JMPLY - Johnson Matthey Plc (JMPLF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-05-25 00:43:05 ET
Johnson Matthey Plc (JMPLF)
Q4 2024 Earnings Conference Call
May 23, 2024 4:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Martin Dunwoodie - Director of Investor Relations
Liam Condon - Chief Executive
Stephen Oxley - Chief Financial Officer
Anish Taneja - Chief Executive, Clean Air and Chair, Group Commercial Council
Alastair Judge - Chief Executive, PGM Services
Conference Call Participants
Ken Rumph - Goodbody
Chris Counihan - Jefferies
Tristan Lamotte - Deutsche Bank
Ranulf Orr - Citi
Presentation
Martin Dunwoodie
Morning, everyone, and thank you for coming on today. I'm Martin Dunwoodie, Director of Investor Relations at Johnson Matthey. And I'll just say, thank you for everyone coming along in person today and those of you who are attending the webcast. Just before we start, can I ask that everyone turns their mobile devices to silent or turn them off?
Very pleased today to welcome our CEO, Liam Condon; and our CFO, Stephen Oxley. We'll have a presentation on the results as usual, and then plenty of opportunity for Q&A from the room afterwards. And we will also take questions from the webcast. I'll point you to our cautionary statement ahead of the presentation.
And with that, I will hand over to Liam.
Liam Condon
Thank you very much, Martin. And a warm welcome to everybody here in the London Stock Exchange. And, of course, a warm welcome to everybody who's joining us online today. Now, I'm afraid I won't have as many surprises as Rishi Sunak had yesterday evening, but I think we can all be grateful that we have a roof over our heads, it's not raining. And I can promise you I'll have a lot more content to deliver together with Stephen today.
Now, we're going to go through our presentation. We're going to talk -- I'm going to give an overview by way of introduction into what's happening at JM. There's a lot of moving parts. So we put out a release and you'll see there is a lot of content in there. I'm going to try and give you the key points upfront to try and connect the dots for some of the many moving parts. Then Stephen is going to talk you through the financial details. And then I'm going to talk about the strategic priorities.
I think the first thing to note in our results is, if you look at the reported results and the underlying results, there's quite a difference. The reason is quite simple. The PGM pricing environment was highly volatile last year, we had a super cycle and prices were at cyclical highs and they came down. We are now back to what I would call historical averages.
So, the volatility has moved away from pricing, but that volatility impacted our reported results. And at JM, as you know, there's a pretty big transformation ongoing. And the key thing is, are we making a difference from an underlying point of view? So, the things that we can control as JM, are they moving forward or not?
And I have to say, I was personally very pleased to see that the underlying results, there has been quite significant progress. So growth of 11% in this relatively still weak macroeconomic environment, and with all the volatility we have, 11% in underlying growth. This is, of course, without PGM prices and forex, but this is strong growth, I think in anybody's book. For me, this is evidence that our strategy is working.
But it's not only about the financial numbers. What we've been doing is also making progress from a strategic point of view. When we set out the new strategy two years ago, we said we're going to basically build a better JM, a stronger JM, that will help drive the energy transition. And this requires us to have a more agile business model, and we put out certain strategic milestones....
Johnson Matthey Plc (JMPLF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript