Keller Group Stock

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Keller 2026 Capital Markets Day. I think I recognize pretty well everybody in the room, but for anybody who doesn't know who I am, I'm James Wroath, and I'm the CEO of Keller. I hope that watching that film, you can share the enthusiasm and the confidence that I have for the future of Keller and in the difference that we make, out into the world. When you see that video on our webcast later, unfortunately, we can't keep that music, the the fees we're doing get too expensive. But thank you to Nicola for making a great music choice to accompany as well.

So thank you, everybody, for joining the Capital Markets Day. Thank you, especially to those of you who have traveled to be here in person. I know we've got people joining online, and hopefully, lots of people watch the recording in the future.

Keller does something that is technically demanding, physically difficult and absolutely essential. We help create the infrastructure that people rely upon, the roads and railways that they travel on and the buildings in which they live and work. And yet, we do this at the same time as creating value through really specialist engineering. However, I'd say that even among people who followed Keller for many years, and there are a lot of people in the room in that camp, there's not always a full understanding of what we do and why we're different or what the opportunity looks like that's ahead of us. So today, the team and I and the presenters that you'll see, we want to change that.

Okay. So how are we going to achieve that? The first thing that we want to do is to explain. We're not going to be able to turn everybody in this room into a geotechnical engineer by the end of the afternoon. Brent from our team will probably tell you that it takes a little longer than a couple of hours at the Capital Markets Day to do that. But we do want you to understand what Keller does, why our work matters and where we really add value. The second thing we want to do is we want to position. And we want to demonstrate why Keller can deliver organic revenue growth in the range of 5% to 7% over the medium term, while sustaining our group operating margin of around 7%. And both numbers really matter to us. This is not a plan that depends on continual margin expansion. It's a plan to sustain the stronger specialist margin we have and grow the business from that base. And then the third thing we want to do today, I hope, is to excite you. We believe we've got attractive markets and excellent portfolio a strong management team and the financial capacity to invest. I want all of you to leave today sharing the confidence and the excitement we feel about what this business can become. And to do that, we've got a pretty full agenda for you.

We're going to begin by explaining a bit more about who we are, what we do and where we fit in, in general, into the construction industry. David is then going to join me to bring the financial and the commercial perspective. We're then going to go deeper into our strategy. We want to show you what we do, where we do it and how we do it really well, because the compounding conclusion from that story, we believe is there are lots of opportunities for our growth. For the strategy section, I'm going to take you through our portfolio, Brent will explain the operating capabilities behind our performance, and then I'll return to set out the growth opportunity in the pipeline.

In many ways, as a business, we're all about geology and geography the what we do and the where. And when it comes to geography, we may be global in reach, but I'm sure you've all heard us say many times, our markets are local. They're very local. And so that's why after the break, we've got Scott, Peter and Deepak showing how our model works in their specific markets in North America, Europe and the Middle East and Asia Pacific. And then finally, David will bring it all together in a financial framework and our medium-term targets. And then we'll finish with questions. All of today's presenters will join me on the stage for us to do that. And then for those of you that can, after that, there'll be some drinks afterwards and the team will be around to have individual discussions.

Okay. So let's start with the basics. Who are we? What do we do? Why does it matter? Keller is the world's largest specialist geotechnical contractor. We design and build foundations. We strengthen and we improve ground and we remediate contaminated sites so that land is safe and ready to be built upon. We employ approximately 10,000 people. We work on around 5,500 projects each year. And our operations span 35 countries using a fleet of approximately 1,100 specialist rigs and pieces of equipment. In 2025, the group generated GBP 3.1 billion of revenue and GBP 218 million operating profit. That scale that we have gives us access to people, to equipment, engineering expertise and techniques but smaller competitors cannot easily reproduce. But the word that I really want to emphasize is specialists.

We're not simply another general construction company. We operate in a technically demanding part of the construction process, where knowledge, judgment and execution matter enormously. And we also operate against clear values, safety, people, excellence and integrity. They shape how we select, design and deliver our work. The map on this slide is also important because it shows our global local dynamic. We operate in 35 carefully chosen countries. We're not trying to plant a Keller flag everywhere. We choose markets where we build strong local positions and where we can manage contractual risk, and importantly, where we can operate within reliable legal and payment frameworks to earn an appropriate return.

North America is the anchor of the group, representing just under 6% of our revenue and we do see significant further opportunity there. But more than 40% of the business lies across Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, giving us exposure to different economies and patterns of construction demand. Keller is a genuine portfolio business. It's diversified across where we operate, what we do and the work that we undertake. And this slide sets out the investment case that we want to prove today. We're a diversified and sector-agnostic portfolio with strong commercial and operational execution. We have local focus combined with the power of our scale. We have attractive long-term growth drivers and a track record of strong margins, cash generation and returns.

Keller has not held a Capital Markets Day since 2017, and we've not previously given this kind of medium-term framework. Today, we're setting out why we believe Keller can deliver organic revenue growth of 5% to 7% a year and to sustain an operating margin of around 7%, while maintaining those strong returns and cash generation. So therefore, the central question for the day is pretty simple. Why should you believe we can both grow at that rate and not compromise on the quality and the discipline of the business, everything that follows today is intended to answer that question.

So as I've just said, we have a team globally of 10,000 colleagues, but this is our executive team. Success in Keller is very much a team activity and it's a team responsibility. And this group of people combined deep color experience with important new perspectives. Scott, Peter and Deepak, as I've said, lead our 3 divisions. Together with Brent, they bring almost 70 years of Keller experience, and Brent leads our Construction capability globally. David has been central to the improvement in the group's financial and commercial discipline. And this team is supported by leaders responsible for people, safety, technology, communications, legal and governance. Some of these people have spent decades with Keller, others bringing experience from outside the group. And that balance gives us deep knowledge of the business and the willingness to challenge how things have traditionally been done. You're going to hear from many of them as you've seen on the agenda directly today.

So just briefly because today is, of course, mostly about looking forward. But it's worth a few words about our heritage because many of the capabilities supporting future growth have been built over the 160 years of Keller history. Johan Keller founded the company in Renchen in Germany in 1860. And on that same site, our KGS business still designs and manufactures specialist machinery today. The acquisition of Hayward Baker is also worth highlighting in 1984 because it established the foundations of the North American business that we have today. So Keller's history combines engineering innovation, local entrepreneurship and acquisition. And the most relevant thing is that all three of those remain essential to our strategy today. And I also wanted to highlight this point, the whole area of acquisition, because acquisition is also not something that just sits at the edge of Keller's history. It's one of the principal ways that this group has been built.

Keller has acquired strong local companies with specialist people with customer relationships, market knowledge and techniques. Our more recent success has been in bringing those businesses together more effectively. They've retained the local identity and relationships that has made them so successful. But they've also now shared expertise, equipment, customers and opportunity more readily across the group. That is central to the improvement in performance, and it's why selective bolt-on M&A can still create further value. But before we look further forward, I'm going to ask David to come up now to take you through the financial journey that's brought us here, David.

Thank you, James. I have had the privilege and thankfully only occasionally the stress of living through the last 6 years of this journey. This chart goes back to Keller's listing in 1994 and shows a business that has grown substantially through very different economic and construction cycles. The dot-com downturn, the financial crisis and the pandemic all had an impact. Keller is exposed to construction activity, so we are not immune when the world stops building. From a medium- and longer-term perspective, our revenue has resiliently grown matched by cash generation as we have maintained and grown the ordinary dividend every year since listing.

Furthermore, we are not tied to one construction subsector. Our broad range of techniques and local operations allow us to move towards the activity taking place across the markets we serve. The recent chapter is particularly important, between 2021 and 2025, underlying operating profit increased from GBP 89 million to GBP 218 million, average annual growth of approximately 25%. The current consensus estimate for 2026 is around GBP 242 million. Over the same period, the group operating margin moved from 4% -- from around 4% to circa 7%, where it has remained in recent years. That improvement did not happen by accident. We shaped the portfolio, change the commercial structure, strengthened execution and brought the businesses together more effectively. This slide shows the result.

This next slide explains why we believe the improvement is structural broad and temporary. There are four principal elements. First, portfolio optimization we exited subscale and low-return markets, where the balance of risk and reward was not attractive. We were prepared to give up revenue where the quality of that revenue was not good enough. Second, commercial discipline. We introduced more rigorous risk-adjusted pricing, shifted the culture from volume towards margin and return and strengthen the bid review process for larger and more complex work. Third, operational excellence. We improved project execution and consistency and materially reduce the number of loss-making contracts. With the scale of profitability we are now achieving individual project issues no longer have such a volatile impact as it would have been the case in the past. And then fourthly, integration and large project capability, the clearest example of One Keller in North America, which brought the U.S. Foundation businesses together through structural management and [indiscernible] change. They now share customers, people equipment and technical expertise far more effectively.

These four changes reinforce one another better portfolio choices, concentrate management time and capital where we are strongest, better commercial discipline and choose that risk is understood and properly priced. And better execution delivers the return we priced and integration allows us to use Keller's scale where it creates genuine advantage. That is how we move on from a margin of around 4% to circa 7%. Because these changes are now embedded in how the business is managed, we believe around 7% is sustainable [indiscernible] margin, not simply a temporary peak. The improvements we have made on margin have translated into bottom line growth. Since listing, Keller has grown revenue, operating profit and shareholder distributions very materially. More recently, shareholders have benefited from total shareholder returns of approximately 30% per annum over the last 5 years. So the direction is clear.

The business has grown, the quality of earnings has improved. Cash generation has strengthened and shareholder distributions have increased. The platform we have today is, therefore, a much stronger one than Keller had several years ago. Our responsibility now is to preserve the discipline that created that improvement while using the platform to grow. James is going to explain more about what Keller does and why it's specialist position supports these economics. James, back to you.

Thanks, David. Okay. So you've seen how the financial performance has developed. Let me now take us a little bit more on [indiscernible] and try and make what we do more tangible. So at a very high level, our role has kind of have three parts. We have Engineering & Design, we have Construction, and we have Monitoring and Quality Control. And then the Construction work falls into 5 broad categories that the team are going to describe a few times today in more detail as we go through the presentation. Under those categories at different techniques, again, many of which you'll see and hear about later. But beyond the complexity of that, our job is pretty straightforward. We need to understand the ground. We need to understand what the customer wants to put on it and design and build a safe cost-effective and environmentally responsible solution.

At this point, though, I just wanted to mention our Suncoast business. And those of you who know us well will know this is our Post-tensioning Steel business in the U.S. It's a great business, and Scott's going to talk about it a bit more later on when we get to the North America section. But what Suncoast does and the products that it sells are fundamentally different from our core foundations and ground improvement business, and Suncoast sits outside of the solutions that I've just described. And we've, therefore, decided to exclude it from a lot of the data that we talk about today because it behaves quite differently to the majority of our business. But I wanted to reiterate, it does remain an important part of the Keller Group.

Okay. So this is where the specialist knowledge begins. Above ground, we need to understand the structure. We need to understand local regulations, supply chain and construction practices. Below ground, we need to understand the geology, understand what groundwater conditions are like, what seismic conditions are like and if there's any potential contamination. And all of these things can vary enormously. They can obviously vary enormously within a country, but they can also vary within the state, and they even sometimes vary within a single site. So the crucial question for us as a business is not whether the customer is building a hospital or a data center, a bridge or an industrial facility. It's what's happening below the surface and what does the structure that's being put on it require from it. And our local teams build up decades of knowledge of those conditions of their customers and construction practices.

But as I've mentioned local quite a few times, at this point, you might be asking, if all of this knowledge is so local, what's the point in having a global Keller Group. And the answer to that, I think, is fairly simple, is because of the group creating a multiplier effect. Expertise that we develop in one market can be deployed in another. Specialist engineers can support a branch on an unfamiliar challenge, [indiscernible] technique can move to where demand is strongest. So local knowledge is the starting point, but global capability strengthens that.

