Earnings call transcript: SSP Group H2 2025 sees stock surge 16% post-earnings

SSP Group PLC reported strong financial results for the second half of 2025, with earnings per share rising 25% to 12.5 pence and revenue increasing by 8% to 3.6 billion pounds. The company’s stock surged 16.34% in pre-market trading following the announcement, reflecting investor optimism about the company’s performance and future prospects. The proposed full-year dividend increased by 20% to 4.2 pence per share, further boosting investor confidence.

Key Takeaways

• SSP Group’s revenue grew by 8% to 3.6 billion pounds.
• Earnings per share rose by 25% to 12.5 pence.
• The company proposed a full-year dividend increase of 20%.
• Stock price surged 16.34% post-earnings announcement.
• Strong performance in key markets like the UK and North America.

Company Performance

SSP Group demonstrated robust performance in H2 2025, with significant growth in both revenue and earnings per share. The company benefited from strong market positions in the UK, North America, and Asia-Pacific, despite challenging conditions in the Continental European rail segment. The expansion of its presence in high-growth markets like Southeast Asia and key airports such as JFK and Denver contributed to the positive results.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: 3.6 billion pounds, up 8% year-over-year.
• Earnings per share: 12.5 pence, a 25% increase.
• Operating profit: 223 million pounds, up 13%.
• Operating margin expanded by 30 basis points.
• Free cash flow pre-dividend: 80 million pounds.
• Net debt to EBITDA reduced to 1.6x.

Market Reaction

Following the earnings announcement, SSP Group’s stock price increased by 16.34%, reaching a new high within its 52-week range. This significant rise reflects investor confidence in the company’s strategic direction and financial health. The market’s positive reaction is also supported by the proposed dividend increase and the company’s strong performance in key markets.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking ahead, SSP Group is targeting earnings per share at the upper end of the 12.9-13.9 pence range and expects free cash flow to exceed 100 million pounds. The company is also focusing on building its Return on Capital Employed towards 20% and is conducting a strategic review of its Continental European rail business.

Executive Commentary

Patrick Coveney, Group CEO, expressed determination to enhance profitability and returns, stating, "We’re not satisfied with where we are. There’s more that we can do to deliver profits, cash flows, and returns." CFO Geert Verellen emphasized a shift in focus, saying, "We have to pivot from a growth phase into a returns-first and cash-focused phase."

Risks and Challenges

• Challenging market conditions in Continental European rail segment.
• Potential impacts from economic fluctuations and currency exchange rates.
• Competition in high-growth markets like Southeast Asia.
• Execution risks in strategic initiatives and restructuring efforts.
• Regulatory challenges related to international operations.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about margin improvement plans for Continental Europe and strategies for optimizing working capital. Executives also addressed shareholder value creation potential and clarified that no current ownership change approaches are underway.

SSP Group’s strong financial performance and strategic initiatives have positioned it well for future growth, as reflected in the positive market response and optimistic outlook.

Full transcript - SSP Group PLC (SSPG) H2 2025:

Patrick Coveney, Group CEO, SSP Group: Okay, so we’ll get going. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us here at Nomura in London and on our live webcast this morning. I’m Patrick Coveney. I’m the Group CEO of SSP, and I’m joined this morning by Geert Verellen, our new CFO, and by Satya Menard, who joined us in October of last year as the CEO of our Continental European Region. Our Board’s Senior Independent Director, Karen Bradley, is also with us this morning. In a moment, Geert will take you through the 2025 financials, and I’ll then set out the operational, commercial, and strategic drivers of that performance, and importantly, our Focus 2026 actions. During that review, Satya will join me to set out our specific plan to build and accelerate returns from our European business.

We’ll then together share our outlook, and Geert, Satya, and I will finish by taking questions both from the room and on the webcast. So let me start by briefly sharing my perspective on the year. I set out to ensure that FY25 would be a year of execution against the specific performance priorities that we outlined a year ago. We, and I specifically, didn’t nail all of them. However, that’s not to say that we didn’t progress. Revenues were up 8%, operating profit up 13%, margin accreted by 30 basis points, and EPS rose by 25% to GBP 0.125, all of those metrics on a constant currency basis. And our reset teams drove strong trading performance in three of our four regions. Importantly, we pivoted to positive free cash flow, delivering GBP 80 million of cash pre-dividend, with leverage now at the lower end of our guided range.

That put us in a position to initiate a GBP 100 million share buyback in October. We’ve tightened our capital expenditure, and we’ve built returns on recent investments. And as a result, our return on capital employed metric rose by 100 basis points to 18.7%. We created and delivered a GBP 30 million corporate and regional overhead reduction plan that we actioned rapidly in the second half. However, we didn’t deliver a plan in Continental Europe, and I’m frustrated and disappointed about that. But we have now reset and embedded our team under Satya’s leadership, changed our model, and cleared up our balance sheet consistent with these actions. We have granular plans that underpin an increase in operating margin from the 2.1% that we delivered in 2025 to at least 3% in 2026 and towards our 5% medium target.

2026 has started positively, like-for-like sales growth across the group for the first two months of the new year, tracked at about 4%. And the combination of this early trading momentum and the improvements being actioned across the business give us the confidence to nudge up our EPS guidance. But let me be clear on my view of where the business is today. We’re not satisfied with where we are. There’s more that we can do to deliver profits, cash flows, and returns, the returns, profits, and cash flows that SSP is capable of, and 2026 is about showing that. Of course, there are market challenges and uncertainties ahead, but we’re focused on the opportunities that are within our control, and there are a great many of those, and we’re executing against them and at pace.

More broadly, and let me be crystal clear here, we’re focused on surfacing and delivering whatever actions are necessary to drive shareholder value from here. So with that, let me spend a moment on our priorities for FY26. This summer, as a board, we broadened the scope of our financial and strategic planning to identify, debate, and embed sustainable value-driving actions. This process assessed a number of areas: further cost reduction opportunities, improved cash flow conversion opportunities, portfolio optimization, our strategy and related shareholding for India, options to accelerate returns on capital, and the level and timing of share buybacks and other options. As a result of this work, our actions for the year include an operational plan that we internally call Focus 26 to drive profit, cash, and returns.

We will drive profitable organic growth with strong market and contract retention, deepening our positions in high-growth, high-return food travel markets. We will execute our recovery plan for Continental Europe, permanently building the margins and returns in these businesses. We will embed the GBP 30 million corporate and regional overhead savings that we delivered this summer and action further cost efficiencies. We will build returns on the recent investments that we’ve made and tighten our FY26 capital investment to no more than GBP 200 million in the year. And we will strengthen free cash flow to over GBP 100 million through both profit growth and disciplined capital allocation. We’re executing against this plan, and as I said already, we’re off to a good start. We now expect to deliver earnings per share towards the upper end of the expectations we set in October.

We expect to deliver free cash flow of more than GBP 100 million and to build returns on capital employed towards 20%. However, as we focus on driving additional shareholder value, this operational plan will be complemented by two further initiatives. First, a wide-ranging review of our Continental European rail business, and second, a board review of options to realize value for SSP shareholders in line with delivery of the TFS free-float requirements. I will come back to both of these initiatives in more detail later in the presentation. But for now, let me hand over to Geert to take you through the FY25 financials.

Thanks.

Geert Verellen, CFO, SSP Group: Thank you, Patrick, and good morning, everyone. I’m Geert Verellen. I joined SSP earlier this year and took over as CFO in June. I’m delighted to be here and share with you our results for FY25. As usual, I will start with the key highlights of this past year, and as you know, in prior years also, we present our metrics before the impact of IFRS 16. We grew revenues by 8% to GBP 3.6 billion and increased our underlying operating profit by 13%, with operating margin expanding by 30 basis points. This, in combination with higher income from associates and lower minorities, resulted in an increase of earnings per share of 25%. Better operating profit, lower capital expenditure, and stronger working capital resulted in free cash flow pre-dividend of GBP 80 million compared to a substantial outflow last year.

This led to a reduction in net debt to EBITDA to 1.6 times, and that leverage level facilitated the start of our share buyback program, which we launched on the day of our trading update in early October and has been running since then. Consistent with our dividend policy, we propose a full-year dividend of 4.2p per share, which is an increase of about 20% versus last year. Now, let us get into some of the details, and let’s start with sales. Full-year sales growth was 8%, as you can see on the slide, including 4% like-for-like growth supported by strong performances in the UK and our Asia-Pac and EMEA regions. Net contract gains added 4% to sales growth again as we prioritized investment in our Asia-Pac and EMEA and North America regions.

The negative 2% you see in the column other to the right of the slide represents the impact of the exit of our German motorway services business and the transfer of our Mumbai lounge business into a new JV. To the right on the slide, you also see that we’ve had a good start to the new fiscal and financial year, FY26, with all regions in positive revenue growth and the group posting 6% total growth in the first eight weeks since October 1st. In those first eight weeks, we’ve also seen the group post like-for-like growth of 4%, and this revenue growth is supported by solid like-for-like growth in all regions, including in America, which has recovered from negative like-for-likes in the second half of last year to 2% positive despite the recent shutdowns in the U.S.

This is all very encouraging to us, and Patrick will explain the drivers of this later on. We delivered underlying operating profit growth of 13% to GBP 223 million. This increase was supported by good growth in all regions, with an increase in the underlying operating margin by 30 basis points at constant exchange rates. In Continental Europe, underlying operating profit growth increased, but margins fell short of our own expectations. Patrick already alluded to that. Driving margin in the Continental European region is a key focus for me, and I’m working closely with Satya to improve performance. Satya will go through the detail on performance and his plans in a moment. Turning to the UK and Ireland region, underlying operating profit improved despite the disruption caused by the M&S cyber incident earlier this year.

In the APAC and EMEA region, we benefited from profitable growth in Australia, Malaysia, and Egypt, although this was partially offset by the effect of the transfer of some of our business and our units in India into JVs. Excluding the impact of this transfer, margin in the region would have been unchanged. As a reminder, upon deconsolidation or transfer into JVs, SSP’s share in the benefits or in the profit of these units is reported in associates and continues to contribute to the earnings per share metric. Our group earnings per share increased 19% at actual exchange rates compared to last year. As you can see on this slide, this is mainly due to higher underlying operating profit, higher income from associates, and lower minorities, partially offset by higher finance costs that are mainly the result of last year, including a foreign exchange benefit.

As you can also see on the slide, our effective tax rate for the year is in line with prior year and at approximately 19.4%, reflective of the recognition of deferred tax assets in the U.S. as our business strengthens further there. Looking forward, we would expect the underlying effective tax rate for the group to gradually return to 22%-23%. You heard me say earlier that in FY25, we saw a smaller part of our profits be attributed to minorities, and this table shows the components of the minority interest. In relation to the FY25 underlying operating profit of GBP 223 million that I mentioned earlier, we have reflected a minority share of GBP 60 million pound, down from last year.

Over time, we expect this share to go down further, both as a result of structural changes to our operations in North America, as well as due to the fact that growth in our Indian business is increasingly coming from JVs and as a result is presented in the associates line. As you will have seen, our reported operating profit was roughly GBP 86 million, reflecting about GBP 183 million of non-underlying items. Approximately GBP 40 million of those non-underlying were cash in the year. Impairment charges of GBP 117 million are primarily related to our business in France and Germany, which were contracts entered mostly pre-COVID. Satya will share with you his views and plan on this in a bit.

We’re not satisfied with this performance, as we’ve mentioned earlier, and we have to reflect the structural challenges that we face in these markets in the carrying value of the assets we carry on our balance sheet in these markets. We’ve also fully reflected the consequences of our exit from Italy. The £33 million that you see on the slide relates to the application of new accounting regulations in our investments or with regard to our investments in IT that we already raised in the half year. In short, technical guidance requires companies to no longer capitalize IT assets related to the configuration of cloud-based software solutions. And instead of keeping them as assets on the balance sheet, these investments now have to be expensed. So just to be clear, we’re not writing off these investments as bad investments.

We’re merely in line with the accounting guidance, classifying them in a different way, and have to run them through the income statement now. The restructuring cost of GBP 12 million that you see here relates to the overhead reduction program that we actioned in the second half of the year, and Patrick will get back to that later on. Site and contract exit costs of GBP 14 million relate primarily to our exit from Italy and the continued unwind of our operations in the German motorway business. Let’s turn to cash flow now and how this impacted our net debt and leverage. Net debt decreased from GBP 574 million at the beginning of the year. Sorry, net debt decreased to GBP 574 million, which represents 1.6 times net debt over EBITDA, which is a reduction from the 1.7 times that we had at the beginning of the year.

Free cash flow before dividends amounted to GBP 80 million, approximately GBP 280 million better than in the previous year, reflecting an increase in EBITDA as well as the positive impact of working capital initiatives like supply chain financing and lower capital expenditures. While we’re obviously encouraged to see this improvement, there’s plenty of opportunity for us to go after. This brings me to a couple of reflections that I wanted to share with you, my take on SSP, if you will, since I started. First of all, I believe that we compete in a great industry with tremendous potential for growth and in markets and channels that are weighted to long-term positive travel trends. We’re exposed to a great number of markets, each with their own state of maturity, their own spending power, exciting regional strategies, and tailored business models.

Most importantly, I also believe that we have a results-driven team that is passionate about food and about the customer. Since the start of my induction, I’ve listened to many shareholders about what you see as imperative for us as a company. And here’s what I heard. You want to see us grow profits faster than sales, increase the returns of the assets we already have, and generate meaningfully higher cash flow with healthy cash returns to shareholders. Those messages have been received loud and clear. As an organization now, we have to pivot from a growth phase into a returns-first and cash-focused phase and mentality. And we’re doing that, and let me give you a couple of ideas of how we’re doing that. So first of all, I see an opportunity to streamline our finance processes to bring more insights and simplify the flow of information. That’s number one.

Also, performance management in an organization starts with a clear and transparent way of engaging with each other at every level of the organization. Patrick and I are working hard to instill that mentality at all levels and in all parts of the organization. Second, while I do believe that we have a robust methodology to assess capital investments, I’m challenging us to prioritize more and be more selective. The mere fact that a business case hurdles does not guarantee automatic approval. We’re linking up the strategic choices made in capital allocation to the individual discussions on discrete business cases. Questions like, does this contribute to EBIT and margin fast enough? And importantly, why would we invest in this case instead of the next one that also hurdles are now all linked up in the same conversation with the regions.

In other words, Patrick and I are being more selective. My philosophy is that in business, everything is a choice. One just needs to be comfortable with the consequences of the choices made. Another area of opportunity that I see is an increased focus on cash generation. The importance of cash needs to be reinforced throughout the organization. That is why we have identified a number of focus areas that will drive that message and must result in better cash generation, and let’s look at these in a little more detail. The first and most important element here is flawless execution at store and restaurant level, disciplined operating standards, waste and loss management, menu and recipe re-engineering, etc. Many years working in retail and at Walmart in particular taught me that without focus on how you operate in the field every day, every time of day, nothing else matters.

We’ve identified several opportunities that are included in our plans for FY26, and Patrick and I are on this every week and every month with our regional and market leadership. The second area is working capital. I already mentioned it. We see an opportunity to optimize the timing of our rent payments, switching from cash deposits to bank guarantees, reviewing the timing of payments, excuse me, to and from our suppliers, just to name a couple of examples. In FY25, we already saw the positive impact of supply chain financing, which in turn resulted in lower borrowing costs. We have also started a global benchmarking exercise to uncover further working capital benefits. For FY26, we see a further decrease in CapEx to no more than GBP 200 million as total spend, a significant decrease from prior years.

Beyond the absolute spend levels, we’re also being more selective, and we’re creating more competition and more tension in the process, more competition for that capital. We’re also challenging our build and construction teams to review specifications, ensuring we can get more for less. The fourth area in optimizing the way we go is the way we go to market with our partners and, in short, making sure we manage closely the profit and hence the cash coming back to SSP shareholders. Lastly, we’re focusing our teams on cash by bringing it front and center into the monthly regional performance reviews, and we’re also increasing accountability for the leadership teams when it comes to cash generation. Turning now to CapEx in more detail. In FY25, we further decreased our capital investments to GBP 212 million.

The biggest part of that FY25 CapEx went to a still elevated level of contract renewals and maintenance CapEx, followed by growth and expansion CapEx, and lastly, technology. For FY26, we expect to spend no more than GBP 200 million. Roughly 50% of that number will go to renewal, rebrand, and maintenance CapEx, with roughly one-third going towards supporting the 2% net gains that we have on the slide. Going forward, based on current planning, return objectives, and what I just said about making choices, we expect CapEx to be in and around GBP 200 million. Before I hand it back to Patrick, let me summarize how we see our capital allocation policies or priorities. First is our aim to maintain a sustainable balance sheet.

This business operates best through cycles with leverage somewhere between one and a half and two times net debt over EBITDA, and of course, considering seasonal fluctuations in a business like ours. Second is to continue to fund profitable organic growth. You heard us say that we’re not in the market for M&A at this time, and we’re firmly focused on generating, improving the returns out of the existing assets and locations. Organic growth, most particularly in markets and airports where we already have a strong presence, creates the best platform for us from which we can improve our cash conversion. We continue to target a dividend payout ratio of between 30% and 40%, and you’ve already seen that for FY25, we post a 20% increase in our dividend to 4.2p this morning.

Lastly, we’re in the market now with a share buyback program of GBP 100 million, and up to last week, we had executed approximately GBP 13 million and repurchased slightly more than 8 million shares so far. To conclude, I’m both resolved and excited about the year ahead. We’ve got a good model, we’ve got great teams, and we’ve put together a plan that is based on focus and making choices. We’re delivering that plan, and the first weeks of the new year look promising, and it feels like we’re off to a great start. So with that, I’ll turn it back to Patrick. Thanks, Geert. This is my third full year as CEO of SSP, and it’s been a very different one.

In 2023 and 2024, we expanded our business rapidly, prioritizing building our presence, our capability, and our relationships in higher growth and higher returning air channel markets across the world, defending long-held market positions and renewing and extending profitable contracts throughout, strongly building our client, our customer, and our culinary propositions. But while these investments created a strong platform, we were not converting that platform into value for shareholders. So in December last year, we tightened our business agenda to build profitability and returns on this platform, and we actioned the five priorities that are on this slide. So a year later, how have we done? My answer is partial delivery. We have driven sustainable growth across the world.

We have progressed our profit recovery plan in Continental Europe, but I must acknowledge that at a 2.1% margin level and with the scale of the necessary balance sheet reset that Geert just described, it leaves us short of the expectations that we had at the start of the year. We rapidly actioned a GBP 30 million overhead savings program in the second half, and we’ve built returns on the recent investments while also tightening levels of new capital expenditure in the year, and taken together, these initiatives strengthened our operating and free cash flows and enabled us to initiate the GBP 100 million share buyback program in October, which was an aspiration we had when we gave the presentation this time last year.

Finally, we set out to highlight the value of our investment in India through the successful IPO of TFS on the 14th of July and its subsequent strong momentum, both in trading terms and as a listed business. So to dig into our progress against this plan, I’m now going to describe the operational, financial, and strategic progress in our four regions. Let’s start with America. We’re building a great business there. However, after a period of significant contract wins and complementary M&A activity to gain access to multiple new airports, indeed stepping up from 37 airports three years ago to almost 60 today, this year we focused on extending our restaurant footprint within the airports that we now serve. Particular examples include materially stepping up our presence in JFK at Terminals 5 and 6 and at Denver Airport, these being two of the busiest airports in the country.

From March of this year, as parts of the U.S. airport network experienced lower passenger numbers, we focused firmly on driving initiatives to sustainably step up our like-for-like sales, with initiatives such as Sunday trading effectiveness, whereby senior management have reset their personal weekly schedules to be present more often in airports during this peak trading day, menu optimization, technology and ordering systems, and more consistent merchandising across the business. Encouragingly, we are now seeing the impact of these initiatives with a marked step up in October and November like-for-like sales growth relative to Q4, in other words, moving from minus 2% to plus 2% as we transitioned into this quarter, despite lower passenger numbers during the recent government shutdown.

Throughout, we’ve had a concurrent focus on efficiency and productivity, from menu optimization to improve already SSP-leading levels of gross profit, to automated kitchen equipment to reduce staffing levels, to more consistent use of technology and automation to drive down costs and waste. In 2025, we delivered top-line growth in America of 8% at constant rates, as well as building operating profit margin to just over 11% there this year, by far the strongest level of margin ever delivered by the SSP North American business. As you know, we had work to do to put our home market in the U.K. onto a strong path. Simply put, our U.K. business was in a poor place three years ago. In response, we completely reset our team, our culture, and our client store and customer propositions.

We have found a sustainable sweet spot to deliver better propositions for customers and clients while at the same time sustainably improving our financial performance. Our teams have relished this new approach. What do I mean by a sustainable sweet spot? Strengthening our M&S estate is a big part of it. This year, we refurbished a further 15% of our M&S retail estate, with these programs generating strong double-digit sales uplifts each time we do them. This trading momentum there enabled us to work our way through the disruption caused by the M&S cyber attack in half two, and more broadly, we stepped up our propositions and built market share in the UK regional air channel with renewals, extensions, and wins in Newcastle, in Birmingham, in Liverpool, in Belfast, in London City, if you’d allow me to characterize that as a regional airport, and in Bournemouth, all on long tenures.

Importantly, Kari and the U.K. team have also gone hard after overhead improvement and cost efficiency through the creation and deployment of our best-in-SSP workforce management scheduling tool, through detailed work on menu optimization, especially in our own brand estate, and through the full participation in the overhead reduction program that I’ll describe in a few minutes. These efficiency programs helped us deliver a good step up in profit and operating margin to 8.4% alongside the strong like-for-like sales, and we’re continuing to build on that. In Asia and the Middle East, regions that have some of the fastest-growing airport infrastructure in the world, we’re investing to build scale within our chosen markets to enhance returns on our now maturing level of recent investment. With our acquisition of ARE in Australia in the spring of 2024, we trebled the size of our business there and became the clear market leader.

The Australian portfolio has come together very well with our integration on track in all areas. Indeed, we’re not only integrating the two businesses effectively, but we’re exciting customers, and we drove like-for-like growth in the year of 11%. In Indonesia, we’re building scale and profitability fully in line with our acquisition case, and in Malaysia, which we entered organically in late 2022, we have doubled the number of units in two years and now have a business there that is already nicely profitable. In India, our second largest market in the region in sales terms, and where we hold a just over 50% share in the now listed Travel Food Services, we’re driving profitable like-for-like growth.

We had an important contract win there in September at the eighth busiest airport in India, Cochin, and we’re now also scaling up new operations in TFS’s largest joint venture airports in Delhi, Noida, and Navi Mumbai. We also continue to strengthen our regional lounge proposition, with an important milestone being the deployment of our own lounge aggregation technology system, what we call EATS, across our Indian lounges in July. This program allows us to capture a materially greater share of margin from credit card and loyalty card lounge users there. The margin profile of our Asia and Middle Eastern business has remained strong as we’ve continued to expand. So to be clear, the change in year-on-year margin that you see on this slide entirely reflects the deconsolidation effects in India that Herat described earlier, with profit moving from the EBIT line to the associates line.

So moving now to our fourth region, Continental Europe. Building profitability from the unacceptably low levels in this region is of utmost priority to us. I’ve invited Satya Menard, the CEO of Continental Europe since October of last year, to join us today to give a deeper analysis of the region, to explain what we’ve achieved to date, and to describe our plans to accelerate progress from here. If you’d allow me, Satya is an experienced F&B operator, a strong leader, deeply knowledgeable in several of these specific markets, and also a great colleague. Satya, over to you. Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, Patrick. Good morning. As Patrick said, I joined 13 months ago to lead Continental Europe, and I have a long track record in food, hospitality, and catering.

Before joining SSP, I had three years at JDE Peet’s, the world leader in coffee, and before that, I spent more than 20 years at Sodexo, also a global leader in catering services. Let me start by giving you a quick overview of the SSP business in Continental Europe, which includes 15 countries across the five blue clusters on the left on the slide. Next to each cluster, you can see the channels where we operate: light blue for rail, green for air, and brown for motorway services. Air, which is SSP’s forte, represents two-thirds of the region revenue and delivers mid-single-digit EBIT margin. Rail and motorways make up the remaining third, with margins well below acceptable levels. Patrick was fully transparent about the challenges before I joined. I was, and I am still very motivated by the opportunity, but the issues prove deeper and more structural.

Continental Europe is a very contrasted region. Spain, Norway, and many countries already contribute well. Others are improving. But clearly, France and Germany remain very challenging. Even if it is two different stories, they share too many loss-making units, several structurally unprofitable contracts, and flawed processes. This is particularly true in rail, which, unlike any other country, accounts for more than half of their revenue. This morning, I will share with you how the swift actions that we’ve taken in 2025, complemented by actions which are already in flight for 2026, firmly position us to deliver at least 3% of EBIT margin and over 5% over the medium term. Let me start by sharing with you the turnaround that started in 2025, and it is built on five pillars.

From my long experience in low-margin, decentralized concession models, two fundamentals must be in place to create sustainable value and good returns, and they are the first two pillars of this plan. First, you need a contract structure that enables you to generate the returns from your investments, and second, you need a very strong leadership close to your operations, while both were missing in France and in Germany. On contracts, each country had too many legacy agreements with uneconomic rent structures, so we have engaged into a proactive renegotiation campaign, either to fix the performance or to exit. Out of the top 20 loss-making units in France, 15 have already been renegotiated, and for Germany, the number is 14. These will generate over £4 million of positive EBIT impact over the next two years, and the work continues for the rest of the contracts.

Each of those two countries also had one so structurally negative contract that fixing it was an absolute priority of the turnaround plan. In France, I’m talking about the contract of a major train station in which we entered in 2018. We are just finalizing now a restructuring which will enable us to halve our losses in 2026 and reach breakeven in 2028. These negotiations alone will improve our EBIT by more than GBP 3 million in 2026. In Germany, as Patrick already said in the past, by far the most negative contract is the one with Tank & Rast in the motorway channel, and it is here the fourth pillar of our plan. The correct decision to exit was taken before I arrived in 2024, but the execution proved slow, especially at the beginning of 2025.

We managed to accelerate it just before the summer, and now, by the end of last month, just this month of November, we had already exited 87 of the 115 sites included in this contract. Let me come back to the list of the pillars by order. The second pillar is on leadership. Except in Spain, significant renewal was required, and I acted quickly to refresh senior teams in early 2025. Yet in France, the situation demanded urgent and deep action. Early spring, I stepped in as interim CEO, replaced four of the top six leaders, and engaged Alvarez & Marsal to design a detailed recovery plan. I’m happy to share with you today that we now have a new, highly engaged MD that started six weeks ago and who is now supported by a much stronger team. The third pillar is about cost.

We, of course, acted quickly on the biggest costs which are in our units. I’m talking about labor and COGS. But we also took actions to reduce structural overhead costs. These had a limited impact in 2025, but will deliver over GBP five million of savings in 2026. As shown by the size of the green slice in the pies on the right, most of the actions had a limited impact in 2025 EBIT, but it will accelerate in 2026, and there is a further upside also thereafter. So while the issues proved too entrenched to achieve 3% EBIT in 2025, we are now clearly firmly positioned to deliver at least 3% in 2026. Let’s look ahead now, and let me take you to the additional actions that we are adding in 2026, and they are built on the same five pillars.

About contracts that enable us to drive returns. Well, the negotiations will be concluded by the end of H1 2026, with margins benefit that will wait into H2 of 2026 and will continue in 2027. Regarding the second item on leadership and structure, I would say that after a necessary high turnover in 2025, 2026 will be about stabilizing the teams, continuous improvements, and strengthening our client relationships. But we have many new initiatives to continue to further optimize our structure, and they are already in motion. Probably the most significant change will be the merger of two HQs in France, and this initiative was just launched last week. Again, it will have a limited impact this year, but it will generate more than GBP 1 million of extra savings as of 2027. Cost discipline.

We will continue to tighten our control in units, our improvement of our processes, and in our tools, with a special focus, of course, in France and Germany. In France alone, operational optimization will deliver over 200 basis points of EBIT margin improvement over the next three to four years. Regarding the MSA exit in Germany, the final units will be transferred by the end of 2026, but interestingly, we have kept the most profitable units for the end. So we will manage to divide the losses in 2026 by five, or we will have just over £1 million of losses this year compared to £5 million last year. Sales growth is our last pillar, and it will gain traction in 2026 as we need to adapt to a more cautious economic environment. So we are enhancing digital engagement, accelerating promotions, and value-led pricing in order to drive like-for-like growth.

We also plan to rebrand 400 German Red Convenience Stores as our Point brand, and this will enable us to have stronger conversion and increase the basket size. Overall, as we add positive impact of 2026 initiatives to the full impact of the initiatives that we have already executed in 2025, we can really be confident that we will reach at least 3% of EBIT margin in 2026. Let me show you the financial impact of this plan on a graph. On the left part of this chart, you can see the impact of the actions taken in 2025 and also underway in 2026 that I’ve just described, and you see how they take us to at least 3% of EBIT margin this year. Each step is shown between the two first brown bars on the left.

You can recognize the initiatives that I mentioned, like renegotiating our contracts, controlling our costs, or exiting the MSA. But the improvement of our EBIT does not stop there. Many of the initiatives launched in 2025 and in 2026 build further margin improvement and momentum into 2027 and beyond. And we will continue to add new actions and new levers in 2027, in 2028, and beyond. Contract optimization and negotiations will remain a core engine of value creation by generating stronger returns both on renewals and on new wins. Optimizing unique costs and efficiencies is a multi-year journey. Labor, costs, COGS, and operating processes will continue to drive structural improvements. A growing factor will be our ability to capture more spend from a value-conscious European traveler, including in airside environments where impulse conversion remains a significant upside.

So to conclude, if I look back on my first year, three points are very clear to me. First, I’m very pleased to be leading this region. It has strong fundamentals, and I’m excited to lead the unleashing of its potential. The issues were more severe than expected, but we now have a clear plan, the right leadership, and we have the full group support, including Patrick and Geert here. Finally, execution is well underway and will position us to deliver 3% of EBIT in 2026 at least and over 5% in the medium term thereafter. Thank you. Handing back to you, Patrick. Thanks. Okay. Our third priority in building returns was driving efficiencies across our cost base. We flagged at the half-year our concerns about the macro and geopolitical environment and the risks that that created to travel levels across the world.

We were right to be concerned, and we saw that play out in a reduction in our like-for-like growth levels from 5% at half one to 3% at half two, with quarter four at 2%. So cost efficiency needs to play a stronger role in underpinning SSP’s profit growth in this more uncertain and volatile external backdrop. So in 2025, alongside our embedded programs of operating cost reduction, what we refer to as our value creation plans that focus on optimizing labor costs and reducing our cost of goods to drive up gross profit, we implemented two important incremental initiatives. First, in the second half of the year, we rapidly delivered a project to simplify and scale back support costs across the group. This effort streamlined our corporate and regional offices by removing more than 300 roles across our corporate and regional support teams.

We’ve delivered GBP 30 million in annualized savings, of which GBP five million was delivered in FY25, with the balance fully locked in for delivery this year. Second, we are tackling above-market rents at market, channel, airport, and station level. Our philosophy is that every contract is a relationship, a commercial partnership that must work economically for both parties. As you know, I have more than two decades of direct experience of building and leading contracts, relationships, and partnerships of this type. Satya has taken you through some examples of what we have done already or are now doing with clients in Europe. But across the rest of the group, this mindset has led to our exit from subscale businesses in Italy and Bermuda.

but in addition, we have reset, renegotiated, and in some cases, scaled up, actually, contracts to deliver improved returns in the stations and airports that you see on this slide. Notable examples include Copenhagen, the full Netherlands rail network, Keflavik in Iceland, and our ongoing reset in Jeddah. Throughout, we’re doing this on a front-footed, client-facing, and at times creative manner, and collaboratively where possible. but we’re doing this firmly, and we’re embedding this mindset and this approach in how we work with clients from here. Moving then to our fourth priority, accelerating the return on our recent investments and generating more cash. A key part of accelerating returns has been delivering returns from the five acquisitions that we made in 2023 and 2024, which between them now generate annualized revenues of over 225 million and have added 130 new units to our group.

Relative to the individual acquisition cases, we’re pleased to report that for each of them, the revenue, synergies, profit, and most importantly, on the returns line, were at or above where we expected to be, and indeed, across the five, all are strongly profitable now, and we expect to deliver a combined IRR of approximately 20% on these investments. To drive our teams to build returns on our capital base, last year, we introduced return on capital employed as a key performance indicator for the first time at SSP. The measure adjusts both the numerator and the denominator for joint venture and minority interests. On this basis, our return on capital employed in FY25 rose to 18.7% from the 17.7% that we reported last year.

Importantly, the result in FY25 adds back to the denominator the impairments and asset write-offs that Hertz spoke about earlier, in fact, bringing the Return on Capital Employed back to 18.7% from something on the face of the P&L would have been above 20%. We will deliver further progression on this Return on Capital Employed metric through strengthening operational performance, driving higher returns on our 2025 investments, the working capital improvements that Hertz referenced earlier, and through further tightening capital investment in 2026. Now, let me just finish by talking about how this plan comes together in a plan to deliver value for shareholders and in our outlook for 2026. I set out at the beginning of this presentation a focused operational agenda to deliver profit, cash, and returns. It’s imperative that our executive team and the wider business have incentives that align fully with these objectives.

So from this year, we’re updating our annual bonus plan. Our plan sharpens the focus on financial delivery, with performance being assessed on three metrics: operating profit, net of minority interests and associates, earnings per share, and with a newly introduced component of free cash flow. In addition, for FY26, 100% of the reward for executive directors will be determined by financial delivery. This annual bonus plan will complement the long-term incentive plan we introduced last year that was based on earnings per share, return on capital employed, and TSR. The targets are stretching, and for reference, our executive directors will actually receive no bonus for financial performance in FY25, reflecting the targets that were set for us by the board last year. We announced last month that Mike Clasper has decided to step down as our Chair following next year’s AGM, a year earlier than planned.

During the period of transition from here, the board has formed the Focus 26 review committee, which will provide appropriate oversight, support, and challenge through this period. Ultimately, though, these plans will be delivered by the 50,000 colleagues that work for SSP across the world, and our executive team have worked extensively to fully align our regional, our functional, and our in-market teams behind this plan. We’re confident that these actions will ensure delivery of the plan, and as we said earlier, we’re off to a good start. Our board is committed to pursuing all initiatives that can create value for our shareholders. With support from our external advisors, we have considered and explored a wide set of such options. But for now, let me return to the two additional levers that I set out at the beginning of this presentation.

The first is a review of our Continental European rail business. As Satya set out earlier, we are not delivering adequate returns on our rail business in Continental Europe. There are a range of drivers for this, including the slow post-COVID recovery in passenger numbers, changing passenger profiles, a marked increase in F&B space and competition across the rail network, and reduced consumer spending levels in several of these markets. As Satya set out, we have an operational plan to build margin in Europe to 5%, but that’s not enough. We actually need to do more to build the margin levels across our European business beyond the 5% level that we set out earlier.

Given the level of issues in this channel and the necessity to assess all options objectively and at pace, we’ve appointed an external advisor, Alvarez & Marsal, to support us in the review of this part of our business. The review has a wide-ranging scope of potential options, and we’ll provide you with an update on the progress of this review no later than at our interim results in May. The second lever is the consideration of options to fulfill the TFS free-float obligation. In July, we successfully listed our Indian subsidiary, Travel Food Services, on the Indian Stock Exchange. We own 50% of TFS, and since listing, the equity value of TFS has increased by approximately 20%. At the point of IPO, our partners and co-promoters, K Hospitality, sold down 13.8% of their shareholding.

Indian listing rules require a minimum free float of 25% within three years of listing. We believe in the potential of India’s food travel market, the strength of TFS’s market position and economic model, and importantly, in the value of having a strong and balanced ongoing partnership between SSP and K Hospitality. So as we look forward, and in partnership with K Hospitality, the board will explore options to realize value for SSP shareholders in line with the delivery of the TFS free-float requirement. To finish then, I am crystal clear on the locked-in structural growth features of SSP, the potential for us to build stronger returns from here, and the pivot to cash generation that we’ve made in our economic model.

But I recognize too that there is more that we must do this year to deliver the profits, the cash flows, and the returns that SSP is capable of. Our shareholders have been patient, but that patience is not infinite. I hope that you sense this urgency in us too. We’re fully focused on delivery with the right team, and we’re executing against it at pace. FY26 has started well. So bringing this together, let me be specific then on our FY26 guidance. That guidance is for earnings per share at the upper end of the guidance range of 12.9-13.9 that we gave in October, and this guidance excludes the positive impact of the in-flight buyback program.

We’re guiding for an increase in free cash flow to more than GBP 100 million, and we’re expecting to further build our return on capital employed towards the 20% level from the 18.7% that we delivered in FY25. So thank you for listening to us, and with that, Geert, Satya, and I will be delighted to take your questions. Great. Sam, have you got the mics? Yeah, let’s start with Fintan and at the very front here. Thanks very much. Good morning. Fintan Ryan here from Goodbody. Three questions for me, please. Firstly, could you give us the strong like-for-like performance year to date? Could you break that down in terms of what’s volume, what’s pricing, and in particular, the UK performance seems to be continuing an exceptional growth, exceptional incremental growth on 25. So just to understand what are the key drivers behind that.

Secondly, could you give us a sense of what you’re building in for assumptions around food and bev and sort of labor cost inflation for FY26? And if there’s any sort of major differences between the regions? And then finally, so I do appreciate the ongoing review of the continental European rail business, but could you give a sense of what we should be factoring in for maybe exceptional costs and cash costs at this point in time for FY26? So appreciate all the moving parts around the European operations. Thanks, Fintan. Let me deal with the first two here and then send that to you. So let me caveat all of this, Fintan, by saying, without being too clichéd, one swallow doesn’t make a summer here, right? And so two good months don’t yet make a full year, but you still prefer to have them, right?

and so we’ve gone from, on a like-for-like basis, we’ve gone from 2% in Q4 at the group level to 4% in October and November. All four of our regions have progressed like-for-like in the year. The two most notable improvements are North America, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East. but you asked the question about the UK. The UK had the strongest performance of the mature markets through the summer, and again, that stepped up, and so our like-for-like performance in the UK in these two months is 7%. There are not many consumer businesses in the UK that have like-for-like performance of 7% at the moment. Most of that change is volume.

There is some price recovery and inflation recovery, but the elevated level of cost of goods inflation that we would have seen in some of the early years of my tenure in SSP has moderated to more normal levels now, and we did see, as everyone knows, a kind of something of a structural reset in labor rates in many markets post-COVID, and again, the progression from there is more modest, so I think you can assume that most of that is volume as you go through that with a necessary level of more modest inflation recovery in that. As we look forward, we’re not seeing meaningfully different levels of inflation between markets, and we have market-by-market plans on price recovery to deal with that and all the initiatives that we have in flight in terms of management of labor costs as well.

And so if I just maybe give one thought which would be on the minds of some of you here, our planning assumptions for labor rates in the UK were entirely consistent with the budget announcements in relation to the national living wage, and that’s what we’ve been planning for as we set out for the start of the year. So we’ll work to recover that with our existing plan. Here, you might want to just talk about Europe and restructuring? Yes. Here’s what I would say to that is last year, so FY25’s exceptional charge was exceptionally high, as you saw, and we’ve fully disclosed the reasons why. As we think through FY26 and as we renegotiate contracts, that’s a normal part of what we see in our industry is if you renegotiate contracts, there may be a one-off cost associated with that.

We’ll have to flush that through as we renegotiate these deals. What I can say today is that by no means will we be at the level that we had last year. For the first reason, or the most important reason, is that most of those exceptions were impairments related to a complete reset of the balance sheet in the areas that are under close scrutiny for us. So I think going forward, you’ll probably see a more normalized level of renegotiating contracts that will lead to a level of one-off that is more, I would say, akin to what you’ve seen in the past, but not FY25. So we’ll communicate those to you as we flush those contracts through and as we negotiate them. And just to be clear, the cash guidance, free cash guidance includes the cash contribution for any exceptionals?

At this point, we’re not including any exceptionals in that. We’ll flush that through as we go through every single contract that we’re renegotiating. Right. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. It’s Manjari Dhar, RBC. Just two questions from me, please. First, questions on North America. You’ve seen some good margin gains there over the last few years. I was just wondering if you can give some color on what you think the sort of right level of margin for that business could be in the medium term. And then secondly, just on working capital, I think you gave some color on potential opportunities in your presentation. I was just wondering, how should we be thinking about working capital this year in context of quite a good inflow in fiscal 2025? Thank you. Here, do you want to start with the second question? I’ll come back in in North America.

Yeah, sure. On the working capital, you saw that I referenced that we had a good inflow in FY25. What I would like to say to that is that for FY26, what we’re looking at is, I would say, more structural improvements in working capital that are really going to the core of what our working capital is composed of, inventory levels that are reflective of standard operating procedures that are, again, meticulously followed. Number two, a solid review of our payment frequency and payment timing. As you can imagine, in a business like ours, our rent is an extremely important part of our P&L, as you can see in the income statement, and we’re going to do a thorough review of the opportunities that we have in terms of rent payments. Structures are very different country by country.

The last element is a review of our accounts payable terms, so looking at our payment terms. So while I do not believe that the inflow from working capital is going to be as important as we had in FY25, there’s still plenty of opportunity for us to go after. Just as a reminder, the working capital element of free cash flow is only one part of the free cash flow target that we set for ourselves. I think the efforts in cash generation are equally split between making sure that our EBITDA is higher than what we had in FY25, and that speaks to minding the details of our business every day, every time of day in every unit. Second is lower capital. Third would be lower exceptionals than what we had in FY25.

Fourth would be a stronger focus on cash and therefore improvements coming from working capital. Manjari, let me just pick up your question on North America. So if you take the last three or four years, we’ve had a very nice balance of good sales progression and good margin progression in America. I think we’ve reached a level of maturity in terms of the kind of the scale of the step-up that we’ve had in margins in America. I would expect us, and we are planning for modest ongoing margin progression in America on the back of the sort of operating leverage effects of the extra scale that we’ve got in the business. But if we can continue in 11% plus EBIT margin in this kind of business, I think that would actually be quite strong.

And what you’ve really seen us highlight is pushing very hard to put through a set of initiatives to reestablish good like-for-like sales momentum in America. That will help cash profit materially, and it also creates the operating leverage effect on margin too. So that’s what we’ll be working on. But I think we’re at a kind of mature-ish level of margin in America in contrast to some of the parts of the group that you heard us talk about earlier. Yeah. Morning. It’s Harry Gowers from J.P. Morgan. First question, just on Europe. I mean, obviously, you won’t have an answer yet, but in your mind, what are the kind of realistic range of options with the strategic review for the European rail business?

And then, second question, just on APAC, the margins, I think from memory, are quite a lot higher than they were historically, and there’s obviously been a few moving parts on acquisitions and the deconsolidation. So, what’s the run rate for margins from here? Can they grow from that? I think it was 13% on the slides. And then, just going back on the third question, just going back on the working capital, have you entered into some kind of supply chain financing or factoring facility during the year? Is that one of the components? And then, maybe just some more details on that, the size of the facility and ongoing benefit from that in particular going forward. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Do you want to finish off the working capital topic? Sure. And then Satya and I’ll do the other two. Yes.

