weighting of cost images into the second half, EBITDA in the first half is now expected to be high single-digit percent lower. We will provide a more detailed update on the business and the actions we are taking when we announce our half-year adults on the 6th of November 2025. Turning to the full-year outlook, while we anticipate the near-term market demand environment will remain challenging, we expect performance to improve as we move into the fourth quarter. This will be driven by the acceleration of actions we are taking to drive delivery of top loan growth and increasing benefits from the CP Club accommodation, including an acceleration in cross-selling, the migration of distribution relationships to a direct service customer model, and delivery of cross-sellages. Therefore, for the year ending 31 March 2026, in constant currency, And compared to pre-former comparisons, we now expect revenue and EBITDA to decline by no single-digit percent compared to the prior year. In summary, then, in April we started to operate as one combined business. Since then, we have made real progress setting up the business for future growth, while also operating in a period of considerable economic volatility. The benefits of the combination are clear to see. Looking ahead, the fundamental growth drivers of our business remain strong. Consumer demand for healthier and more nutritious food and drink continues to grow, and our expertise in food and drink reformulation and our leading positions across sweetening, mouthfeel and fortification mean we are well positioned to capture this growth. To conclude, we are determined to accelerate top-line growth and are fully focused on the success of using the benefits of the CP-Calco combination.

With that, I will open up the call for questions. Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question at this time, please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. And please make sure the malfunction on your phone is switched off to allow you to signal to reach our equipment. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star 2. Again, it is star 1 to ask a question. We will pause for just a moment to assemble the queue. We'll now take our first question from Matthew Webb from Investec. Please go ahead.