And then in terms of the whole construction industry overall, where does Keller fit in? So our work generally represents only around 0.5% to 1.5% of the total build cost. But it derisks approximately 85% of the structures and finishes spend that follow after. And also in 2025, total construction spend in Keller's markets was more than GBP 6 trillion. So even around 1%, if anybody is underwhelmed by the 1%, it's still a pretty meaningful number. We're one of the first contractors on site. And once our work is complete, the rest of the structure is obviously built on top of it. But that means that if a building has a problem with it's windows or similar they can be replaced. It might be an expensive process to do that. It might be quite disruptive, but it is possible. But if the ground solution beneath the completed building is wrong, remediation is significantly more difficult. And now the extreme, the whole project can be quite literally undermined.

So when customers buy from us, they're not simply buying Piles or Grouting or Ground Improvement, they're buying certainty for their project. And that means that we may be small -- a small part of total cost, as this graph says, but we're mighty in terms of the consequence that we have on the process. And that's why specialist knowledge, dependable execution really matter and why I believe that Keller own's margins that are more akin to a specialist rather than a general contractor. The main thrust of this or point of this slide is also really important to me.

Keller, at Keller we self-perform. So there are a lot of construction businesses in the world who primarily design, procure and manage third parties. That is absolutely not Keller's model. We are doers. We employ the people who design and deliver the solution and 1,700 of them are qualified engineers. We own and operate equipment, and we are physically on-site carrying out the work. I think those qualities make Keller's work pretty AI resistant. We still need our people and our equipment to do the work that we do. It also means we're in control over much of our supply chain. Around half of the projects that we do are design and build, but whether or not Keller actually design the original solution, we build what we commit to deliver. Our people, our in-house engineering expertise and our rigs give us direct control over execution, and that's where Keller's scale begins to create a genuine advantage. And we also serve a broad range of end markets. Keller is organized geographically, not by sector. We don't have a global data center division that can only work on data centers. We don't have a rail division that sits idly waiting for rail investment to show up.

A branch may work on a data center. It might work on a warehouse, a bridge or an industrial facility. The end market changes the local knowledge, the people, the equipment and the techniques do not. And that's what we mean when we talk a lot about sector agnosticism. Doesn't mean we're immune from construction cycles. But we're not wholly dependent on any one sector. As demand moves between the subsectors that sit under these main sectors, we can move towards it. Okay. So hopefully, you now understand what we do and why the work matters.

David is going to explain where we sit commercially, who buys from us, how we contract and the competitive market in which we operate. David?

Thank you, again, James. So approximately 75% of our work is for EPCs or general contractors responsible for the wider build. They engage Keller to deliver discrete geotechnical package, either design and build or build only. The remaining approximately 25% is contracted directly with asset owners, particularly in sectors such as energy, resources, transport and infrastructure. The commercial relationship matters because our work happens early. When we are involved before the solution is fully fixed, our engineers can often identify a safer faster or more economical approach. That creates value for the customer and gives Keller a better understanding of the technical and commercial risk before we price and commit. The strongest relationships are therefore built through technical credibility, early engagement and dependable delivery over time.

This next slide is central to understanding the quality and sustainability of our earnings. At one end of the spectrum is fixed price contracts, where the contractor accepts most of the risk and expects a higher margin. At the other end is cost plus, where the owner retains more risk and the contractor earns a lower margin. Keller typically operates between these extremes, estimating costs and pricing contracts with remeasurable bill of quantities. In simple terms, we take responsibilities for the risks we can control, particularly our own productivity. But we seek protection risks that sit elsewhere, such as third-party delays, design changes or material changes to scope. That discipline continues after a project is won. Teams measure productivity, cost to complete, cash variations and key risks through regular project reviews. If conditions change, we assess and document the impact and agree the commercial treatment rather than allowing unpriced work to accumulate.

Material issues are escalated early. The objective is not to avoid responsibility. It is to ensure that the risk Keller accepts remains understood, controllable and properly priced throughout delivery. We will not take every project at any price, and we will not accept risks we cannot manage simply to win work, that commercial discipline is one of the most important reasons the quality of our earnings has improved. Furthermore, given the portfolio of contracts, we are not reliant on any small, few highly profitable contracts in any given year. This next slide is on the competitive landscape. The competitive market is highly fragmented. At one end, there are a small number of multinational specialists and integrated general contractors capable of bidding for the largest and most technically complex projects. Then there are the strong national and regional specialists and beneath them a long tail of local businesses focused on one or two techniques and most likely a particular city, state or region. These local businesses should not be underestimated. Many have excellent customer relationships, deep knowledge of local ground conditions and low cost basis.

As projects become larger, more technically demanding or require several techniques, the competitive pool does become smaller. That is where Keller's combination of local presence and global capability becomes especially valuable. We can offer the responsiveness and knowledge of a local specialist supported by engineering breadth, specialist equipment, financial capacity and resources from right across the group. That commercial context leads directly into the strategy.

James is now going to explain.

Thanks, David. Okay. So we've described the business. We described the customer proposition, and we've taken you through the commercial model. We're now going to spend some time diving deeper into our strategy for long-term value creation.

Our portfolio gives us choices about where to compete and which capabilities, sectors and project sizes to pursue. The performance part of this chart is our ability to convert those choices into attractive, sustainable returns through local knowledge, technical expertise, specialist assets and disciplined execution. If you put the two of those things together, they create a pipeline of opportunities from which we can grow. And simply put, as the chart says, our portfolio multiplied by performance equals pipeline. I'm going to begin by taking you through a bit more detail on portfolio. Brent is then going to show you what sits behind our performance, and then I'll return after that to explain how the two combined to produce our growth opportunities.

So beginning with portfolio. Our portfolio is both a source of growth and a source of resilience. It lets us move towards attractive demand without becoming dependent on any single market or type of work. And whichever lends you use to look at our business, the portfolio is balanced. As I said earlier, North America is our largest division, but we do have meaningful further exposure across Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. Our business is also balanced across our product and service range including Astral's broader civil and marine capability, which Deepak will talk to you a lot more about later. And finally, we serve a wide range of end markets with a balance of contract size. And that final dimension is particularly important to us. Small and medium projects keep branches close to customers, they support utilization and they help us to develop our people. They also create relationships and local knowledge from which our larger opportunities often emerge.

The larger projects allow us to deploy Keller's scale and expertise where they can create the greatest value. But the strength of the business in the combination, not in pursuing size for its own sake. And the whole picture gives us selectivity, a business with only 1 technique or 1 sector or 1 project type may feel compelled to chase the work available to it. Within Keller, we have a much more -- a much broader opportunity set. We can direct ourselves towards the work where our knowledge is strongest and the risk and returns are most attractive. And back to the map. This map shows locations where we've chosen to operate.

In some of these, we already have a leading position, such as parts of the U.S. and Australia, Canada and Europe. But in many others, we have an established position with still meaningful room to grow. You'll hear more about our locations in each region from our divisional residents later. The opportunity isn't simply to add more countries, is to deepen our position within existing countries and local areas, building capability, competing for greater share and applying more of Keller's technique portfolio. Selective acquisitions can accelerate that process where they add density relationships or capability, and I'll talk more about acquisition and our strategy later. The map should, therefore, be read as an opportunity map. A clear part of the medium-term growth opportunity is straightforward growth within places where we already are.

And I promise you I'm not going to read out every technique on this slide or take through each one. But the point of putting them up there is to illustrate our breadth. There are many local competitors who will specialize and be really good at a small number of these techniques. But Keller can focus on the customer's problem rather than the product we happen to want to sell, and we can value engineer an existing design or we can propose a less materially intensive solution. We can combine these techniques and then self-perform the answer that we recommend. Combined with local knowledge and engineering expertise, this is a really powerful proposition, particularly on larger and more complex projects. And when you look at the history, the broad mix of our core techniques has remained pretty consistent as Keller has grown.

I think that tells us two things. Demand for our principal solutions is enduring, and the growth story does not depend on one technique becoming unusually fashionable. Acquisitions such as Moretrench, RECON and Astral are broadly offering that we have but the customers' ground conditions, the project needs continue to determine the right answer. These three projects show the breadth in practice. At the Wharf in Washington, we combined 8 different techniques to enable 5 mixed-use buildings. On the Bruce Highway in Queensland, 6 techniques were combined across several sites. And in The Hague, building, I'm sure many people are familiar with, construction of a tunnel beneath an important historical building required 4 techniques to investigate and strengthen the ground to underpin the existing structure and to monitor movement throughout the work.

In all these examples, customer didn't need to assemble a different specialist for each element. Keller was able to assess the challenge combine the techniques and take responsibility for delivery. And that broadens our opportunity set and our ability to deliver the full solution gives us a genuine competitive edge. And again, I'm sure you've heard David and I said this many times in meetings and discussions, but sector agnosticism is a key feature of the Keller business. As I explained in the opening the same techniques and local capabilities can serve many end markets. The broad sector mix has remained relatively stable over the years, but the activity within it has shifted as demand move. So from warehouses post COVID to data centers or between rail projects, roads, ports and water. That's how Keller responds to changing demand without reinventing the underlying business.

Turning to contract size. On this one, this where there has been more of a visible change. Projects worth more than GBP 10 million now represent approximately 28% of our revenue. As David explained earlier, stronger integration, particularly with our One Keller initiative to North America, has made us much better able to bring branches together and manage complex work at scale. But approximately 72% of the remainder of the portfolio remains with small and medium work. And as I said earlier, that base still really [indiscernible]. We've increased our capability at the top without abandoning the repeatable local work beneath it. And that's really important from a risk perspective. The larger work can create attractive economies of scale, longer utilization while the broad base of smaller project prevents the group becoming dependent on the timing or outcome of a handful of contracts.

I-40 is a particularly powerful example of the portfolio and scale coming together, and I'm sure many of you have seen our two recent RNSs on this project, and it is, without question, the largest project in Keller's history. In this instance, a long-standing local relationship created the opportunity. We were then able to mobilize people, equipment, and engineering support from across North America to respond to a critical infrastructure emergency and to earn significant repeat scope. But rather than me describing it further, let me show you through the power of video.

[Presentation]

So the scale of that project is mind-blowing. David and I along with some others going to see that for the first time in 2 weeks' time, very much looking forward seeing the super nasty hard drilling that is on site. But yes, normal scale. And and a perfect segue really into the next section of our presentation today, which is around performance because you don't get awarded projects like I-40 without having really struggles of performance.

So the strong portfolio that I've just taken you through gives us opportunities and choices, but it only actually creates any value if we can execute consistently and convert those opportunities that we have into sustainable returns. So over the past year, I've spent a lot of time getting under the skin of how Keller operates. I've visited every one of our business units around the world. And what I found universally to be true is a terrific business, whether that's being on the Hudson River in New York or the project we're doing in there or a port expansion near Chennai or a residential development in Warsaw, Poland. Everywhere I've been, I've seen advanced technical capability, high-quality and exceptional diligence and met people with extraordinary experience, commitment and passion for what we do. I believe very strongly that Keller's current level of performance is repeatable.

But I also want you to hear that from our Chief Construction Officer. Brent knows the business from the [indiscernible] side upwards, and he's responsible for the standards and capabilities supporting delivery across the group. So Brent, over to you.

Thanks, James, and good afternoon. like James said, my name is Brent Byford, Chief Structuring Officer for Keller. I've been with Keller almost 20 years, and I've been in the general construction industry for over 25 years. So we're going to start with talking about performance. There's a lot to do on this slide. But what we want to do is we want to start in the center.

Keller is a global company, but performance is created branch by branch and project by project as been described by the local people who know the customer, they understand the ground conditions, and they take responsibility for the execution of that project. So around those branches, we also do bring the capability of the broader group. The specialist engineering, we talked about, shared learnings, skilled people, and a market-leading fleet. We also bring more than 50 techniques. I'm not going to describe them all. Don't worry. We also book KGS, which we'll talk about the use of technology and an embedded approach to safety and sustainability.

James has already shown you that our work represents a small share of the customer's cost, but it does remove a disproportionate amount of the risk. So my job is to show you the capabilities behind that certainty, and why disciplined project selection, accurate pricing, consistent execution, support the specialist margin. So the operating flywheels is straightforward. Local density creates more opportunities, more projects deepen our knowledge, better knowledge improves our design, pricing and risk selection, but the strong execution builds reputation and repeat business. So that, in turn, improves our utilization of people and equipment. So none of those are dramatic on its own, but like we said, we have 175 branches. So over those 175 branches, it's very powerful.

So we can use Texas to show how this looks in reality. So everything is bigger in Texas as everybody knows. Dallas and Austin, they share similar project types. The ground conditions are similar as well. You move across to Houston the soils are very different. In Dallas, we work in clay, we work in rock the big nasty drilling that James was talking about. Around Houston, the deal was very soft soils. So the solutions and the risks are different. And that's why the business can't run effectively from a central office. So our 175 branches do build up decades of project history, what the ground looks like, techniques that really work, where the risk tends to emerge but most importantly, how those local customers operate. So the next project begins with what we learned in the last one. That improves our design improves our pricing, most importantly improves our project selection. Gives us the confidence to say no when we don't understand the risk or it's not properly rewarded.

But it also helps us move between sectors. So that same local team can support a data center, an industrial facility or an infrastructure project like I-40. So the end markets change, but the brand's knowledge of the ground, the supply chain and the customer base is what remains relevant. However, we don't want to portray that local means isolated. When branches face complex challenges, we draw on the specialist engineers, product teams, our [indiscernible] fleet and the lessons we've learned across those 35 countries we work in. A really good example of this is the project a few years ago in India, where the local business needed a technique that they didn't routinely do. So we brought in resources from the U.S. and from Europe, help, work alongside the team to deliver that project successfully. So that's the global scale and practice. So it's not that start taking over. But specialists capability on demand and leaving the local teams stronger afterwards. So the same applies to our equipment and learning.

So our machines can move across countries as demand changes. And our product teams work to ensure that one branch does not have to relearn a lesson we already experience. So as we talk about all, there is one thing that's evident for the entire discussion. People are the key. So we do employ around 1,700 engineers. So they're supported by rig operators, field leaders, branch leaders. We invest in their development that goes from technical trains to operator trainings to product management and senior leadership, but includes practical programs that we do such as driller schools and project management academies. And there's even structural development for senior leaders and future branch managers. So why does it matter? Specialist capability is not built, it takes years to build, sorry. It cannot simply be bought. So we can't just buy it when the market becomes busy. And equipment alone does not deliver the project. It's the judgment of the people using it. So they have to react to ground conditions. They have to understand what is happening on the site and know when to adjust most importantly.

But they do need the right tools. We do own approximately 1,100 rigs and cranes, but the advantage is not the number. It's the breadth of the fleet. So we're going to match the technique to the equipment and to the size of the project. So before I explore one distinctive part of our capability, let's hear from some of our talented people behind it.

[Presentation]

So it is exciting. I think what's fun about it is if you know any of these people, they could probably stand up here and talk to you for the next 5 hours about why Keller is great and why they enjoy engineering. So one of the other cool things. So James had mentioned that the start of Keller was in Renchen Germany back in 1860. And as he said, it's still a vital part to our landscape here in 2026. So KGS, who's our in-house specialist equipment business, is still based in Renchen. So after more than 160 years, we're still designing a manufacturing equipment that's solving today's engineering problems. So they build purpose design machines and monitoring systems, particularly for techniques such as Vibro and Jet Routing. So that when feedback comes back from the business, they can make those changes and design changes effective immediately. So it's instant feedback. .

But they also support it through the life of the equipment with spare parts, maintenance. We also spent specialist technicians around the world to assist with challenges that arise. So it's a combination of field experience, the design, the manufacturing and the life cycle support that improves the [indiscernible] activity, and it gives us a specialist capability that's difficult to replicate. The most important also shortens that learning loop. So once that problem is identified by the construction team, it can be fed back to the designers. It could be engineered into the next equipment solution and also then supported across the life of the asset. So increasingly, these equipment issues also can be diagnosed remotely, which reduces the downtime on site. So equipment is great.

I'd like to talk about equipment all day. But the technology behind it's also what strengthens the same model. So our proprietary Data Acquisition Systems can connect equipment in the field with the site teams and engineers. So in those cases, we can actually see what's happening in real time. So what does that do for us? It improves our quality control, we can make faster decisions and it gives the customer greater certainty in our delivery. But if the data shows something is not behaving as expected, that seemed to make a change immediately, and we can adjust before anything else is [indiscernible]. If you go back 5 years ago, we didn't always have that kind of visibility. So we've learned from experience, and we've embedded better systems and controls, and that's another reason I believe that our performance is sustainable going forward.

However, through all of this, the equipment technology does not supersede the expectation that we have to keep our people safe on a daily basis. This is very personal to me. As Chief Construction Officer every day, we got thousands of people working on Keller sites around the world. So the expectation is simple Work safe, go home safe. So our accident frequency rate, as you can see, is 0.04. It's very strong for our industry. But it's never going to be good enough, while instances are still occurring. And very sadly, we did have a fatality in September at a site in Singapore. This was the first incident of the severity in many years. When an event like this happens, it forces to stop and take stock. We did hold a safety -- global safety stand down and we followed it through with our annual Global Safety Week last week. But safety is not created by one initiative. It has to be earned again on every site and every shift through planning, learning, training and most importantly, a willingness to speak up.

So every individual on our sites has the authority to stop it. If something doesn't look or feel safe, they have our full support to stop the job. It's regardless of time or title with the company. We will also act to see patterns. So 2 years ago, we have repeated hand injuries. And most of that was done with our guys handling or people handling steel. So we launched the hands-off steel program. So wherever possible, mechanical means are now used to control the steel rather than people handing it. So that's what we feel as an embedded safety culture looks like. We identify the risk, we take a practical action and we share the learning across the group. That culture protects our people, but it also supports a reliable execution for our customers.

So we've mentioned design solution as well through this. But why does that matter? Because the biggest opportunity is to improve the solution early. So before techniques, materials and dimensions are fixed, we can choose a lower impact technique, we can substitute lower carbon materials, and we can optimize the size of solution. So what does that mean in practice? A 1-meter diameter column may be the initial answer. Our engineers and designers demonstrate that 800-millimeter diameter column provides the same support that means less material, less spoil, fewer equipment moves and less time on site for us. So the same principle can apply to technique choice. So shows we have different techniques for foundation to ground improvement. Ground improvement tends -- may remove the need for more material-intensive deep foundation solutions altogether.

So very often, the lower carbon solution is also the more efficient and cost-effective engineering solution. And a really good example of this is a project that's going on right now in Lulea called [indiscernible] in Sweden. So SSAB was developing a major fossil fuel free facility on [indiscernible]. The original concept relied heavily on concrete piles. So it created some big cost, schedule and logistical challenges. So working with the customer, we developed an alternative solution. We combine zone columns, dynamic compaction and deep soil mixing, so as a result, there's a reduction of more than 50% in the foundation cost. Also it was 80%, 90% reduction in the carbon emissions from a traditional solution that was first designed. It's also a good example as we've talked through. We mobilized expertise from 11 countries to come to do this project around on design and one safety standard. So it's a strong example of why customers involve Keller early. So we're not simply there to install a specification. We can help create a solution that's safer, simpler, less expensive and lower carbon. So we talk about customers. Why do they use Keller?

So [indiscernible] did some customer research and the results show that price, it still matters. And we have to be competitive. But as James showed, sometimes a cheap solution can cause further delays, redesigns and be no bargain at all. So customers do want experience, similar structures, similar geology, they also want to some equipment to meet the program. They care about safety, they care about reputation and they care about track record. There are practical ways in which we can remove risk. So we do complete around 5,500 projects per year. And we mobilize every day 22 new sites. So that does create a enormous base of practical experience. So rather than take my word for it, let's hear from the customers.

[Presentation]

So I think the film brings the point to life. And the feedback on this slide supports it. The positive Net Promoter Scores in every region and relationships [indiscernible] . There's wider network and on to another opportunity. That's how repeat business, knowledge and reputation compound. So [indiscernible] as where I started.

Performance is created locally. But what we've built around our branch is the difference. Specialist engineering, shared learning, skilled people, a market-leading fleet, KGS and embedded safety culture. We're more selective about the work we take. We're better at understanding and pricing risk and stronger in our visibility and controls. We share learning more effectively and we invested in the people and tools that allow our branches to deliver with greater certainty. That's why I believe the margin we are earning is sustainable. And while we can grow out compromising the discipline that has improved the business.

With that, James, back to you.

Thanks, Brendan. So the last section I want to cover before the break is about our pipeline, bringing the [Audio Gap]-- and on top of these improvements there's also a more than we can do. And so following my first year with the company, there are 4 broad focus areas that I have.

The first one is greater talent identification and development. So as Brent described, we believe, and we think that's pretty good evidence to say that we've got the best people in the industry. But I think we can be much more intentional about how we develop those people and to make better use of the breadth of the group to achieve that. The second area is in our customer relationships, and you've just seen some fabulous customer testimonies there. And we do have excellent [Audio Gap] in key relationships and taking a more focused approach to how we manage those customer relationships. The third link to that is our systems improvement. So the ERP and our new project management software will deliver efficiencies on its own, but it will also deliver enhanced data that will [Audio Gap] will read, who's here today to the team.

Will has been with Keller since 2012 in numerous senior finance roles. But from December, he's going to move into this new position. It's going to focus on developing and executing Keller's corporate strategy and identifying new value creation opportunities. He's also, as I said [indiscernible] Keller's corporate development capability looking as we increase our focus on acquisitions and other [Audio Gap] and infrastructure are expected to grow a bit faster at around 7% and 6%, respectively, commercial, residential and institutional activity remained robust. And we think that is a pretty useful starting point for the growth target that we're aligning today because the target that we're talking about doesn't require an extraordinary construction boom. It's broadly anchored in our addressable markets. And in doing that, we're not asking you to believe in a ROIC top-down forecast. We're starting with sectors and geographies where capital is already committed and where Keller has an established operating presence.

We also believe Keller can meet or outperform that market by moving capability towards stronger areas of demand and growing further local share. So the market gives us the base. Our portfolio and our execution give us the opportunity to do even better than that. And the global mega trends are also supportive, and we believe that Keller is positioned superbly to benefit from them. Urbanization and infrastructure create opportunities. [Audio Gap] and critical infrastructure. At the same time, buildings are becoming larger, taller and more likely to be built on constrained or brownfield sites. All of this increases the technical demands placed on the ground solution. It means we're not relying on any single theme. Our local network -- the geographic reach we have and our breadth of techniques gives us access to demand across several of them. [Audio Gap]more recently, shows that we don't outperform every market in every period.

It's a highly competitive market for us, and our relative scale advantage has not historically been a strong [Audio Gap] results. And it shows our order book, and it's our order book that provides us with the near-term evidence of that demand that we see. At the half year, the group order book stood at approximately GBP 1.9 billion. The underlying North American order book was at record levels, even excluding the exceptional I-40 contribution.

However, including I-4, the group order book now set an impressive GBP 2.4 billion. And it's important to understand what that means in our business. We operate very early in the construction process, and we're usually appointed project by project. Around 2/3 of the projects that sit in our order book will unwind from that order book within 6 months. Our order book will naturally be shorter in duration than that of a general contractor, but it does provide strong visibility of near-term revenue. [Audio Gap] as committed revenue. Projects can move, they can be delayed or cannot proceed at all. [Audio Gap] supports our very robust organic growth target. But M&A is an opportunity for us to go then further.

Our purpose for M&A is to accelerate the core Keller model by filling white space. We wouldn't do M&A to create unrelated businesses or to move into markets that we don't understand. And when we think about M&A, we think about it from a white space argument, and we think about it from white space in three different angles. But firstly, we think about geography, can we deepen our presence in attractive locations. Secondly, we think about techniques. Can we add capability into geographic markets that we don't have today? And then finally, sector or customer access. Can we bring relationships that Keller can support with a broader range of solutions. The value comes when the acquired business and Keller make one another stronger. And this means that M&A is an accelerator. It's not a requirement for our organic target. We're not going to buy revenue simply to fill a gap in the plan. And we're not going to enter unfamiliar countries merely to make our map look more impressive.

David is going to return later to talk more about the financial disciplines that we'll apply around M&A, which I know will be very important to people in this audience. But first, let me take that theory and show you what successful bolt-on M&A can look like. So coincidentally, this is the last acquisition that Keller did in 2021 of RECON. But I don't choose it as a last one. I choose it because it's a very good example of what we're aiming to do.

So we acquired RECON in 2021 for about GBP 30 million. In doing so, it increased our local presence in Texas, the Gulf Coast and on the East Coast of the U.S. It added environmental remediation and industrial service capability and it increased our exposure to energy infrastructure customers. So in short, it ticked every one of the three white space boxes that I've just outlined to you and would sit right in the middle of that Venn diagram. And as a result of that, the story didn't end at the completion of the transaction. RECON has used Keller's customer base and capabilities while Keller has brought more of its techniques and relationships into RECON's markets. And as a result, the acquisition delivered cash payback within 3 years and continues to generate organic growth through cross-selling in our North America business. The key -- the absolute in doing it was considered integration. RECON retained the specialist expertise and customer relationships that they had and that made it attractive, but gained access to a much broader Keller platform, and that is the model we seek to repeat using M&A to accelerate our core strategy.

So let me bring the first half together. The portfolio that we have gives us choice, gives us a choice across geographies, across techniques, across sectors and across project sizes. The performance and the quality of the business allows us to convert those choices into sustainable returns. Brent has shown you the people, the assets, the technology and the operating disciplines that sit behind our execution. And pipeline is what follows when those two things come together in supportive markets. And our markets are supportive, and we can put within those markets towards attractive subsectors. And that means we can deliver organic revenue growth at the same time as sustaining those group operating margins. And then on top of all of that, inorganic growth is a feasible and affordable additional opportunity for us.

As I said right at the start, after the break, Scott, Peter and Deepak are going to put some more local color behind that group story and show you some of the differences that exist within their regions. But for now, we're going to take a short break and reconvene here at 3:00 p.m. Thanks very much.

[Break]

Welcome back, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the cookies. We had those cookies yesterday and even our Americans and the team were impressed. So I think they were pretty good.

Okay. So you've heard about the group model. But when David and I first started talking about this event, we wanted to make sure that it was different from just our full year and half year results presentation. So we wanted to do here more for more people in the team and deeper to the business. So now I'd like you all to see how the group model that we've just described works in practice across our 3 divisions. And each division has its own market and it has its own opportunities. There are similarities, but there are differences. And Scott, Peter and Deepak are going to show you where the growth comes from and how the group model is being applied locally. So we're going to begin with North America, with Scott. Scott, over to you.

What a great picture here, by the way. We saw the film earlier of our employees. This is Kelly. She works in our Georgia office. She started in 2023, as an operator and still with us today. So it's just great to see smiling faces, people like work. So good afternoon, everyone. I'm Scott Nichols, President of North America. I've been with Keller for more than 20 years and in this industry for more than 30 years. When I joined the business so many years ago as a young project manager, I certainly did not imagine I'd be standing in London in front of a room of investors, right? But I'm pleased to be here, because North America is a business I know closely, and I care a great deal about.

I want to explain why it has become such a strong business, how we've changed it and why I believe there's still significant growth ahead. So a little bit about the North American business. North America accounts for more than 1/5, and though we are the largest specialty geotechnical contractor in North America, -- the branch network is what makes us unique. It gives us proximity to customers and detailed knowledge of the local markets in which we operate. We have a strong American North business, North American business, with significant opportunity to still grow. Operationally, I think about the division of 3 complementary platforms.

U.S. Foundations in Canada form the core Geotechnical business. Moretrench and RECON extend us into environmental remediation, industrial work and heavy civil construction. And Suncoast is our Post-tensioning business. Together, they give us a broad and diversified North American portfolio. That breadth matters. Specialty grouting and earth retention. They serve infrastructure, industrial, commercial and data centers, among others. As James and Brent have already Moretrench and RECON broadened that core platform. They add environmental remediation, industrial and heavy civil capability and take us closer to asset owners in power mining, chemicals and industrial infrastructure. James just used RECON as the group example of a successful bolt-on M&A.

From an operating perspective, the value of the overlap. Our Foundations team can bring geotechnical capability into Moretrench and RECON's customer base. Moretrench and RECON can bring remediation industrial capability into relationships held by Foundation businesses. That is One Keller in practice, using the customers and the capabilities of the whole organization rather than keeping good businesses in separate boxes. It also changes the quality of opportunity set. -- a relationship that began around remediation can lead to foundations work while a geotechnical customer can gain access to a broader industrial environmental solution.

Suncoast is different again. It is leading unbounded post-tensioning specialist in North America with 10 fabrication facilities across the United States. It serves residential and commercial construction through post-tensioning materials, engineering and field services. It is largely a stand-alone operating model with less direct cross-selling into the business -- the Foundation's businesses. But it gives North America exposure to a different part of construction that has provided a balance when parts of the geotechnical market have been softer. As many of you are aware, residential conditions are currently more challenging, but Suncoast retains a strong position and remains an important part of the portfolio.

Unlike the rest of Keller, SunCoast is much more closely linked to the residential construction market. When residential activity is strong, demand for post-tensioning tends to increase. When housing markets slow, Suncoast feels that more directly than our other -- than our Foundation of business. You can see that relationship in the chart. Revenue grew strongly through the residential recovery and peaked in 2022, before moderating as residential conditions became more challenging. The other factor to bear in mind is steel. Because steel is a major component of the products, Suncoast supplies, movements in steel prices influence both revenue and profitability. From a group's perspective, that residential exposure is actually valuable.

Keller today has relatively limited exposure to residential construction overall. The Suncoast provides diversification and access to a different part of the construction cycle than the infrastructure, power and industrial markets that drive most of North America. This slide brings the portfolio together. U.S. Foundation is the largest business Canada, Moretrench, RECON and Suncoast add geographic, technical and sector diversity. No single end market dominates the division. We have meaningful exposure to infrastructure power and industrial, office and commercial and residential demand. That means we're not waiting for one market to perform. It also means the division is not simply a data center and an I-40 story. Those are important and visible opportunities, but they sit on top of thousands of projects across a broad customer and sector base. We have moved capacity from electric vehicle manufacturing to our data centers and we see power generation and transmission becoming increasingly important from here. Medium-sized work gives medium-sized work remains the heart of the portfolio, giving us a dependable flow of projects and keeping local team and equipment utilized.

At the same time, we can now take on much larger work with the risk and the return are appropriate. The growth has been broad based. The graph on the left shows how de foundation and ground improvement remain the core, while Moretrench and RECON have added environmental remediation capability. Looking at the sectors on the right, infrastructure and power and industrial work have grown consistently. More recently, office and commercial has accelerated, driven in large part by data centers. The point is not that one category has replaced all the others, the whole platform has grown, and we have been able to direct more capacity towards the strongest opportunities as they have emerged.

As James showed at group level, larger contracts have become a more important part of the mix. For North America, that change reflects the integration of the Foundations business in 2020, what we call One Keller. Before that, individual companies could be constrained by their own people, equipment and balance sheets. Today, we can combine branches and specialist resources across the division. In an ordinary week, we may sign several contracts worth less than $2 million. On I-40, we secured a $650 million variation. We can do both. The local project base still matters. It keeps us close to customers, develops people and diversifies risk. But when the right major opportunity appears, we can now mobilize and deliver it as one North American business.

The market outlook is supportive, particularly in infrastructure, energy and utilities. Aging infrastructure requires repair and replacement. Population movement into the Sunbelt is creating demand for development and public assets. Brownfield sites need to be remediated and extreme weather is increasing the need for resilience and reconstruction. Forecasts are useful but they are never perfect. The strength of our portfolio is that we do not need every forecast to be exactly right. If one sector slows, the same branches, people, equipment can move towards a stronger demand elsewhere. Data center is the most visible example today. We began developing customer relationships before the current level of activity was obvious. Our local branches then converted these relationships into work across the country.

A few years ago, electric vehicle plants were a major source of activity that [Audio Gap]-- not unique to that sector. If the market moderates, these people and assets can support power, infrastructure, industrial commercial work in the same local geography. This map shows why we have captured the opportunity. We already have branches in many of the markets where investment is concentrated, where a project emerges in a less established location, nearby branches can support it and mobilize the necessary people and equipment. Customers also value this consistency. Our relationship developed on one project can travel with that customer to the next market. For customers building across several states, Keller can provide the reassurance of common standards and technical depth while still delivering through teams that understand each local market. That combination of local coverage and national reach is difficult to reproduce.

This Texas project shows the model in practice. The customer is redeveloping an existing data center. The original concept involve deep foundations, but existing drilled shafts created a constraint and the customer needed a faster alternative. Our local team understood the conditions and worked with the engineers to propose and aggregate peer dilution. We installed over 1,400 peers in approximately 6 weeks, which was multiple weeks faster than the original drill shaft solution. The customer gained speed and certainty Keller combined local knowledge, design capability and sufficient crews and equipment to deliver [Audio Gap].

[Presentation]

We do some really cool stuff. That's a really nice video. You guys have some good ones, too. That film brings to life what I just described. North America is large, but it's not concentrated. We have broad capabilities, exposure to several end markets and a balanced project mix. We can deliver the local project that keeps us close to customers and scale the full Keller platform when a major opportunity appears. And we have demonstrated that we can move toward demand from electric vehicles in the data centers and now towards power, infrastructure and resilience. I know these businesses, the people who run them and the markets in which they compete. I also know the standards we now applied to project selection and delivery. That is why I am confident North America can continue to grow while sustaining the discipline and strong performance that brought us here. Peter? Over to you.

Thank you. We do have [indiscernible] people. So this good look at rosters [indiscernible]. He's actually a site engineer, senior site engineer from our Hungarian business, working on that Lulea project you saw earlier in Northern Sweden. So 50 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle and starting to get a bit cool.

Look, Europe and the Middle East is a very different beast, perhaps to the North American business and very much that it is a portfolio within the global Keller portfolio. When we operate across countries that are connected geographically, but they're very different in language, culture, regulation, construction practice, ground conditions. And importantly, political and economic cycles. So whilst it looks like a patchwork of local businesses, our success has come not only from the individual markets, but also the strength of collaboration that we can generate between those markets. So it's less about creating or hoping for one big uniform market. It's more about being agile and moving our capability intelligently across -- across a collection of distinct and variable markets.

So I've been with Keller for 9 years now, first in Asia Pacific for the last 4 years in the Middle East and Europe. Before Keller, I spent 26 years in a large U.S. listed design company. and most of that time was across Asia Pacific. So I've been managing portfolios of different geographic operations for quite some time. And over those years, I think I can generally count 4 easy years. There's always something happening. But navigating through difficult markets is where good portfolio management [indiscernible] the most. And I guess in these tough times is where you can build lasting market differentiation. So let me tell you a bit more about the portfolio.

So we generate about $900 million of revenue, $40 million of operating profit. We're about 3,400 employees, 600 engineers deliver about 2,500 projects per year. And we do that across 28 countries. So most of Keller's countries. But we organize those countries. So we're organized into 5 business units, with each business unit built around one strong core market. And those core markets have had consistent strength, consistency of opportunity for us to allow us to establish strong pools of technical and functional talent. So Germany anchors our Northwest business. Poland anchors our Northeast business [indiscernible] or around those core markets see a series of adjacent countries that have good, attractive markets to us, and we have established a presence. And we can leverage the skills of those core markets and take up the opportunity in those markets to grow our total pool.

Further afield, we have our emerging markets. where we may see selective opportunity from time to team, but we don't need to overcommit. So right now, that would include the Baltics with the Rail Baltica Program. Hungary and Romania are currently good examples. But what's important is that whilst they will provide a good selective active project from time to time, we can also build up skilled resources in those markets that are transient. And so we have people like [indiscernible] able to go and assist us when we win a big project in Sweden. So we can support the busier navy projects in other times. So this structure, it gives us flexibility in two forms: capacity, so the ability to move capability towards demand as markets strengthen or weaken and technical, the ability to move people, specialist equipment and technical expertise across borders to where we can differentiate ourselves.

But it is important to us that each of our businesses remain deeply local and strong because we operate in local languages, as you would have saw in some of the videos. We operate in local cultures, local business environments, and [indiscernible] build client trust. Clients will generally always prefer to buy local where they can. They want to know who is dealing with. And they also want to see construction as an economic multiplier and they want some of those funds to stay locally. So looking at the comparative of how that portfolio breaks down, you'll see from the pie chart that no individual business unit dominates our divisional revenue. We do reshape the business units from time to time as markets ebb and flow over the medium-term outlook. We have strong product positions in deep foundations, ground improvement, specialty grounding, and we work across the larger sectors of infrastructure, power and industrial, commercial and residential.

But as James said earlier, look, balance is not an end in itself. The value comes from how you proactively manage those -- that portfolio. And we use collaboration and agility to ensure that we can maximize our position in the stronger markets. But each business has to be strong in its own right. As we've said, the portfolio is there to create the additional value. When knowledge, people and equipment move effectively between them, and we can improve our returns. Look, fair to say the European construction market is not generally regarded as one of the world's great growth markets at the -- over recent times at least. But we have grown the division for approximately $640 million in 2020 to around $900 million in 2025. And that's not just a COVID rebound. But more importantly, what we've done is we've improved the quality of that revenue. We've lifted bottom line returns.

As David explained in his opening, Keller has exited markets where the risk and return were not attractive. In -- for my part of the world, that included completing our withdrawal from our disparate African operations, and parts of the Middle East. We're not prepared to retain revenue simply to make the business look larger. We've replaced lower return activity with better quality work in markets where we have stronger positions and a clearer right to win. So that's why this revenue chart shouldn't be read simply as a recovery from 2020. It represents a vision that is larger, more focused and better balanced than the one we started with. These foundations remain the largest product area as that's the prime [indiscernible] of the infrastructure market. But for Keller our technical differentiation is strongest in ground improvement and grouting, where we can use our deep expertise and the specialist KGS equipment that Brent spoke to. And these products are seeing strong growth, which is important to us.

The sector mix, as we've said with the other parts of the business, you'll see gives us [indiscernible]. Public infrastructure remains the largest part, government spending. But we are seeing power, industrial, commercial demand, driving and providing for us important growth. So we'll continue to pivot following the sections of the market that are actually buying. That's our approach. When it comes to project size. Similar to North America, we are seeing an increase in those larger projects, the 10 million-plus projects. They've been the fastest growing part of our portfolio since 2020. That's actually been client driven. We are seeing customers who are increasingly wanting specialist contractor able to take responsibility for a multi-technique geometrical geotechnical scope -- and if we can, the associated enabling work, civil works. What that gives customers is the ability to deal with one supplier, fewer interfaces, design and delivery risk and then be easily managed for them, and gives them the opportunity.

For us, it means we have more direct control over a number of productivity levers. We're not reliant on somebody preparing the ground ahead of us for our works. We can do that ourselves. And you'll see an example of this. We're going to show a video soon on a project in Poland that was executed that way. So this trend particularly benefits Keller because we're one of the few businesses largely across Europe, they have the technical range, people, equipment and balance sheet to deliver that work consistently across most of the broader European markets. But we don't pursue size for its own sake. The small and medium portfolio, which you see have remained very steady for us there. They give us permanent local presence and customer relationships largely for where a lot of those large project opportunities come from. And it's very important, we do local consistently better than any other sizable competitor. And we use our position to scale up quickly when the opportunity arise without us needing to overcommit locally and end up with a large business when that market wanes.

We look at the external data, generally available external data suggests growth of 5% to 6% across the principal sectors. Now I need to admit, I've been in charge in here for 3 years, so I regard these forecasts as a useful context rather than the basis for a plan because the actuals just haven't been there. Our strategy is based on what our local teams can see emerging over the next 2 to 3 years. And we see aging infrastructure, requiring renewal, investment in grids, energy security, emerging demand coming on now, higher defense and resilience spending, and also some good strong continued government-backed development across the Gulf. Now some of these themes are obviously more developed and more advanced in North America. So we see that as giving us confidence that we can provide an additional tailwind to our business as committed programs like the German $500 billion program get translated into live projects. So yes, we -- but -- we can't wait for a broad economic boom. We're already moving capability toward visible demand today.

If I take Austria, for example, Austria is one of our very strongest business historically, but it's not having a very great time in terms of local market generation at the point. But our Austrian teams remain amongst our most busy. So they're busy supporting projects in Czech, Slovakia, Sweden and other neighboring markets. And for me, that's the portfolio working as it was intended. We're not trying to produce identical growth in every country, every year. We're dedicated to producing consistent profitable growth across the division as a whole. Talking of sexy projects, and you would have seen some photos from this [indiscernible] during the earlier videos, The Rauheberg tunnel. This is a critical section of Deutsche Bahn's high-speed rail network. It's a tunnel is about 5.3 kilometers long, but it is a particularly challenging section in the middle where 2 geological planes cross and the tunnel is starting to deform or was starting to deform.

So we spoke with Deutsche Bahn, they invited us in. We came up with a solution using Jet Grouting, Permeation Ground tailored to the geometry of the tunnel to stabilize it. We work very closely with Deutsche Bahn because their technical ambition did not reconcile directly with the available access window and the budget. But working together, we came up with a solution they worked within their time, within their budget using sort of EME expertise from across the thing and some specialist equipment out of KGS. So at around EUR 120 million, this was our largest order in Germany's history. So we had to put 150 people onto this project. Delivery took place over a 5-month window around the clock. I filtered the project. Look, this is a German winter, snow. You're in a remote area, you're inside a long, dark railway tunnel for 8 hours shifts, and we had to take everything in with us. So teams worked 24/7. There was a team on site on Christmas Day. There was a team on site at midnight, December 30, 2024. And we had to have it finished because the trains were to run on a set date.

The real portfolio story for me and that is how we resource for such a critical project, we concentrated our core German team, branch managers, technical specialists on this tunnel. We then brought in teams from Poland, Romania and Czechia to help deliver other German work for other German clients. So that allowed us to execute an exceptional project without weakening the repeatable local business that supports that business. So I gave the people also the opportunity to take back that experience back into their own countries as they finished off. So now for me, that's resource flexibility and capability development at the same time. We had our challenges, complex around engineering is not about assuming nothing will go wrong with the major water inflow into the tunnel. But because of our strong client relationships, engineering depth and our delivery capability, we're able to respond strongly and positively when that happens. So the rail be tunnel shows how Keller works at a major project scale.

As I alluded to earlier, this next film shows a similar operating model, putting that all together on a smaller complex office development in Poland.

[Presentation]

You can imagine my surprise when I found out that the bridge was a building project, as a civil engineer. Look, I want to leave you with a couple of points here before I finish off. Look, Europe and the Middle East must be managed as a portfolio. It's just the way it works. And we actively shape it. We strengthen chosen markets, and we remove resources towards opportunity. The outcome we're seeking is consistency of growth and a sustainable margin of around 5% across a very competitive and diverse region. Growth is coming from building, market share and deploying capability where demand is strongest. It's not dependent on a good project, even $1 billion project would be nice to have or one individual country. So with that, I'll hand over now to Deepak. He's going to take you through Asia Pacific, very different portfolio, one I'm familiar with, with his own set of opportunities. Deepak?

Thank you, Peter. I think it's fair to say that most of our Keller employees are very smiling. So he's lead and he walks in Austral as a yard supervisor. By the way, my name is Deepak Raj, and good afternoon, everyone. I have spent more than 20 years with Keller and all of them in Asia Pacific. I joined Keller India as a graduate engineer and the second employee in the business. We're a start-up in every sense, even to the extent that Keller office was operating in a residential apartment. And for my initial year or so, that is the office where I lived at.

So the growth of APAC is not an abstract to me. I've seen the businesses develop, the difficult choices that we acquired and the capability that has been built on. Since then, I have worked across India, Singapore and Australia, building businesses, reshaping parts of the portfolio and helping develop the strategy we are pursuing today. So this is the reason I know from the ground and a business that is incredibly important to me. With that introduction, let me bring you to APAC portfolio. Asia

Pacific generated approximately GBP 400 million of revenue in 2025, which is approximately 13% of the group revenue, and we delivered around GBP 30 million of operating profit. The division has 3 business units: Keller Australia, Keller Asia and Austral Construction. Approximately 72% of revenue is generated in Australia and 28% in Asia. Across the division, we have around 1,600 employees, operations in 6 countries, and we delivered approximately 300 projects every year. These markets are very different in regulation, labor model, ground conditions and customers' requirement. Australia is a developed and highly competitive construction market. India offers significant industrial growth. And Southeast asia requires very selective choices about where Keller can build a scale and earn the right return. The central challenge has been to be clear, about were Keller has the right to win.

Let me first start with Austral construction, which is an important and distinctive part of APAC portfolio. It is a national civil and marine contractor with around 70% to 80% of activity in Western Australia, which supports iron ore transport infrastructure. We described that activity as pit to port the railways, roads, bridges, stockyards, [indiscernible] and port facilities that move either over from the mine to export facility. The [indiscernible] what you see there on the screen, though it looks pretty tiny, but it is as big as the size of Spain. Projects are remote, the rail networks extends over hundreds of kilometers, and much of the field workforce operates on a fly-in and fly-out model. That environment creates challenges. You need people, equipment, logistics, local experience and involve the trust of customers whose assets must continue to operate. Mobilizing itself is a capability. [indiscernible] long distances, often 2 flights one way. Equipment has to be maintained in hot conditions and every activity must fit around the customers live operations.

Austral is not arriving for an isolated construction package. It is embedded in maintaining infrastructure that has to work day in and day out, creating a repeatable flow of sustaining maintenance and expansion works. Austral represents approximately 43% of divisional revenue, Keller Australia around 29%, and the remaining 28% Asia. Alongside Austral Civil and Marine activity, the Keller businesses provide deep foundations, ground improvement, earth retention and grouting. Power and industrial work driven substantially by mining is our largest end market, with infrastructure and public sector work also significant. As you have heard from James and other divisions balanced by technique, sector and contract sizes creates resilience. For APAC, it also gives us options to move people, assets and investment towards the market where demand and returns are the strongest.

This chart needs a bit context. At first glance, revenue over the full period may appear relatively unchanged. In fact, the business has changed materially. In 2018, I relocated to Singapore to help lead turning around of Southeast Asia portfolio. Following a strategic review, we exited activities in markets where we lacked sufficient scale, and where the risk and returns were unattractive. Those decisions reduced revenue in the short term, but they were the right decisions. We are not prepared to retain volume simply to report a larger business. Following COVID, we moved from reshaping the portfolio to rebuilding it. The core Keller techniques have grown, and Austral has expanded through mining and infrastructure demand. The growth what you see today comes from businesses and markets we understand, have chosen and believe can deliver sustainable returns. That is the same portfolio discipline David described earlier.

Mining is APAC's largest subsector with Australian iron ore at the center of the opportunity. But our growth case is not simply a forecast on the commodity price or a bet on new mine development. A large part of what we do supports infrastructure that already exists and must continue to operate. At [indiscernible] Keller provides foundations, water management and cut-off walls, across the transport network, Austral works on rails, ports and prizes at export facilities we support was, ports, stockyards and bulk handling. And across the life of the asset, we provide maintenance renewal, remediation and ultimately, decommissioning support. That gives us several routes to growth, sustaining existing infrastructure, supporting expansion and optimization and helping customers with decarbonization, water management and responsible restoring. [indiscernible] maintenance and renewable element is important. This is not solely a new-build opportunity. Much of the addressable work is generated by assets already in operation and required to perform day in, day out.

The nature of the APAC market, it lends self to the larger projects. Many sites are remote. Mobilization is significant, and the infrastructure itself can be very large. Contracts over GBP 10 million account for approximately 36% of the divisional revenue. While maintained medium-sized projects, which is GBP 1 million to GBP 10 million, remain the core at around 50%. The important point here is how APAC develops these larger works. We may begin with a smaller package, mobilize people and equipment and prove that we understand the site and can deliver safely and reliably. Once the customer has confidence in the team, it can be more efficient to award additional work to an existing contractor compared to mobilizing a new contractor into a remote operating environment. The customer gains continuity and lower interest risk, while Keller scales the project from an established base. That is particularly valuable in remote locations. We are bringing in another contractor can mean additional mobilization induction, logistics and safety interfaces.

Now let's look at the future. The outlook across our core APAC geographies is supportive. With forecast construction growth of approximately 7% to 9% across the [indiscernible] sectors. We can see specific sources of demand. Australia's infrastructure pipeline, industrial and semiconductor build-out accelerating data center investment, energy transition and critical minerals activity and defense and resilience programs. In Australia alone, the infrastructure pipeline is approximately AUD 242 billion over the next 5 years. It is spread across transport, utilities, housing, power and resources sector rather than concentrate in any one sector at a time. The growth case is not dependent on every thing developing in the same way. We already have people, customers and operating capabilities in these markets. We are not trying to arrive after the opportunity appears. We are on the ground and able to direct capability as demand develops.

Let me demonstrate these through two cases. The first one is the major Australian iron ore export facilities, which exports 100 metric tons of iron ore every year, Austral is delivering 4 interconnected packages across marine and landside infrastructure with around 150 people on site at peak, all while the facilities continue to operate. We began with a more limited scope by delivering safely and reliably, we build the customers' confidence and earn additional work. That progression from an initial package to 4 interconnected scope is the organic growth model in very practical terms. The project also demonstrates the value of the wider Keller group. The ground included extremely hard granite. We transferred down the whole Hammer technology from an expertise from Europe to Australia and adapted for a live marine environment. We also deployed one of the largest jack-up barges in Australia to provide a stable and safe working platform over the varying title conditions.

For me, this project shows the APAC model clearly. A trusted customer relationship at a local level, Austral civil and marine capability, Keller technology and expertise and delivery that earns further scope. It also shows why the ownership structures matter. Austral could access a technique and a specialist from Europe without losing the local accountability that customer values. After seeing this remote projects, let's look at an urban project from our Australian geotechnical operations.

[Presentation]

What an exciting project. It really brought the engineer in me. And it also demonstrates how an engineering vision turns into value creation. So over the last 20 years, I have seen APAC develop from a number of small operations into a focused division generating approximately GBP 400 million of annual revenue. This journey has not been always straightforward. We made difficult choices, exited activities that didn't meet our expectations and rebuild around markets where Keller has the capability and customer relationships to succeed. Today, we have a strong position important customers, supporting long-term markets and access to Keller's, global people, technology and equipment when a local opportunity requires it. We know these markets. We know our customers and we know how to grow while continuing to deliver safely, profitably and with discipline.

With that, let me conclude my presentation, and I hand you back to James.

Thank you, Deepak, and thank you to Scott and Peter. So you've now seen how the group model is applied in 3 different portfolios and where each division sees the opportunity ahead. But I'm very conscious that in a room containing investors, analysts and bankers ultimately want all of this translated back into some numbers. And I've seen how many of you are doing like the newspaper and turn into the sport pages at the back before we've even got to it. So I know people have already got to David's section. But anyway, I'm going to ask David to come up and he's going to add it all up for us. David?

Thanks again, James. So let me bring the discussion back to the group perspective. There are three questions I would expect you to be asking. How sustainable is the performance we have delivered, how much financial capacity do we have? And how will we use that capacity to create value over the next 3 to 5 years? There are three parts that I'd answer. First, the underlying business must continue to perform. None of the discussions about acquisitions, buybacks or capital allocation matters unless operational delivery remains strong.

Second, we will invest and grow with discipline. James has set out the opportunity. Part of my job is to make sure we pursue it without getting carried away. And third, we are committed to maintaining and growing shareholder returns. All three are underpinned by the same improvements you've heard about today: commercial discipline, rigorous project controls and much better management visibility. The order is deliberate. The business performs first, that creates the cash and capacity and we didn't allocate that capacity between investment, growth and return.

I'm not going to talk through every number on this slide, but taken together, they tell a clear story. Revenue has grown, underlying operating profit has more than doubled since 2022, and the margin has moved from 3.7% to 7.1%. ROCE has increased from just under 15% to more than 30%. Free cash flow, earnings per share and the dividend have all increased materially and the balance sheet has moved from a leverage of 1.2x to a net cash position. This is not simply a margin story or a cash story, and it's not the result of one large contract. It reflects deliberate decisions about where Keller operates, the work we take on and how we price risk and how we manage delivery. The improvement is visible across the financial profile rather than in one isolated measure. That is why I regarded as a stronger and more durable platform.

You've already heard how we moved the margin of around -- from around 4% to over 7%. So I'll not repeat that transformation story. This slide is about what we believe Keller can sustain. Our view is that around 7% is a sensible group baseline over the medium term. But from the deliberate -- the divisional margin of approximately 9% in North America, 5% in Europe, and the Middle East and 7% in Asia Pacific. There will be movement around these numbers, projects, markets and currencies will have an effect, and I'm not promising a ruler straight line to 2030. But in a normal construction environment, I am comfortable that the group can sustain around 7% because the improvement came from the factors within our control, portfolio choices, commercial discipline, project selection and execution.

Our plan does not rely on margins moving continuously upwards. These are competitive markets. If a contract begins earning exceptional returns in 1 pocket, customers and competitors tend to notice. The ambition is to sustain a specialist margin and grow business from that stronger base. That operating performance needs to translate into cash. In 2025, Keller generated approximately $176 million of free cash flow and delivered operating cash conversion of 108%. Now there is an obvious blip in this chart, the negative number in 2022. That was a difficult year for profit and cash. In parts of the business, we had placed too much emphasis on revenue rather than profitable revenue, and we were also emerging from COVID into a rapidly increasing labor and material costs and some contracts did not protect us adequately against the rapid inflation in such a short time scale. The effect was visible in profitability working capital and cash, but we learned from it. We strengthened bid reviews, risk-adjusted prices and contractual protection.

We increased accountability for cash and working capital at project and business unit level and improved management visibility. Since then, free cash flow has been approximately GBP 103 million in 2023 and GBP 193 million in 2024 and GBP 176 million in 2025. I do not regard 2022 as a number to be ignored. It was an important point in the transformation and the lessons learned directly inform the actions that support today's margin and cash performance.

There will still be annual movement because of working capital and project timings, but the underlying business is highly cash generative. When we perform at the level we are targeting, annual free cash flow of roughly GBP 150 million to GBP 160 million provides a reasonable planning base. That is what gives us confidence in the cumulative target I'll return to shortly. That cash generation has materially reduced leverage.

Since 2018, we have moved from 1.7x net debt to EBITDA to a net cash position at the end of 2025. Our target leverage range remains 0.5 to 1.5x. I believe that is appropriate for Keller, more efficient than sitting permanently in net cash while remaining prudent for the risks and cyclicality of the business. But the range of the framework not a target we will force the balance sheet to reach on a particular date. There may be periods when we sit below it because the cash has not yet been deployed or because the right opportunity is not available. I would much rather explain an under-geared balance sheet than a poor acquisition.

The funding position is straightforward. We have no debt maturity before 2030. Our GBP 400 million revolving credit facility is fully undrawn, supported by 9 lending banks and running until June 2031. We also have approximately GBP 219 million of fixed rate U.S. private placement debt maturing in 2030 and 2033. So we have a diversified, well-staggered funding structure and the flexibility to support investment are the right bolt-on acquisitions. But financial capacity is an option, it's not an instruction to spend.

James has explained the strategic role of M&A. My focus is the financial discipline. We're looking for bolt-ons rather than transformational transactions. Generally, self-funded businesses valued approximately over GBP 100 million -- at GBP 100 million or less. The strategic rationale must be clear, geography technique or access to an attractive sector or customer group. There was the same 3 routes James described in the pipeline section. So I'd love to repeat the strategic case in detail. But strategic fit is not enough. A transaction must make financial sense. The earnings accretive offer a credible route to value creation and fit within our leverage framework and preserve the quality of the group.

Revenue synergies are particularly important. I know often investors treat them with skepticism and in many cases, rightly so. But for color, they are not a decorative line in the model. They are the purpose of the deal. Connecting an acquired local business or capability with Keller's customers, engineering equipment and technique portfolio so that both sides can win work neither could address as effectively alone.

And then there's integration. Buying a business is the easy part, integration creates the value. Any acquisition must become part of Keller sharing customers, capability, people, equipment and expertise. We will walk away where the quality price or integration case is not right. Over the period from 2026 to 2030, we expect Keller to generate approximately GBP 800 million of free cash flow. Our first priority is to invest in the existing business, maintaining our people, fleet, equipment and technology and supporting organic growth. We expect gross capital expenditure and working capital investment to remain broadly steady at approximately 3.5% of annual revenue.

Our second priority is a sustainable and progressive ordinary dividend. The 2.5 to 3.5x cover framework creates a clear link between earnings and dividend growth. And across the period, we expect approximately 40% of free cash flow to be allocated to ordinary dividends. That leaves approximately 6% for inorganic growth and additional shareholder returns. The split between bolt-on M&A and shareholder returns will depend on the quality and timing of opportunities. If an acquisition meets the strategic financial and integration tests, we can pursue it. If it does not, we will not hold surplus cash indefinitely in the hope that a suitable transaction might appear.

Where cash is genuinely surplus, we will return to shareholders. This is a medium-term framework, not a rigid annual quota. The proportions can vary from year to year. The discipline is what matters. Invest in the business, maintain a sustainable ordinary dividend, pursue only value-accretive bolt-ons, return surplus cash and operate within the leverage range.

We have created a strong set of choices. Our responsibility is to exercise them in a way that produces the best long-term return for shareholders.

So let me bring that together in the medium-term targets. Organic revenue growth of 5% to 7% per annum, a sustainable group operating margin of around 7%, ROCE of approximately 30%, cumulative free cash flow of approximately GBP 800 million between 2026 and 2030, and dividend cover of 2.5x to 3.5x with the dividend progressing in line with earnings over the medium term.

The most significant new commitment is the organic growth target. In the past, when investors asked how they think about Keller's growth potential, I would often say GDP plus. Not necessarily wrong, but it left quite a lot of room for interpretation. The better reference point is construction spending in the markets and sectors where we operate. The external forecasts point to the underlying growth of around 5%. The markets provide the base. Our portfolio and execution provide the opportunity to grow. We believe we can do that because of our local positions, the breadth of the technique portfolio and the ability to move towards stronger sectors and our capability on complex projects where relatively few competitors can match us.

The approximately 30% ROCE target is also important. We want to maintain strong returns while continuing to invest in pursuing the right acquisitions. We will not protect an artificially high ROCE number by refusing to invest in opportunities that create long-term value, but nor will we deploy capital into acquisitions that materially weaken the quality of the return. And the GBP 800 million cash target gives the framework substance. It allows us to invest, grow the dividend, pursue acquisitions and return surplus cash.

Now I'm conscious standing here as a CFO and trying to excite people may sound slightly unusual to those know me. But I want to be clear about my own view of these targets. There are not stretched numbers designed simply to win a headline today. I would not be putting them in front of you if I did not believe we could deliver them. They are based on improvements we have already achieved, the opportunities you've heard from the divisions and the financial capacity we have built. They also fit together. Growth is not being pursued at the expense of margin and the cash target is not being achieved by underinvesting. And the return target remains a discipline on how we deploy capital.

