Alumasc Group (LSE:ALU) — AGM Proceedings 2026

0:00 Good morning. Welcome to the LUMASC GROUP PLC Annual General Meeting. Throughout this recorded meeting, attendees will be in listen only mode. Questions can be submitted at any time just by clicking on the q and a tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. I'd now like to hand you over to the board. Vijay, good morning, sir. Good morning. Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the twenty twenty six Annual General Meeting of the ALUMASC GROUP PLC, which I will now call to order. I'm Vijay Thakra. I'm the Interim Executive Chair of the company and will also be acting as

0:31 Chair for this meeting. Now before I begin with the formalities of the meeting, I would like to take the opportunity to introduce current members of the Board of Directors who are here with me today. On my right, perhaps on your left on the screen is Simon Drey, Chief Financial Officer and Interim Company Secretary. And then I don't know whether you can see them all on screen, possibly not, but we also have our other directors here. I've got Gilbert Jackson, who is the divisional MD of our Building Envelope division, and he's also an Executive Director of the Group Board. We have Michael Leaf, divisional MD of the House Building Products division and also an Executive Director of the Group Board. And we have Steven Beachy, a nonexecutive director, and he... Steven also chairs the remuneration committee.

1:20 And then we have Karen McInerney, who is also nonexecutive director and chairs our audit committee. And last, by no means least, Andrew Baricluff, another Non Executive Director. We're also joined today by Kemi Waterton Zhu, who's from our company secretariat. In addition, liquidity, our registrars are present here today represented by Marcus Grunton. Good morning, Marcus. We also have some of our advisers in the room from Peel Hunt, who are one of our joint brokers Cavendish, another joint broker, but also our NOMAD Crow, our auditors and one or two members of senior management. Joining us remotely are Ginny Pullbrook and Tilly Butcher from Comarco, who are our financial PR advisers.

2:10 Now we're conducting this AGM with those present and they constitute a quorum as required by the articles of association of the company. This year's AGM is being held in a hybrid format. This is the first such time we've done this and is hosted by a webcast via the Investor Meet Company or IMC platform to enable shareholders to follow the proceedings remotely and also here at Wade International, 3rd Avenue, Halsted, Essex, CO9, 2SX, the site of one of ALUMASC's business units. Shareholders joining through the IMC platform may follow the proceedings remotely and indeed submit questions live through the Q and A tab.

2:55 They will not be able to vote online at the AGM. However, shareholders may vote by the AGM in person or via a proxy appointed in advance of this meeting. Shareholders have been encouraged to submit their votes by proxy as early as possible. Valid proxy appointments have been received and will be included in the poll by Affinity. Shareholders have also been invited to submit questions in respect of the business of the meeting for the Board to consider. Questions relating to the business of the meeting may also be submitted in advance through the Investor Meat Company, IMC dashboard or live during the AGM through the Q and A tab on the IMC platform.

3:44 Now we have had a small number of questions that we have received in advance. Simon, do you want to just take us through those? Sure. One for the first question, it says sales fell short of the orders value. Can you explain the reasons for this, please? Do you want me to If you don't. Please, Vijay. Thank you. I I always caution when in any discussion about order book for ALUMASC because we're not exclusively an order book driven business. Parts of our business like Timlock operate a same day delivery model, so they don't have an order book. In many other parts of the business, orders come in and out within the same month. It's not a reliable indicator of what the next month or the next six weeks sales are going to be.

4:32 But as the question alludes to, over FY 'twenty six, we did see sales falling relative to the prior year, but order book growth. And there can be two reasons for that. Firstly, the order intake is healthy, but there are project delays, and we certainly saw that over the second half of last year. Another reason might be that demand underlying demand is quite healthy and the order books are growing and there's more activity around order intake. And we also saw signs of that over the second half of FY twenty twenty six. Encouragingly, as you've seen from today's trading statement, that continued into the first quarter of FY twenty twenty seven and into the early weeks of October as well, where despite revenue in the first quarter being 10% ahead of the prior year, order intake more than kept pace with that.

5:27 The order book's higher than it was at June 2026, and we've seen order book growth versus Q1 FY 'twenty six. Thank you, Simon. We also have another question. And again, if you don't mind, Simon, I'm going to ask you to read that out and perhaps address this question as well. How significant could international markets become over the next three to five years? And what level of investment will be required to support that growth?

5:58 International markets have always been important for ALUMASC, although they've been dominated by large multi million pound contracts like the CLK contract that we saw. The majority are shipping out into FY 2026. We like them because they're big and important contracts for us, but what we don't like is that they make export performance quite lumpy, difficult to forecast. So we've been looking over the last couple of years to grow our bread and butter work overseas. And for us, that orders somewhere between, say, a 100,000 up to maybe a million pounds. And they come and go within a year, and we can we can supply them quickly.

6:47 And building up a baseline of those allows allows us to have less reliance on the call offs from these these big contracts. And to support those... That that that growth, we've been putting technical sales resource into key selected markets. We saw some signs of the benefit from that investment over FY 'twenty six, where non Czech black cock revenues were 36% higher than the prior financial year. And we saw further progress in the first quarter of FY twenty twenty seven, as you see from today's trading update, including a £400,000 order from the Tincan Port Complex in Lagos, Nigeria. That's the first phase of a larger project. It's difficult to put numbers on where we expect that export sales to grow over the next three to five years as percentage of group revenues because over that same time period, we'd expect UK sales to grow as well.

