Travis Perkins plc (TVPKF) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

2025-04-01 16:58:05 ET

Travis Perkins plc (TVPKF)

Q4 2024 Results Conference Call

April 01, 2025 03:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Geoff Drabble - Chairman

Duncan Cooper - CFO

Matt Worster - Director of Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Aynsley Lammin - Investec

Arnaud Lehmann - Bank of America

Will Jones - Redburn Atlantic

Charlie Campbell - Stifel

Ben Wild - Deutsche Bank

Zaim Beekawa - JP Morgan

Shane Carberry - Goodbody

Ami Galla - Citi

Presentation

Geoff Drabble

Good morning. Welcome, finally, to the Travis Perkins Results Presentation. Pretty of you who don't know me, I'm Geoff Drabble. I became formerly the Chairman of Travis Perkins on the 1st of February this year. So, it's been an interesting first couple of months, culminating in today's results.

But I'm going to do a brief introduction and also just make a few observations before I hand over to Duncan, who will take us through the majority of the presentation. But obviously, we'll get into Q&A, which I think will be the most interesting once that presentation is complete.

Sorry, here we go. So, it's been a while since I did this, I'm a little bit out of practice. Look, once I started on the 1st of February, really, I was working closely with Pete from the moment he joined. And look, we're all very disappointed that Pete is unable to build on the good work that he started in his brief tenure with us. But we -- he and I had very, very similar views of this business.

And look, you will be tired of us all telling you this because -- but the group does have incredibly strong fundamentals. It's got a great network, got good people. It's got long-standing relationships and some good brands, and I can promise you, the vast majority of our competitors in this industry would love to have all the strong fundamentals that we have as a business in Travis Perkins.

Having said that, we have this unerring knack of scoring own goals and messing up the strong fundamentals that we have. And over the -- over recent years, in my opinion, there have been a number of strategic missteps. And in particular, around about a year ago where we had something of a management void, there were some quite serious tactical blunders, which has resulted in us having way too much attrition in our staff.

When I look through those strategic missteps of those tactical blunders, look, we can get into Q&A what they specifically were. But they all, in my opinion, have a very common theme. And the common theme was there was a lack of clarity of what our business model was and what we were trying to achieve. And actually, I think the culture, which existed within the business worked against our likely achievement of that business model.

So, what does that mean? It's all written down here; it all sounds very NBA. Look, what we need is a focused, entrepreneurial local business. You win business in this industry on a post code by post code basis on a -- based on relationships. We are a relationship business. We will not ever replace those relationships with digital over the format of our locations, we are not a retail business. And we need to rebuild that trust back into those core relationships and that core entrepreneurial flair out in the field....

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