I know where the improvement has come from, and I know the controls and disciplines now in place. So when I say Keller can grow organically at 5% to 7%, sustain a margin of 7%, maintain a return on capital of approximately 30% and generate around GBP 800 million of free cash, I am comfortable that those are achievable commitments. We have a stronger business, a stronger balance sheet and a range of attractive choices. Our job is now to execute with the same discipline that got us here.

So James, back to you.

Thanks, David, and thank you to the whole team for their presentation. So at the beginning of the afternoon, I said we wanted to explain, to position and to excite. And so here's what I hope we've achieved today. We've explained what Keller does, why it matters at a group and the local level. We've shown you in quite a bit of detail what we do, where we do it and how we do it really well. And I hope we've made clear that the compounding conclusion from that story is that they genuinely are lots of opportunities for the growth of the business. We've shown you how Keller enables modern infrastructure and living, and we've shown you that in doing this, we create sustainable growth. We're a specialist engineering partner. We operate a critical early stage of projects and our work may be small -- maybe a small share of total cost, but it removes a significant share of the risk that follows.

We've also positioned the business. Keller has a diversified, sector-agnostic portfolio and a repeatable operating model. And the improvement in our performance is genuinely structural, and we believe the current group margin is absolutely sustainable. And then lastly, we've shown the opportunity ahead. Our markets are supportive, we can move towards demand with disciplined M&A opportunities, and we've got the financial capacity to invest and to return capital.

As we move into the Q&A section, I'm going to leave this slide on the screen. You've already seen it today. I'm not going to present it again. But it captures both the investment proposition and the targets behind it. So I'll leave it up there.

I think almost most importantly, you've met the team that's going to deliver it. Our strategy is achievable, and we have the people, the portfolio and the financial capacity to execute it. Keller has an exciting future. And I hope from today that you can share in that and can see the value from where we are able to create from here. Thank you very much for your time today. I'm going to invite my colleagues back on to the stage and they'll join me in answering any questions that you may have. Just bear us a minute while they bring up their chairs. We're running ever so slightly behind time, but only a couple of minutes. Conscious we have a hard stop at 4:30.

While they're doing that, we are very much looking forward to having your questions. if I could ask, please, when you ask a question, could you state your name, your organization and from the full year results, we know these things work. If you could keep it to a maximum of 3 questions to start with, that will help. If we run out and people want to come back and have more, then we can go back more. But that way, we can get as many as possible. And if you could direct the questions towards me, I will then allocate out answers as I see fit.

Okay. Thank you I'm not sure, am I responsible for choosing haul. Have we got the microphone. Very much Yes, 3, you've got 3

Three questions from me. Aynsley Lammin from Investec. Just firstly, on the organic growth, 5% to 7%, just interested where the current utilization is of employees and kit, do you need to invest significantly in that to deliver that growth? Or is there still quite a bit of spare capacity at least in the first few years? Second question, just in terms of the free cash flow, the GBP 800 million. And if you were to operate, say, 1x leverage, is the right way to think about that? You've got kind of GBP 1.1 billion or so of financial capacity capability.

And third question, it will be interesting to hear maybe from the kind of each divisional head, where they see the biggest gaps and where they'd be most excited to fill those gaps if you to do M&A in each of the 3 regions?

Thank you. Okay. So I'll take your first one. David will take the second one and then we'll ask each of the divisional presidents to cover the third question. So from a capacity utilization perspective, it's not a straightforward calculation because a lot of it depends on what that growth looks like. So you'll know that the average contract size within ke is about GBP 0.5 million. if we have -- if that growth all came in GBP 0.5 million contract size project, that would be a problem in terms of the capacity that we have. Equally, at the other end of the spectrum, if it all comes in a couple of large projects each year, then that's much easier for us to resource because you -- the number of experts you need is exponentially less.

What I would say is that the growth targets that we presented today are in line, as you've seen from the data, in line with our historical averages. And they're a growth rate that we think we can keep up with constantly increasing our capacity as we go. We don't have -- yes, we don't have capacity to grow that compounded 5% to 7% over the next 3 to 5 years. We will need to increase resources as we go. But I think we've proven that that rate of change, we can achieve that.

David, free cash flow and the leverage?

Yes, I think you're right, in, if you think of it, we deliberately call it free cash flow, and therefore, if we were to be up at the 1x, then that gap is additive in terms of the funding that would be available. And I think we're very comfortable about where we have the leverage at the moment, and we're comfortable about that financial capacity. So if we did go on a spree in terms of acquisitions. We feel we've got the funding structure to support that and actually accelerate the growth, which is one of the strategic rationale associated for us doing the acquisitions. So -- but we -- as I said in the session, it's a framework. We don't feel the need to be at 0.5 or 1. It really depends on what the opportunities are that are available.

And any major gaps in the regions, Peter?

Yes. Look, I think we'd like to build out the larger support structures. You would have saw the Poland project, deep basement, more and more of those projects. Europe is quite congested. Much of the toll construction will be in built-up areas. So there's opportunity for us to build that up in more places. We do have well in Poland. We do that well in France, but there's other areas we could do that. We're also in the Middle East. We're very good at building new islands, but more of the infrastructure in the Middle East now is Dubai tries to catch up with its growth. And Saudi Arabia is trying to introduce new growth outside of the mega projects. the heavy foundation support through that part of the world is important to us. So we're working on both those cases at the moment.

Very good. Well, white space in Asia Deepak?

I think Asia Pacific, I guess, that our target markets are India and Australia. So India, particularly over the last 20 years, we have built organically, but I think through the last few years, what we do is we do technology transfer from Australia, particularly CFA piling last year we did to create more market and opportunities, a range of techniques, but at the same time, while doing this land-based technology, we are also building a new vertical for marine, India marine, particularly as government invest in the marine. And leveraging Astral from Australia as well as we have hired experts from Netherlands who are based in India. So that is the organic growth whitespace, I would say. While in Australia, there is an opportunity, particularly in defense and energy market, as I talked about, big pipeline over the next 5 years. So these are the markets probably, I would say we got an opportunity.

Very good. And last but not least, Scott?

Yes. I look at it more as rather the way is a gap where the opportunity, right? We have opportunity and current market share that we can grow as a possibility that it's an acquisition that helps us do that. There are white spaces we look at that we see if it's worth the investment, we'll look to acquire there and grow that. And then there's the opportunity of a new pipeline, whether it's getting into power, near shore marine, we're constantly looking at that to see if that will help grow the portfolio as well.

Mark Howson from Singers. Just first question, I've got 2 questions. Obviously Keller is a service company, but that's backed up by quite a large fleet of assets behind that. Can you give us a feel for the sort of the average age of the assets base at the moment or participate that by the regions? Are you happy with the fleet age where it is? And does that 30% ROCE target assume the fleet age remains where that's the first more question?

Do you want to do the other 1 and then I will...

Yes. Second one, obviously, I didn't hear that much today on technology. I mean is there anything technology you can do to help you sort of improve the deployment, utilization, reliability of the fleet and also the design and service offering as well.

Perfect. Thank you. And good news, Brent, they're both for you.

Yes. Our average fleet age for the rigs we spoke about is somewhere between 10 and 11 years. So that varies across where you go. And we feel comfortable in that. We have brought that down over the past 5 years. But we feel comfortable because in certain markets, trying to take a new machine is not really realistic. So we try to keep that age around that 10 years.

As far as technology goes, yes...

The just the 30% ROCE, David, that is based on maintaining debt?

That point that was in the presentation was around the fact that we would continue to invest in CapEx. We usually do about GBP 100 million a year, along with the working capital, makes up to 3.5%. So we don't see any change in terms of that mix in the next -- in the coming -- during this medium term.

Excellent. Brent?

I guess do you want to repeat your question, just so I'm clear. The second question?

Just -- it was just on the -- anything about technology. What could that do to improve the deployment utilization, reliability to the fleet or the design and service offering?

Yes, both. So yes, I mean, what we're seeing is, obviously, being able to handle the fleet more remotely is key. Most of our fleet is able to be, we can see it. We can utilize it. We can understand what's happening remotely, so we can start to diagnose problems before they're bigger problems. So yes, from a technology standpoint and also going forward is how we take that data and then make it more efficient, make the equipment more efficient for us.

From a design standpoint, we're also seeing it as well, where we can start to code faster, our engineers, whether they're creating apps or doing other things from a design standpoint. AI is helping code so much quicker. So it's helping us be able to deploy things a lot faster than we were before.

I think -- well, I -- absolutely what I would add to that is data is a bit of a gap in our business. It's partly because when you go into projects, everyone will tell you about how different everything is. And it's true, right? We've talked a lot today about how local site conditions make such a difference to what we do. There are some common threads in there, particularly around equipment utilization. So we're moving quite quickly along that technology curve and as rents as we're controlling more of that centrally.

Camilla Ayling from Legal & General Asset Management. First 1 for you, James. You talked about changing Exco and Will Reed's appointment. Should we read into that, that an uptick ahead in these smaller bolt-ons, given the net cash position? I know you said nothing transformational, but should we be expecting more M&A on that front? Second question, maybe for Brent or David, about in the video, there was a lot of talk from the customers about optimal price [indiscernible] is great for optimal price. Clearly, price plays a key part as well as specialist technologies. So how much are you able to put through price increases when you need to, given that's a focus of the client?

And then finally, on the Slide 94, which is the capital allocation slide, [indiscernible] critical, I could say that changing the name of the company and the GBP 800 million free cash flow. You could have this slide representing a lot of U.K. businesses just in terms of priorities of capital allocations. So it would be great to have a more clarity on sort of return hurdles and that capital tension between those different ones?

Go ahead. David, you're going to get a second and the third question, just so you're ready for it. Look, on the M&A one, there was a bit in David's speech about making sure it didn't say me, but not getting in a way, right? We do have an absolute ambition to do M&A, right? I said in the very introduction, Keller as a business, it's DNA has been in M&A and acquisition and bolt-on things together. And we've had a bit of a pause on that whilst whilst Mike and David, in particular, had worked on properly integrating this business.

In my view, I've now joined a business that is ready to do some more M&A. However, the financial hurdles that David set out are critical to us. Finding opportunities that genuinely drive revenue synergies, like the RECON example, I think we're setting a relatively high bar with that, we're not just going to buy businesses just to spend the cash or to boost our revenue numbers. We want to find stuff that genuinely drives capability, be that geography, sector or technique into the business. But it's -- we have an active pipeline. And when I say actually, that means we're having conversations. It's not just desktop, it's saying anything is imminent, but it is active, and that's why we're bolstering our team to be able to do that.

David, sorry, first question then is about pricing and how easy we can pass along increases, and the second one is make our capital allocation less generic.

Yes. So on pricing, Yes, we do -- and you've heard it from all of the 3 divisional presidents, we do operate in a very competitive market and price is by far the biggest concern from a customer perspective as well. In terms of material cost increases that come through, through inflation or wars, we are a short order business. So we are able to pass on pretty quickly any increase in prices pretty swiftly with the turnaround we have in contracts. And where we have longer-term contracts, we will contractually protect ourselves.

And as I mentioned in the presentation, we probably weren't doing that very well 4 or 5 years ago, but we are now much more attuned to that. So if there's a longer-term contract, we will have escalators and are we will price the risk in itself.

In terms of the generic nature of the investment decision, I think I'd throw back to James' answer to the question in respect of we have options, and given the high cash generative nature of the business, and I think from -- we talked about the financial framework associated with the 30% ROCE, and we'll be looking at that in terms of any potential acquisitions in which we do. And then that kind of leaves the surplus cash for shareholder returns, be it further increases in the ordinary dividend or special dividend or further buybacks.

I think we kind of not committing to that because it's very difficult to lay out a pack for that in the next 5 years. We will just take that as we go in the coming years.

Yes. I think if I link the first and the third question, what I'd like to do next time I stand up here at a Capital Markets Day or in 1 of our results around. It'd probably be a little bit more specific about how much we're going to spend on M&A each year. The reason we're not doing that now is because we haven't done any for a few years. We've got to get the muscle trained again. We've got to go through and make sure we integrate product and make sure we deliver on all of the financial hurdles that we've discussed. Once I'm confident that we can do that. And once I can understand exactly how much the business can cope with each year alongside how much we can afford, then I think we can be clearer about how we'll split that GBP 800 million free cash flow.

