Rotork plc (ROR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Gap] One points of housekeeping. Any unlikely events and the need to evacuate the building, you will hear an alarm and should leave the building by the nearest fire exit. In this room, the nearest fire exit is through the doors at the back please assemble in the main car park, so we can check everybody has left the building. On a small reminder, can you please switch off your mobile phones. Thank you. The Board has put in place a list on -- the audio facility so that those shareholders who were not able to be here today can listen to the proceedings of the Annual General Meeting. Shareholders dialing in will not be counted as being present at the meeting and therefore, will not form part of the quorum, be able to speak or ask questions. Shareholders were given the opportunity to send questions in advance that designated in our address, but no questions were received. I should also like to bring to your attention that this meeting is being recorded. I would now like to introduce Dorothy Thompson, who was appointed to the Board in December last year and sub -- to election later. Dorothy will succeed me as Chair upon the conclusion of this Annual General Meeting. As you may well be aware, I've been the Director of the Rotork for nearly 9 years and Chairman for the last 8 years, and in line with best governance practice, I am not standing for reappointment of CM. Dorothy brings with her extensive experience of leading international industrial and power business, has a deep understanding of the energy transition, which, of course, is a key component of our growth plus strategy. And I wish her all the very best in her new role. Our Chief Executive, Kiet Huynh, will now present a summary of the business highlights for 2022, after which you will have an opportunity to ask questions, both about the business and the resolutions being put forward today. I will now hand over to you.