As we said in the presentation, and I think we also mentioned it during the trading update, we entered into a supply chain finance facility throughout the year. I actually think to a certain extent it already existed at the beginning of the year, but we didn’t use it that much. We still have more benefit to go, or we still have room in that facility for the rest of the year, but not as much as what we used in FY25. Hence, my statement on the working capital inflow is likely going to be lower than the boost that we got in FY25, but it will be based on a more structural review, benchmarking exercise, and focusing on all three levers, inventory, receivables, and payables at the same time. Got it.

Let me just make a couple of points about the context for the review, and then you can maybe give some sense of the answer. I mean, the first thing I’d say, Harry, is the context of this is really important, right? Which is we now have an operating plan that’s underpinned by specific actions of the benefit of which we can already see, which gets us to the 3% in 2026 and has us on track to get to the 5% in the medium term, right? And that’s the core baseline against which everything I’m going to say should be viewed, right? And that’s the core of what Satya and the team have built and are delivering against.

When you do a step back from that, assuming the full delivery of that, we still end up with what we end up with as a business as you roll forward is a business where essentially our air channel in Europe is broadly in line with the economics we get in the air channel in other regions, and we’re pulled back to 5% by a lower level of margin from rail in these markets, right? That’s the kind of macro picture of what happens when you do it. So what Satya and I with Mark Rainbow who’s in the room, who’s our strategy director, have decided to do is that’s not good enough.

Let’s have a look at all of the levers that could be open to us to do better than that in European rail because anything that we do in that would be additive to the plan to get to the 5% margin. Now, I think you have to let us do the work, right? And getting into too much speculation around what might or might not happen in it is probably unhelpful. But I do want to make one comment, right? Which is the nature of this kind of business, unlike many others, doesn’t lend itself to easy divestment options of things, right? And so a lot of the focus on this work is incremental improvements that we can do, recognizing that there may be things around the edges that we’ll look at in terms of ownership and participation in markets. But I don’t want to add anything else.

No, I think that’s exactly in line with what we’ve been doing. So there are many options on the table. We are partially exiting some parts of some contracts, some businesses, renegotiating contract structures, and continue to improve our operations and our ability to drive sales. So all the options are on the table to help us push further and to go further than the current plan that takes us to 5%. But as Patrick said, we want to go further. Yeah. And let me take your, Harry, your point on Asia-Pacific margins. So start with a high-level point. These margins in aggregate are higher. Sorry, these markets in aggregate are high margin, right? So India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, the structure of how the different lines of the P&L give you structurally higher margins than you get in mature markets when you roll everything through.

The most material of those is India, right? But it’s getting more and more standalone because of its listed status. And as we’re here to explain, and I wanted to add that we are seeing a recut of what’s in EBIT versus what’s in associates and what that means for minorities for TFS on a standalone basis. And Varun and Vikas and the team are updating the Indian market on that all the time, consistent with a very exciting and locked-in progression of net income in India. So you will see the reported EBIT line for Asia-Pacific move around a little bit because of the evolution of the India business on a standalone basis. But there’s nothing to worry about in that because the business is actually really, really strong. It’s just a kind of categorization issue, if I could describe it. That leaves you with two things then.

The profile of and growth rate of some of these very high-margin businesses, Egypt, Indonesia, which we recently entered, and the strengthening Malaysia business. All of that is additive to margin. The second thing, which I’m probably most encouraged about, is in the most mature market that we trade in that part of the world, which is Australia. The performance on everything has been really, really good, including margin progression. It’s not a business that has a sort of prospective 15%-20% margin in it because of the way in which the economic model plays out there. You should take from that that we made a strategic pivot three years ago to move away from China and towards Southeast Asia to scale in the market, several of which I’ve referenced. We’re pretty pleased with how it’s going, but we got to stay on it.

So, yeah. Anna, do you want to go next? Sorry, Tim, you’ve got the microphone, so you jump. Thank you. Tim Barrett from Deutsche Numis. Two things, please. The first one, just wanted to push you a bit on TFS and your language there. Can you help us understand when the IPO was launched? What was plan A to get to 25% free float? Was it K Hospitality only? And I guess also any scenario where you wouldn’t sell a single share within the next two, two and a half years. And then second question, sorry, boring but topical, U.K. business rates. Getting a lot of questions on that. How do they work? Are they wrapped into airport and rail contracts, or is there some exposure that you could update us on? Thank you. Yeah. We’ve already done, let’s deal with the latter first because it’s a simpler answer.

So our team have looked at this hard in the context of the size of our estate and the rents thresholds for the different units that we’ve got. Simple answer is no impact net, right? The TFS, I’m going to be very disciplined in the answer that I give here, Tim, because what we’ve said in the statement is what we want to say. Now, let me roll back to basically this day a year ago, right? The way in which IPOs happen in India is they have this somewhat unusual process where you publish a draft Red Herring Prospectus a long time out from delivering, getting to an IPO. And the doing of that is a public document unlike in other markets, right? And of course, at the point at which you’re doing that, you don’t have certainty on loads of things, right?

Including whether an IPO will happen, at what level, and so forth. But you do have a very positive intent to want to do it. As we went into that process, we went into that with a continuation of a strong intent that we had, previous regime to me who made this investment. We had made a brilliant investment, which was working extremely well in India over a period of years. And we didn’t want to give up on that, right? We wanted to have this strong partnership in which we had control and in which we could benefit from the growth and returns that the Indian business was building year after year, month after month. The way that manifested itself was a desire for us to say, we are going to hold our ownership and control position in SSP in TFS as we go forward.

That’s what we did. We then executed that the whole way through by actually buying 1% incremental shares so that we could continue to be in control and that that would give us the ability also to consolidate the benefits and growth of the business. That’s the 1% stake that we bought just before the IPO. The agreement that we have entitles us to require that the incremental equity to get to the free float does not come from us, right? That’s the agreement that we have. What we’re saying today is that we will review how we will execute that, consistent with the points that I’ve made, but also recognizing that there is a free float requirement of 25% and there is a time period in which that has to happen. We’ve given particular prominence to this for reasons that you can think about.

That bluntly is all that we’re going to say about it today. Yeah. So can we go to Anna next, actually? Thank you very much. Three questions also, please. Anna, would you just introduce yourself and be on the call? Sorry, Anna Barnfather from Panmure Liberum. Three questions, please. First one, just on France and Germany rail, I wondered if you could tell me what the sort of average length of the contracts remaining and where you are on the renewal cycle, or maybe that’s not relevant because you’re renegotiating them all anyway. Secondly, you mentioned sort of rebranding convenience retail, and I would just be interested in your thoughts more widely about the opportunities or not generally for convenience retail.

And then the last question is, I think, when you were talking about minority interests, you mentioned that North America minority interests were going to decline because of changes in structure. And I just wondered if you could expand on that or maybe I’ve misunderstood. Thank you. Yeah. Let me very quickly deal with a small part of two and three, and then I’m going to let Satya do most of it. So Satya is going to talk about convenience retail in Europe. Just to note what we said earlier, which is we have a really strong retail business, a large portion of which is plane to convenience in the UK. The biggest part of that is M&S. It’s complemented by what we’re doing with these 40 or so Café Local stores that we have in regional rail.

