TRAUF - Transurban Group Stapled Securities (TRAUF) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-02-12 09:54:09 ET
Transurban Group Stapled Securities (TRAUF)
Q2 2024 Results Conference Call
February 7, 2024 06:00 PM ET
Company Participants
Michelle Jablko - CEO
Henry Byrne - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Anthony Longo - JPMorgan
Justin Barratt - CLSA
Ian Myles - Macquarie
Anthony Moulder - Jefferies
Andre Fromyhr - UBS
Owen Birrell - RBC
Cameron McDonald - E&P
Rob Koh - Morgan Stanley
Presentation
Michelle Jablko
Thank you, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us at Transurban's 2024 half year results briefing. Our roads and offices sit on the lands of many First Nations people. So I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land and recognize their connection to land, waters and the community. I'm pleased to be joined today by our CFO, Henry Byrne, and together, we'll take you through the presentation that we lodged with the ASX this morning. Today's presentation should take about 25 minutes, and then we'll have time for questions.
Well, today is my sixth results announcement at Transurban, and I've now been in the CEO role since late October. I've been out meeting with many of our stakeholders and spent time with our people across all markets. We have great foundations and a lot of opportunity ahead. And over the past 3 to 4 months, I've been very focused on 3 things. Firstly, maintaining our momentum, we achieved traffic growth across all markets as our cities continue to grow, and we've been very diligent on our costs.
This improved EBITDA margins by 110 basis points to 74%. Secondly, I've been making sure we're set up to take advantage of our growth opportunities. This is a business with attractive underlying drivers. It starts with a very strong population growth expected in our home markets over the next 20 years. We believe that we can continue to help our cities grow as long as we provide and demonstrate clear value to our customers and partners.
And that's why my third area of focus has been the expectations of our customers, our government partners and the community. This means engaging better with our government partners, delivering travel time savings and safety benefits and continually enhancing the value we offer our customers. It also means looking for ways to add value as new mobility trends emerge, like the automated truck trials we've been working on here in Melbourne. If we do all of this well, we'll continue to deliver for you, our investors, and set ourselves up for long-term sustainable growth. It's been fantastic to see our people energized by this too, and by the opportunities ahead.
They really haven't skipped a beat. Let me now move on to our financial highlights. Traffic growth and the structure of our contracts across all markets translated into strong revenue growth with proportional toll revenue up 6.3%. This was a good outcome considering some of the construction going on in Sydney and Melbourne, which will ultimately boost traffic when it's completed. Our diligent focus on costs meant that the majority of the benefit flowed through to EBITDA, with proportional EBITDA up to a new high of $1.3 billion.
We again managed our finance costs very well, with our cost of debt broadly stable. This supported our first half distribution of AUD 0.30 per security. And today, we reaffirmed our full year distribution guidance of AUD 0.62 per security. That is around 7% growth on FY '23. If you move now to Slide 6, you can see that traffic grew in all markets....
Transurban Group Stapled Securities (TRAUF) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript