Tate & Lyle plc

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today, both in person and online. Sarah and I are pleased to announce and present Tate & Lyle's results for the year ended the 31st of March, 2026. Before we start, I want to acknowledge that a week ago, we made an announcement under Rule 2.4 of the UK Takeover Code, in which we confirmed that Ingredient has made a conditional proposal to acquire Tate & Lyle. Details of the proposal are on the slides. At this stage, there can be no certainty that any offer will be made, nor as to the terms of such an offer. Clearly, we can't say anything more than we said in our announcement last week. So today, I am purely going to focus on our results and the encouraging progress our business is making. We have four key messages for you today. Firstly, the integration of CPCalco has been successfully completed. and the entire Tate & Lyle team is focused on delivering on our priority of volume-led top-line growth. Secondly, our full-year results are in line with the revised guidance we gave in October, with performance impacted by muted market demands. Thirdly, we are making good progress on the strategic actions we set out in November to drive top-line growth and strengthen our performance. Finally, with the integration of CP Calco Complete, Our focus is on leveraging the power of the combination to accelerate growth. What's encouraging is that the combination is starting to gain real traction with our customers. And as we move into the new financial year, we are seeing early signs of top-line momentum. Let's start then by looking at the first of those key messages in more detail. Integrating two large global businesses is always challenging and takes focus and time. The fact that the integration has gone smoothly and has been completed without disruption to our customers is a testament to the energy and commitment of all our colleagues. The integration was made more challenging by both softer market demand than we expected and a complex geopolitical environment, notably the evolving tariffs situation last year. While successfully completing the integration in these circumstances was a significant achievement, our financial performance was disappointing. As we move into the 2027 financial year, we are determined to put that right. Looking forward, our number one priority is to deliver volume-led top-line growth. That's why when we renewed customer framework agreements for the 2026 calendar year, we selectively chose to drive volume and revenue growth. We are also acting at pace to deliver on the four strategic priorities we set out in November, and I will come back to these in more detail later. Finally, we continue to operate in a highly unpredictable geopolitical environment, and as we have done in the past, we will look to navigate whatever external challenges we face. Overall, our focus is on delivering top-line growth and stronger performance. With that, let me hand over to Sarah to talk through the financial results.

Thank you, Nick, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to remind you that I will focus on adjusted measures and items with percentage growth and constant currency. Comparatives are pro forma, unless I indicate otherwise, as if the acquisition of CP Calco had completed on 1 April 2024. Before I start, I want to describe our performance in the round. Despite the challenging year, we saw solid performance in our largest market of North America, encouraging performance in Asia-Pacific, despite the impact of tariffs. Specific challenges affected us in Europe, where we were impacted by lower bulk sweetener revenue, and in Latin America, where we saw lower sweetener volumes. It's encouraging that around two-thirds of our portfolio continued to grow. The challenge moving forward is to build on the early signs of top-line momentum that Nick talked about earlier. That all said, our overall financial performance last year was disappointing, and let me take you through the headlines. On a statutory basis, including the impact of the acquisition of CP Telco in November 2024, revenue was 16% higher and adjusted EBITDA was 13% higher. On an adjusted and like-for-like performer basis, muted market demand led to 3% lower revenue and we delivered EBITDA of £415 million, also 3% lower, in line with the revised guidance we set out in October last year. Adjusted profit before tax was 5% lower at £238 million and adjusted earnings per share were 40.4 pence on a reported basis. we delivered £164 million pre-cash flow, with cash conversion of 70%, slightly below our target. Given lower earnings, the board is proposing to hold the four-year dividend flat, maintaining a healthy dividend yield. This chart shows the key drivers of lower revenue. Volume and mix impacted revenue by £34 million, with some mix improvements more than offset by volume declines. We invested £33 million in pricing, such that overall revenue was 3% lower in constant currency. There were some specific challenges which impacted performance. Approximately 20% of the revenue decline was from our bulk sweetener business in Europe. Over time, as demand for fibre grows, we will transition that bulk capacity into speciality products. But until then, its role is to help absorb fixed costs. it is likely to continue to be just less than a one percentage point drag on growth in this financial year. Softness in the sweetening market in Latin America, notably in Mexico, accounted for a further 30% of the top line decline. Looking into the coming year, any further softness should be offset by growth of other ingredients. Elsewhere in the portfolio, we saw more resilience, including CP Kelco ingredients growing volume on broadly flat pricing and a more encouraging performance in Asia-Pacific. Turning now to the performance of our geographic segments, where, as I mentioned earlier, the underlying performance is more reassuring than the headline figures may convey. In the Americas, revenue is 3% lower, with EBITDA 4% lower. While pricing was broadly flat, volume was lower. As just highlighted, much of this underperformance was in Latin America for sweeteners. Encouragingly, in the US, despite muted market demand, notably in beverage, bakery and snacks, revenue was stable. In Europe, Middle East and Africa, revenue decreased by 5% and EBITDA by 6%. Volume was flat while pricing was lower. We came into the year expecting lower pricing, reflecting our decision to invest in price back into the market, particularly in Europe, in customer framework agreements for the 2025 calendar year. Performance across our core categories was varied, with positive demand in dairy and beverage, somewhat offset by softness in soups, sauces and dressings. As previously stated, bulk sweetness in Europe was the principal driver of revenue decline in the region, driven largely by lower sugar pricing. Asia-Pacific delivered robust performance, with revenue broadly in line despite tariff pressures, and EBITDA was up 9%. Our North Asia business continued to grow well, while our China business was flat, reflecting the challenging tariff environment since July 2025. Looking ahead, we see encouraging momentum as the power of our combined business and solutions offering increases customer engagement. Moving on to EBITDA, which is 3% lower on a constant currency basis. EBITDA decreased as a result of the lower volumes and investment in price. COGS increases were broadly offset by $53 million of productivity gains, whilst the incremental growth investments were more than offset by costs in synergies, lower sales incentives and focused cost discipline. Our EBITDA margin on our costs and current spaces was broadly flat. The reported margin of 20.7% remains attractive and well-positioned compared to our speciality ingredient peers. Now turning to other lines on the income statement. On exceptional items, net pre-tax exceptional charges were £45 million, largely driven by CT-Calco-related integration costs. and the buyouts of UK and US pension schemes. Overall, there was a net £48 million cash outflow associated with these one-offs. The adjusted effective tax rate was 23.9% of 130 basis points. This increase is due to CP Calcutta's operations being located in higher tax jurisdictions. We expect the adjusted effective tax rate in the 2027 financial year to be in the range of 23% to 25%. the Board remains committed to a progressive dividend policy to grow the dividend when earnings allow and to hold dividends in other periods. Given the reduction in earnings this year, the Board is recommending a final dividend of 13.2 pence per share, bringing the full-year dividend to 19.8 pence, in line with last year. Turning now to free cash flow, for which comparatives are as you reported a year ago. Overall free cash flow was £164 million, some £26 million lower than the prior year. Reported adjusted EBITDA was £34 million higher. Networking capital changed by £51 million. The majority of this movement related to higher inventory to mitigate the impact of tariffs on the supply chain and support customer supply continuity where we managed the consolidation of biogas capacity. I will talk to this more later. Receivables also increased given extensions in the terms of framework agreements with some customers to support our volume-led growth priority. Capital expenditure was £4 million higher at £125 million. For the 2027 financial year, we expect capital expenditure to be in the £110 to £130 million range. Net interest increased by £26 million to reflect higher borrowings following the acquisition of CP Calco. while cash taxes and other items fell by a similar amount, benefiting from in-year tax reimbursements and lower taxable earnings. Our balance sheet remains robust. Long-term debt financing is in place at a competitive mix of fixed and floating interest rates, and with a well-balanced range of maturities running out to 2037. We continue to target long-term leverage to be between 1 and 2.5 times net debt to EBITDA, and our leverage stands currently at 2.3 times. Next debt at 31 March was £939 million, a £22 million reduction. At the end of October last year, we entered a $180 million two-year term loan facility and drew it down. These funds were used to repay an expiring $180 million US private placement fixed rate to note on maturity. Consequently, our weighted average cost of debt is currently 4% with a weighted average maturity of 4.7 years. And we put a slide in the appendix illustrating our maturity profile. We continue to have strong liquidity with an access to nearly £1 billion through cash in hand and a committed and undrawn revolving cash credit facility of $800 million, which we have recently extended to 2031. We have good financial stability, providing attractive optionality to support future organic investment and return of capital to shareholders. And now how about you Nick?

Thank you Sarah. Moving now to the good progress we are making on the actions we set out in November to drive top line growth and stronger performance. By way of a reminder, these actions are focused on four priorities. The first is targeted investment to accelerate customer wins in key growth areas. Second is delivering the benefits of the CP-Calco combination. Third is accelerating productivity. And lastly, to strengthen our balance sheet and deliver shareholder returns. Let me start with the first priority. We continue to make a series of targeted investments to ensure we have the insights, capabilities, resources and tools we need to win with our customers. Given our significantly expanded portfolio and solutions offering, over the last few months, we've undertaken a detailed customer segmentation exercise which has characterized our customers into four distinct groups. Partner accounts, enterprise accounts, accelerators, and core accounts. We are taking the output from this exercise and realigning our customer-facing teams, including our sales, technical services, applications, and marketing teams to focus on those customers and sub-categories where we can accelerate growth. Alongside this segmentation exercise, we are recalibrating which customers are best served through distributors. To ensure we have the capabilities in our global and regional teams to capture this growth, we are increasing our investment in areas such as applications, sensory science, nutrition science and process development. We are also accelerating the rollout of our solutions chassis program to speed up customer innovation. Eight chassis, mainly for mouthfeel solutions, were launched during the year, meaning we now have 18 chassis available in the market with a further nine in development. To accelerate their adoption, we trained over 300 colleagues during the year, supporting the delivery of many customer projects across our core cast crews. We also continue to selectively invest in technology to enhance the effectiveness and agility of our customer-facing teams. We have invested in developing a new generative AI tool with the ability to search our broad technical and scientific libraries to provide faster and deeper insights for our sales and technical teams as they develop solutions to solve customer formulation challenges. The rollout of this new tool started in February and is already having a positive impact on how we serve our customers. We are also working to improve our customer relationship management tools and this year we will implement a single integrated platform which will improve the visibility of pipeline progression, technical resource allocation and enhance our sales team's performance management. Moving to our second priority, which is to deliver the benefits of the CP-Calco combination. We are targeting revenue synergies of 10% of CP Calco's revenue, or around $70 million by the end of the 2029 financial year. While it's still early days, we are making good progress with around 10% of our target delivered to date. Cross-selling, which is the sale of CP Calco's ingredients and solutions to take and allow customers, and vice versa, is a key way we will deliver these synergies. It's therefore pleasing to see the value of the cost-selling pipeline more than doubled in the second half and now stands at over $100 million. I'm now going to hand back to Sarah to talk about cost synergies and productivity.