That part of our business is trading very well, and it’s very complementary to what we do in the UK. On minority interest, as you look forward, cutting through it, Anna, there’s two effects. The size of the minority interest charge going forward from India will reduce, and the size of the minority interest charge in America will, in relative to profitability, will also reduce somewhat. And that’s largely a feature of how we anticipate new contracts being put in place and the relative size of the joint venture participation in those new contracts as we renew things and build them in. So there would be the two effects. But Satya, do you want to talk about both? Yeah. So first, on the contract length in France and in Germany, I would say just quickly two things. First of all, the size of the contract varies a lot.

It can be multiple units or multiple restaurants in one given train station or as little as one single unit. And the length goes from five to 10 years. So there’s a broad variety of contract situations. But as you said, anyway, we renegotiate sometimes before the end of the term. So the end of the contract is not necessarily as important as it could have been in the past, I would say. Regarding the rebranding convenience, for sure, it’s a very interesting opportunity because we see the share of food and beverage within the convenience space increasing and as an interesting opportunity. And definitely, it’s an opportunity in rail as well. And that’s why we have negotiated this rebranding of those 40 units in Germany, and we will use it as an experiment to be able to see how we can capture these sales. Yeah, the back.

I’m going to go to Luca first, Eric, then I will come to you, yeah? Thank you. Luca from Berenberg. So I just want to ask two questions if I can. So on North America, you in the past mentioned that you saw some headwinds from cross-border Canadian and international passengers. So I just wanted to ask if you expect those to remain in FY26 or if that’s expected to improve. And then just number two, so on current trading, I was wondering what the exit rate was and if there was any big difference from the rate you reported and if you saw an acceleration over the eight-week period. Thank you. Yeah, trying to deal with them very quickly. On the second, I mean, the like-for-like at the group level went from +2% to +4%.

I think your question might well have been on America, where we went from -2% to +2%, inclusive of the effects of North America, would include Canada. On North America, I mean, we don’t have a crystal ball for all the things that may or may not happen in America and all the public policy pronouncements that might or might not happen and what that might mean for travel. We were pretty encouraged, though, by the fact that the core domestic travel within the U.S. was pretty robust, regardless of all of the noise that we saw through the year. We definitely did get impacted in the second half by international travel into America and by trans-border travel from Canada into America. I’m sitting next to a Canadian here, if I could say.

I mean, I think the two things that we observe as it relates to 26 numbers, though, are one, there is some evidence of it normalizing. And secondly, it will make for we’ll be comping against last year’s numbers as we transition into the second half as well. And both of those, I think, would be grounds for encouragement in terms of how we see like-for-like in America. But Jonah, add anything? No, I think that’s factually true, yeah. Okay. Cool. Sorry, Eric. Eric, you may have to explain who you are to people here. That’s fine. I can do that. Thank you, Patrick, and thank you for the presentation today, especially the detail on Europe. It’s very helpful. So Eric Wolf, Gumshoe Capital. I just had one question. Is your strategic review limited to the restructuring of the Europe rail business and the TFS stake and options there?

Are you also exploring a broader way of options to create shareholder value than what you’ve already announced today? Yeah. Well, let me try to deal with that as comprehensively and clearly as I can. The statement and our presentation very deliberately flagged the fact that over the course of the last four or five months, our board embraced, considered, and explored a wide variety of options around how we could build value for shareholders. And we remain open to things that can build value for shareholders. That is our job, right? But we’ve got to take a point-in-time assessment for where we are, and we’ve landed in the plan that we’ve shared today with the specific elements that we’ve shared today.

Now, I’m well aware, and many of the people in the room are well aware, that there has been speculation floated around whether or not this business is open to approaches of different kinds that could result in change of ownership. And I just make two points here. One, you’d expect me to say, and one, I’m going to go a bit further than you might expect me to say. So the point I’d expect to say is our board is very conscious of its responsibilities in this regard. We have a base plan that we think has a value attached to it. And anything that is a plan that challenges that, we would, of course, have to consider, right? And I would say I’ve said that to you before.

The second thing, very specifically, though, is, and we wouldn’t normally be drawn on this, is we are not in possession of any approach, just not, right? So it’s a hypothetical discussion because, and I’m happy to confirm that we’re not. And then the last thing I would say here is that as part of the option set that we described in the statement and that I went through earlier here, you can assume that our board has educated itself on what the appetite might or might not be for an alternative strategy and what that might or might not mean for the value that’s available to us. And so having done all of that, we’ve landed on the plan that we’ve shared today. And this is specifically what we are doing.

If stuff unfolds as we go forward, you can take it that we’ll be responsible custodians of shareholders’ money, and we’ll act accordingly. Thank you. Sorry, can we get a microphone for Greg here? I think just given the time, we’re going to finish with Greg’s question, okay? Last as always, yeah, Greg Johnson at Shore Capital. Just a couple of questions. Firstly, I might not be able to sort of split it out, but what is the carrying value of European rail now post write-downs? And secondly, just thinking of sort of the sort of more turbulent macro backdrop, certainly what we’ve seen in the U.S., how is the tendering environment holding up? Any signs of sort of easing on price there? Yeah, let me deal with the second question, and I’ll naturally defer to the man on my left to think about the first.

The tendering environment, is your question specifically on America there, Greg, or is it more broadly? Well, globally, generally, but certainly thinking about the U.S. in particular. Okay, well, let me do quickly globally. So one of the things that we expected, but we’ve also learned here, is that the level of tendering, particularly around renewals, has eased off a lot relative to what we would have seen in 2022, 2023, and 2024, right? And that’s because you had this catch-up period coming out of COVID where you weren’t just doing the kind of one-in-ten-year renewal. You were also doing the renewals that didn’t happen in 2020 and 2021. And so that led to this elevated level of renewal activity, which also led to the elevated level of capital deployment for us and for other people in the industry. And so you’ve really seen a normalization here.

The £200 million capital number that Geert and I have spoken about is the £212 this year is reflective of an industry that’s normalizing in terms of renewal levels around this sort of level, just to say that. Now, the second thing is I would characterize that as a general trend across the world, and there are pockets of difference, no question. Tenders are coming out where the length of contract is longer. And the more capital you choose to put into America, the more that effect actually goes up as you weight it across our overall contract set because contract lengths are even longer there, right? That’s what we’re thinking about when we see renewal opportunities or what we would call net gains opportunities, those two things.

I think you’ll find it’s a cliché to say every market is different, but some markets place a much greater premium on pure commercial rent offers than others. In general, America places less of a focus on pure rent offers and more on other things. And a consequence of that is you end up with an average level of rent in America in the mid- to high-teens versus the rest of the SSP estate, which would be in the mid-20s. And so that’s a point of difference. June. Yeah, here’s what I would say to that, Greg. The short answer is we do not split that by segment or by channel, that value.

But I think, and this is where you’re heading with this question, is that as part of the impairment review and as part of the non-underlying items that we talked about this morning, obviously, our full business in France and Germany and in Continental Europe was part of that review. And so today, with the base plans that we have, we believe that, and that Satya has highlighted, we believe that whatever we have on the balance sheet is supportive of those strategies and actually reflective of the value that we can realize for those assets. Yeah, I think that’s what I would say to that. Okay. Good. Listen, I’m conscious we’ve gone on longer than usual. We deliberately chose, because of the interest in understanding what was happening in Europe, to give ourselves a little bit more time to run through that today.

But thank you, everyone, for bearing with us. And here’s Satya and I are around for any follow-up questions that you might have. But thank you very much.

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