Thank you, Martin. Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to see you all here today. And then I give you a presentation about Rotork and our new strategy growth class, but before I begin, I thought I'd spend a couple of minutes sharing with my reflections on my first year as CEO. So last year was a very busy and as exciting year. Coming out of the COVID lockdown, it was great to spend time with Rotork colleagues around the world, visit our customers again and also meet our investors and analysts for the first time. In touring our sites around the world, as CEO, it confirmed to me what a first-class engineering company that Rotork is. Our people who are talented, professional and committed really demonstrated their qualities last year, especially in the second half, when we had to step up production to deliver on our full year numbers. In meeting our customers, their feedback was consistent. Rotork has a fantastic brand with market-leading high-quality products. Customers also valued the global coverage that we provide with our site services teams and the level of support that we provide in that area. However, there is still room for improvement. And that is in terms of our on-time deliveries for our products as we recover from the supply chain issues that so many companies faced last year. And then finally, meeting our investors and our analysts, it was clear to me that whilst Rotork has strong margins, cash flows and balance sheet, returning to growth was an imperative going forward for Rotork, hence the launch of our Growth+ strategy, which I would now like to take you through. The Growth+ was built on the foundations of our growth acceleration program and was designed to deliver on our financial ambitions, of mid- to high single-digit revenue growth and mid-20s operating margins over time. Within Growth+, there are three pillars, which we believe are key to driving growth in the future. These are underpinned by our enabling a sustainable future foundations. The first Growth+ pillar is about target segments. This is where we've identified segments and niche markets where we have the right to play and where there is significant opportunities for profitable growth going forward. It's important to say that we won't be stopping business in our other markets. We will continue to sell in those other markets. And we still believe that there is healthy growth there. However, the target segments are the areas where we will really focus our investments to grow the business faster than the base business. Within the middle pillar is customer value. So we want to put the value we provide to our customers at the forefront of everything we do. And therefore, initiatives in this pillar will be around improving the experience the customer feels as they deal with Rotork, so that we deliver a premium service along with our premium products. And the last pillar is innovative products and services. This is the lifeblood of Rotork, and we want to continue the innovation trends, linked to our target segments and linked to the macro trends of electrification, automation and digitalization. So to give you some examples of the target segments in action, I've got three examples here, the first is within methane emissions reduction. So this market is in North America Upstream Oil & Gas, where when they dig for the oil, methane is released. The technology used in that is pneumatic diaphragm valves. So as you dig the methane comes up and they're using that methane to power the pneumatic valves and hence, vent the methane into atmosphere. Methane is 28x more pollutant than carbon dioxide. So with the introduction of the Inflation Reduction Act, many oil companies are now looking to reduce these emissions. And the best way to do that is move from the traditional technology of actuated pneumatic valves, which Rotork does not supply to electric. So moving to the absolute sweet spot of our business. So I think this is a great example of how Rotork is going to grow whilst help our customers reduce their carbon footprint. The second example is within our new decarbonization market. So in this case, carbon capture usage and storage. Last year, we won a big project in Norway called the Northern Lights. It's the biggest open storage carbon capture and usage infrastructure. And Rotork was chosen here for our premium products, as I mentioned. Again, we believe that these new energy markets -- new decarbonization markets are key to driving growth in the future. And the last example is in waste water treatment. This example is here from a project that we won in Singapore. So a lot of companies are now looking to automate and modernize their wastewater treatment plant, but the key in winning this business was the global coverage of our site services and the fact that we could supply local support to our customers in Singapore, which gave him the confidence to award Rotork those projects. So that's how we will start to accelerate our growth within these target segments. Turning to customer value in action. And as a reminder, we want to put the value that we provide to our customers at the forefront of everything we do. And we believe that every single Rotork employee can contribute to this. So two examples that we have here, the first is about using lean techniques that we've applied to two factories within Europe as a pilot to significantly reduce the lead times of those products, and we reduced them from 16 weeks down to 2 weeks. This gives us a competitive advantage, and it also helps our customers to be more responsive with their customers. The second element of this program is reengineering our business processes so we can quite faster. So through these initiatives, we want to be able to provide a premium service to go with our high-quality premium products, and that's whats will give us a competitive advantage going forward. The next pillar is innovative products and services. And as I said, this is the lifeblood of Rotork. In 2022, we continued our innovation, and we launched five new products. One of them was our enhanced intelligent asset management software program. What this can do is, it can receive data from our actuators, and we have designed an automated algorithm. So within seconds, we can produce a health report of that actuator. This really helps our customers understand where to service and how to prioritize their service. So not only is I am a revenue generator in its own right, it allows us to generate more service leads, thus growing our business. So those are examples of our target of our Growth+ pillars in action. The next one I want to do is turn to the market outlook. So going forward, we see good momentum in Oil & Gas, and we continue to see the spends coming through. This is helped by the reopening of China, which will drive global oil and gas demand. You then have the introduction of the Inflation Reduction Act, which will drive emissions reduction, again, moving, we believe, customers from traditional pneumatic to electric actuation. Within CPI, CPI is seeing the benefits of our target segments initiatives in action, and we've generated a lot of business through new decarbonization markets. As well as these, our traditional markets of HVAC and mining are also active and mining in this case is in metal minings connected to lithium battery production, which we believe is a rapidly increasing market. Within Water & Power, there is consistent and spends in terms of infrastructure in the developed world in terms of improving that infrastructure and in the developing world by actually putting the infrastructure in the first place. The opening of China will also help really focus on business activities in that area. Lastly, with the energy security issues, we are also anticipating some refurbishment or power business coming through over the next year. So that's the market outlook. So in summary, 2022 was a good year. We delivered a strong set of results, especially in the second half. We introduced our Growth+ strategy built on the foundations of the Growth Acceleration Programme and designed to deliver on our financial ambitions of mid- to high single-digit revenue growth and mid-20s adjusted operating margins over time. I'll end on the statement that we released this morning. So Q1 was in line with our expectations. Order intake was ahead of mid-teens on a constant currency basis year-on-year, with all divisions contributing to that mid-teen growth. Revenues were up 18% year-on-year on a constant currency basis. And as I've just explained, the outlook for our markets remains positive. So we're now expecting in 2023, adjusted operating profit to be slightly ahead of our earlier expectations. Thank you.

Thank you, Kiet. We will now move to the business of the -- which was set out in the notice of the meeting dated the 23rd of March 2023. You will have noted from my letter in closing the notice of meeting that voting at today's meeting will be conducted by means of a poll in line with best corporate governance practice. This will ensure that the overall result is more democratic and an accurate representation of all shareholders votes as it allows the folks of all participating shareholders to be recorded on a 1 share 1 vote basis. our registrar, Equiniti, has been appointed as scrutineer. We'll be using an electronic voting system to record your votes. Many of you will already be familiar with this system, which enabled the votes of shareholders to be recorded electronically and added to the proxy votes received before the meeting. The system we are using today allows you to vote on all resolutions during the Q&A session. I will let you know shortly before I intend to close the poll. Once the poll has closed, the indicative results of today's votes will be displayed on the screen behind me. I will now hand over to Stuart, our Group General Counsel and Company Secretary, who will briefly explain how to use the electronic voting handsets.

Thank you Martin. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for coming. If you've already submitted your votes by proxy, you don't need to vote again unless you wish to change your previous voting choice. When you were registered as a shareholder, proxy or corporate representative today, you would have been given an electronic handset. I'll now explain the procedure for using that handset. A guide has also been placed on your chair. Your smart card would have been inserted into the top of the handset at registration. The Rotork logo and your name should be displayed on the handset. If you cannot see this or have any problems when voting during the meeting, please raise your hand and a member of the Equiniti team or one of the stewards will come to help you. Follow the on-screen instructions and press the button on your handset corresponding with the way you wish to vote. When invited to vote, select the resolution from the menu. Press 1 to vote in favor, button 2 to vote against or button 3 to withhold your vote, a vote withheld is not a voting law and will not be counted. You can also vote for all of the resolutions together in accordance with the Board's recommendation to vote for all the resolutions make the selection from the menu and confirm by pressing the green square. If you think you've pressed the wrong button, or if you wish to change your mind, simply vote again by pressing the correct button. Your original vote will be canceled and superseded by the new vote. You can do this at any time until the poll closes at the end of the Q&A session. Your handset will not be activated for voting until Martin formally opens the poll at the start of the Q&A session. Voting will remain open until Martin formally closes the poll. And at the end of the meeting, a summary of those provisional results will be shown on the screen, which combine the votes in the room with those provided by proxy in advance of this meeting. Final results of the voting will be available on our website and announced to the London Stock Exchange as soon as practicable once the registrar has verified them. If you experience any difficulties in voting, please make yourself known to the Equiniti team and ask stewards who will come and help you. Could Equiniti and stewards just put their hands up so that everyone knows where they are, please? Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, Stuart. There are 22 resolutions to be considered today, all explanations of which are set out in the notice of meeting dated the 23rd of March 2023. With your permission, I propose to take as read both the notice and the 2022 auditor's report as it appears in the 2022 annual report on accounts for the year ended 31st of December 2023. The Board is unanimously in favor of each resolution proposed and recommends that you vote in favor of all the resolutions. I am pleased to report that we have received a substantial number of proxies, representing approximately 80.97% of our shares, appointing me to vote on their behalf. I will therefore, vote as I have been instructed by those shareholders. These votes are added to the votes cast by shareholders in the room today. Resolutions 1 to 17 are ordinary resolutions, which require a simple majority of the shares voted to pass. The remaining resolutions, 18 to 22, are special resolutions and requires 75% of the votes cast to be passed. I now formally put Resolutions 1 to 22 to the meeting. The voting system is now open, and you may begin to vote. You can cast your votes on all the resolutions at any point from now until I have closed the poll. If you require help with your handset, please raise your hand, and one of the stewards will come to assist you. Please follow the instructions on the screen or in the guidance note. I would like to invite shareholders or their proxies or corporate representatives to ask the directors any questions they may have related to the specific business of the meeting or the company's business generally. I will close the formal business of the meeting immediately following the results of the poll. So if you would like to ask a question, please raise your hand now and state your name, and if you are representing a company the name of that company, please, if you can, just one question each. Do we have any questions for the meeting today? This will be a record...

I'd just be interested in what your view about the size of the carbon capture market is?

We have done a lot of analysis, and we -- because it's so early and so new there isn't a precise number on that. But when we did our Capital Markets Day in November, we gave quite a lot of data and information in that. So in terms of carbon capture usage and storage at the moment, we think the market is around [ GBP 80 million. ] However, the growth of that market is set to grow. And that's with what we know currently. But every time we do this analysis, new technology comes on stream because carbon capture isn't just in Oil & Gas, it's in multiple different markets. So it's steel production, cement production, hydrogen. So it's a bit of a moving target at the moment. But we think that target in Europe is around [ GBP 80 million ] currently and growing.

Does that answer your question, Bill? Any other questions, please don't forget to vote by the way. Are the handsets working, Stuart?

Yes, they are.

Any other questions for today? Thank you very much. As I previously mentioned, given that the audio facility does not allow shareholders to ask questions, shareholders were given the opportunity to send questions to a designated e-mail address the details of which were published in the notice of meeting. No questions were received in this manner. Thank you. So if there are no more questions, this concludes the Q&A session and the poll will close very shortly. So if you haven't voted yet, please do so. Has everybody voted? [Voting] I'm going to give you a few more seconds or minutes to vote. Is anyone having difficulties with the voting? I don't want to worry you, but we can see exactly who's voted on this screen. You're not compelled to vote, by the way. Have you? [Voting] There's a gentleman that needs some help there. [Voting] How many handsets are there ? We got 20 handsets in the room and 10 voted so far. Oh we're at 13. [Voting] I see it's working its way down the list. You are able to vote on all resolutions together if you wanted to make it easier for you. [Voting] We are very nearly there. Has everybody? Wonders of modern technology. The old days, you just put your hand up, didn't you. Everyone of you did. I am going to close the poll in 60 seconds. Not to put you under any pressure. [Voting] Anybody still voting? Anybody still voting? We're all good? Okay. I'm formally going to close the poll now. Thank you for your votes. I'm glad it was so seamless. So please now turn your attention to the screen. We put this up, and you'll see the provisional results showing how the proxy votes were cast in relation to each of the resolutions. A vote withheld is not a vote in law, so it won't be included in the percentages given as voting for or against resolutions. As the results -- as the poll results have to be verified by our registrar to ensure that they are accurate and there's no double counting, it will not be possible to know the final results for a little time, but you can assume that the results shown on the screen behind me are a strong indication of the final results. Results of the voting will be published in the stock exchange announcement on the national storage mechanism and will also be published on our corporate website as soon as reasonably practicable, following the closure of this meeting. That, ladies and gentlemen, concludes this year's Annual General Meeting. Thank you all for your attendance today and for your questions or question. The board would also like to thank all of Rotork's people and employees who continue to be central for the delivery of our success. On a personal note, I would like to thank you and all of our shareholders, the Board and all our employees for their support and hard work during my tenure as Chairman. Rotork, as Kiet has said, is a world-class business. And I believe it is well placed to take advantage of the opportunities over the coming years. So I wish Rotork, Dorothy, Kiet, the Board and all of our colleagues every success in the future. I believe that Kiet, you have a couple of words to say.

I do. I do. I think this is the right juncture for me as CEO on behalf of the Board and all our stakeholders to express our sincere thanks to Martin for his excellent stewardship over the past 9 years. During his tenure and through some uniquely demanding economic periods, he's played a crucial role in the successful development of Rotork. His wise counsel and passionate commitment to our company since 2014 have been invaluable, and he will be leaving a strong legacy of leadership, positive momentum and delivery for all stakeholders. I'd also like to thank Martin personally for his support, especially in my first year as Rotork's CEO. Turning to the future. I'd like to welcome Dorothy as our new Chair, and I very much look forward to working with her, the Board and the entire Rotork team to implement and execute our Growth+ strategy and pursue our vision to be the leader in intelligent flow control. Thank you.

Thank you Kiet, for those very kind words. I now declare the meeting closed. I would like to invite you to join the directors and myself for a buffet lunch in the lounge down dining room. Please would you leave your very important handsets and smart cards on the seat when you leave. Thank you very much. We'll see you shortly.