7:46 But what we will expect to see is a growing volume of orders within that sort of bread and butter level within our export work. Investment wise, we have already put people into key markets. As I say, it's a fairly moderate level of investment. We will look to put more people in over the coming periods into markets where we see potential for the ALUMASC brands to sell into. Thank you, Simon. And as Simon said, the impact of those investments that we're making has been seen last year. Simon referred to non CLK exports grew by 36%. And in our trading update this morning, you'll have seen that we've just won a decent in that range, 100,000 order in Nigeria. So that remains our strategy.

8:41 I think the Gattic and Wade brands are very strong, and we need to really capitalize on those. So we'll continue to do that. And there's a final question. Should I take this one, Simon? Sure. The question says that given that earnings dropped in 2026, how confident is the Board that the current dividend is sustainable? And what level of earnings recovery will be required before dividend growth can resume? It's a good question. And thank you for the question. We are confident. Otherwise, we want to maintain the dividend. Profit fell, but we maintain the dividend at the record level that we'd achieved the previous year. So we remain confident. And our dividend cover, which is one of our metrics that we try to adhere to, we aim for 2.5 to three over a period.

9:30 It dropped below 2% last year because of the decrease in profit, but we very much want to get back to 2.5 or 3% over a period of time. If earnings grow this year, then we would be hopeful of also increasing the dividend. So our policy dividend policy is progressive and with an objective of getting to 2.5 to three times cover. Thank you very much. Are there any other questions that have come in while we No, no, not so far. Okay. Well, thank you for those questions. Now earlier this morning, as Simon and I have just referred to, we did issue a trading update to the London Stock Exchange. The statement is available on our website, and I'm sure that many, if not all of you, have seen it.

10:19 So in the interest of brevity, I'm not going to read it out. But if anybody here would like a copy, we have got hard copies available for you to read. I will now proceed to the formal business of the meeting. The notice of meeting together with the explanatory notes and the 2026 annual report were sent out or made available to shareholders on the 09/30/2026, and I will take the notice that was issued as read.

10:54 As there are no objections to that, we will take a poll after any further questions have been answered. The poll will be conducted by our registrars, Equity, who are here with us in Halstead. Now when you registered as shareholder this morning, you should have been given a poll card. Please note that shareholders who are here today and have already lodged their proxy forms with our registrar do not need to complete another poll card unless, of course, they now wish to change their vote. Now if there is any shareholder proxy or corporate representative present here physically who requires but does not yet have a poll card, needs additional poll cards or needs a pen, please raise your hand and Equidity will assist you.

11:45 If you're here as a proxy of a corporate representative for more than one shareholder, you should have been given one poll card for each holding that you represent. I confirm that the votes that were received by proxy have been counted by our registrar's equity.

12:05 Okay. So I would now like to put to the meeting the resolutions for consideration today. So I now formally put to the meeting each of the resolutions as set out in the notice of meeting dated 09/30/2026. Now for resolutions one to 14, these are ordinary resolutions and a simple majority is required for those resolutions to pass. Resolutions 15 to 17 are special resolutions and they would require a majority of not less than 75% in order to pass. If there are any questions on the resolutions, which is the business of this AGM today, please can they be asked now?

12:58 Okay. There are no questions. I don't think any have come in on the screen, Simon. I think there's one, but it's not related to the resolution to VJ, so maybe we'll cover it before your concluding remarks. Okay, fine. In which case, if there are no further questions related to the business of the meeting, please complete your poll cards at Quincy. Will then collect them. I have completed my poll card on behalf of myself and those who have appointed me as proxy. Once all completed poll cards have been collected and Equinity has confirmed that the poll is complete, I will declare the poll closed. The details of the webcast will be available on our website and on the London Stock Exchange's regulatory information service later today. So before I conclude, should we just address the question that's Yes. Just one thing, is there an update on the new CEO? And I don't think there is anything beyond what we said in our full year 2026 announcements, but it might be worth just touching on the highlights of those, Vijay.

13:56 Yes, yes. So clearly and the presentation, I think, is available on our website. When we did the roadshow after the announcement of our results last month, we did put on in that presentation what the interim management structure is. That continues. And, you know, happily, you've seen what we said this morning in terms of the trading update, you know, that that is proving to be effective. And I thank my colleagues, particularly Simon, Gilbert and Michael for the leadership that they are providing to the business. As of when there's anything to say on the CEO situation, we will, of course, update the market if there's nothing further to up to what we said before. Thank you. That's it. Okay.

14:43 As there are no more questions, equity, are we declaring the poll closed? You can. Okay. The poll is closed. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes the formal business of the Annual General Meeting. Thank you for your attendance and ongoing support of the company. I now declare the meeting closed. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's great. Thank you for updating attendees today. On behalf of the Board of ALUMASC GROUP PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's Annual General Meeting and good morning to you.