Today, I don't want to stand up here and say, "Oh, I'm going to spend GBP 0.5 billion on M&A. Could you rightly say, I'm on a minute where does that number come from? So we'll continue to work on that, but I want to get started. So a number of hands.

Jonny Coubrough from Deutsche Bank. I'd just be interested to hear how you think you're able to manage or maintain improved commercial discipline as you move into more of a growth phase, targeting mid-single-digit revenue CAGR. And obviously, you mentioned that some of the profitability has been helped by scaling into larger projects. So does risk multiply with that? And how does that change?

And then perhaps a follow-up question for Brent relating to the fleet. What's the trade-off between owning your own kit versus renting it? And has that balance changed over the past 5 years? And I'll leave it there.

Thanks. So I'll take the commercial discipline one. Scott, I'll ask you specifically about North America and larger projects and then Brent absolutely owned versus rent. On the commercial discipline, I hope what we persuaded you today is that the changes that have been made in this business and the chart that David showed that took us from the sort of 3.7% to 7.2%, their structural changes. They're embedded. The processes around review of risk, review of contracts are better than actually sat in the front row here as an example of that. We have Katherine Shuttleworth, who's our first GC. She's been with the business now just over over a year, joined not long before me, but the first GC that Keller has ever had. That's the sort of structural change that's been made to ensure not that we suddenly think we can negotiate all contracts centrally, but then we have group governance over the contracts and the terms that we do. So I absolutely believe it's structural and embedded.

Scott, just an example about how we manage larger project risk versus smaller project risks?

Yes. So I mean the larger project, I-40 is a great example, right? It underpins our portfolio. we are able to lean on other branches to help support a large project like that, while we can still continue. It does create a stronger discipline when we look at work, when we have a large project in a branch just because we don't want to make sure we overextend ourselves, right? So it does create that bit of a challenge, but that's a challenge we look forward to because it means there's some good work out there that we're going after.

And Brent, own versus rent?

Yes, it's definitely changed over the past 5 to 10 years when you look at what the availability is, but that's very specific to markets as well. The U.S., they're readily available. You can rent a machine, what we would call a more generic daily drill rig, you could rent. You go to different other markets but not as available. So we're going to have to make sure we're focused on there to actually procure and own. But we still want to specialized equipment. So some of the bigger rigs, and the specialized equipment we're still going to have to own. And with the amount of work we have, we're able to keep that utilization pretty high.

I think I see a couple of more hands. I want to be respectful of time, but we're just, yes, Ben and then yes.

Rob Chantry, Berenberg. So yes, 3 questions quickly. So firstly, I mean you've talked about an absolute ambition to M&A. Given the rigor in resetting your commercial risk management, et cetera, is it hard to do the due diligence to find good stuff at a good price? Secondly, could you talk about the shift of the infrastructure stimulus, I guess, from IAA to Build America 250 in the U.S.? And then thirdly, German infrastructure, is there anything happening on the ground in terms of big spend? I assume not, but like any idea when it might start, what am I be focused on? Can you guys win?

Thanks, Rob. Okay. So German infrastructure, the straight answer is no. We haven't seen anything on the ground yet, but Peter, do we any...

Probably the earlier signs coming through or through Deutsche Bahn, a large part of that money was allocated, I think, $30 billion a year to Deutsche Barn. So like that Walberg tunnel. We now have about 3 or 4 other projects, not internals, luckily out in the open working for Deutsche Bahn on that rail renewal. So that's an early sign there for us.

And then on your first question around M&A and due diligence, yes, I mean, look, the nature of bolt-on is that the risk does go up. One of the things I'm very clear and passionate about is that we don't give a check to the people that do the work, right? So when we're buying a business, we need to make sure that the people that are doing the work and have the expertise because hopefully, today, you've heard very clearly that people are so critical. When we buy a business, we're retaining the people and we're retaining the key expertise and that somebody else is getting the money and going elsewhere. But I wouldn't say it's any -- particularly any more risky. Fairly -- because we want to stay within our own knitting from a technical perspective and from a product perspective, we understand our targets really well. So therefore, the due diligence could be focus more on the legal and the financial risk than the operational risk.

And Scott is a very big question about U.S. Infra, but in general, how are you feeling about?

Yes. I mean it's strong. I mean we are still looking at a lot of opportunities related to the infrastructure. we don't see a slowdown. I don't see a lot of projects hitting the ground yet, but we know they're out there because we're helping budget and work through some of that.

Yes. I think data centers is a good example, and we sort of expected to get a question about some of the noise around data centers in the U.S. But if you just start the headline, the data we've seen is that the U.S. is building about 8x more capacity than any other country in the world around data centers. India is the second one. So our view, not that you asked this, but our view in terms of the noise is that, okay, there might be some projects canceled, there might be some public pressure, but that's coming off a very high starting number. So we're confident that will keep delivering us with work.

And then the other part about the U.S. is it's just so federal, right? So state specific. So New York, I talked earlier about the Hudson River project. There always seem to be states in the U.S. that are investing pretty big in infrastructure.

Okay. I think we time for just 1 more, Ben, did you...

Ben Varrow, RBC. Firstly, on the new targets, in particular, the growth, intrigued, whether that changes internal targets at the business unit level? Or is it more so a change in external communications. And the second 1 is on capacity. Just coming back to that topic, particularly in the U.S., given the I-40 contract and the underpin the just intrigued whether you intend to accelerate the capacity in terms of head count into next year?

Okay. So David, maybe you can do the capacity one. The targets, absolutely, this is as much internal as is external. We went through a process of bottom-up. Budgeting in a business with a short order processes or short order book is quite an interesting process, right, because your -- a lot of it is about projects that we foresee and a lot of it is about looking at market data, but we've made sure that this is all completely consistent throughout. And on capacity, David?

Yes. I think with the -- particularly the I-40 projects coming through the 250 people with an underpin in terms of our future and it gives us more visibility than what we're typically used to. I don't particularly consider that we're going to do anything different in terms of the 5% to 7% growth rates that are in there. That just is a step change increase which we have been doing for which we've been doing for a number of years. So it is more based on a stable business as usual growth for the divisions.

Thank you. Okay. Thanks, everybody. Apologies for slightly overrunning, but it's good to get some questions. Just remains for me to say a huge thank you to you all for coming. Thank you very much to James [indiscernible] Investec team for hosting us today. I'm not going to make the mistake of trying to do individual thanks of my team because you always end up forgetting people. However, I'm also going to break that by mentioning just 1 person. And that's Nicola Rogers, our IR Director. I would think IR Director is a really interesting role. It's kind of responsible for everything from strategy development sandwiches and everything in between, but she's done a phenomenal job. Hopefully, you agree with me, this has been an incredibly professional presentation. So much of that is down to Nicola and her organization. So thank you very much, and thank you all again.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the presentation of Keller's Half Year Results for 2026. I'm James Wroath, and I'm the Chief Executive.

Before I go on to the main business of the day, very sadly since our full year results, you'll know that the -- my predecessor, Michael Speakman, sadly passed away at Easter. And I wanted to take this opportunity to pay a final tribute to him. The results that you see today and many of the themes that come out in terms of just how great a business Keller is lead directly from Mike's work with the management team and the changes that were made in the last 5 or 6 years have been fundamental in my belief to how Keller has performed. So very sad. The business will always remember Mike, but he did an absolutely superb job with Keller.

So on with the presentation for today. Firstly, the cautionary statements, which I'm sure is a slide that you're all very familiar with. For our agenda this morning, I'm going to take you through a snapshot of our results before handing over to David Burke, our CFO, who will take you through the financials in more detail. I'm then going to return to give you some greater color around our divisions, a view of the outlook and a reminder of our strategy. As I think you all know, we're going to be holding a Capital Markets Day on the 14th of October, and there we'll cover our strategy and growth plans in a lot more detail. And then finally, we're going to finish with a Q&A.

So a very brief results summary. The Keller Group continues to deliver record financial performance with H1 2026 being no exception. In fact, 2026 is on course to be the group's fourth record year in a row. Revenues are up 11% overall due to significant increases in both North America and APAC. EME is holding steady despite the Middle East conflict and a tough Q1 due to the winter weather. Operating margin was also up on 2025, leading to an impressive 17% increase in underlying operating profit. Overall, H1 is a good demonstration of our geographic and sector agnosticism, where we've pivoted to key growth markets and high-demand subsectors to drive top line growth whilst continuing to maintain our margin discipline.

I'm now going to hand over to David for a more comprehensive overview of this excellent financial performance.

Thank you, James, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to another excellent reporting period. The key highlight for the first 6 months is again the power of our portfolio. North America after going backwards in 2025 is powering forward. Whilst EME is down on revenue, it is picking up on profit. And APAC is up on revenue, but flat on profit.

This slide shows 9 of our most prominent financial KPIs and the performance of H1 2026 compared to H1 2025. Included in the appendix is a slide in a similar format that tracks these KPIs over the last 4 full years to 2025. For H1 2026, the picture remains very healthy with the underlying fundamentals of the business continuing the upward trajectory we've demonstrated over recent years. The most striking feature is the level of growth momentum with all KPIs improving against last year at quite a healthy clip.

So let's look at some details. This slide sets out the underlying P&L for the half year. Looking at revenue, we have excellent revenue growth of 11% on a constant currency basis against a market backdrop that hasn't exactly been stable. In the box on the right, you can see North America is the driver, albeit APAC is also growing from a smaller base given the buoyant foundations market in Australia. EME is down, but driven particularly by bad weather in Q1, fewer major projects and less revenue coming through from the Trojena project in 2026.

Our underlying operating profit increased by 17.1% on a constant currency basis, and we increased the margin rate to 7.3%. This again demonstrates the resilience of our portfolio where weaker pockets are offset by areas of strength. I will bridge that operating profit performance in the next slide. Net finance costs are slightly reduced given we have been net cash for most of H1 and the USPP cost is static. Taxation is at an effective rate of 23%, similar to last year. The underlying earnings per share have increased by 22%, driven by the improved underlying profitability and the impact of the share buyback. The Board has agreed an interim dividend of 28.7p, an increase of 57%. This increase is driven by our revised policy announced in March to be in the range of 2.5 to 3.5x for the full year dividend and assumes we will be at 3x cover for the full year with 35% paid at the interim.

We'll now move on to the operating profit bridge slide. Moving from left to right, starting with half year 2025 underlying operating profit of GBP 102.6 million. There is an FX impact of GBP 1.9 million due to the dollar weakness against sterling compared to half year 2025. Coming to the North America division first, which is up GBP 14.1 million versus H1 last year. This is an 18% increase in a market where not everything is trending in an upward direction. The principal driver is the Foundations business with data center and infrastructure sectors driving this phenomenal growth. However, within Foundations block, we've had challenges with the Miami residential market, seeing weakness with projects shifting to the right. This Miami business within Foundations have been defying the broader residential trend for a number of years. However, concern over interest rates and broader macro uncertainty seems to have made developers more tentative. We hope this is a pause rather than a downward trend.

Suncoast is up on a low 2025 base. This is the local team squeezing profitability out of what continues to be a sluggish residential market generally. The combined Moretrench RECON business is down after a strong last year. RECON has performed well, executing a sizable LNG project, but the main client for Moretrench continues to limit investment given the impact the Iran war is having on its input costs.

Now turning to Europe and Middle East, where operating profit was up GBP 4.2 million despite the reduction in revenue. The Middle East defied the market backdrop with improved volumes and profitability despite a temporary pause due to the Iran war. This is predominantly driven by the UAE with strong volumes and a change order on the Trojena project also helping. Elsewhere, the market sluggishness of Europe continues. However, the team continued to execute well, increasing profitability and retaining a decent margin level. The exited businesses delta relates to the Mauritius and Seychelles business we exited and represents losses not repeating.

We call out the U.K. separately given the challenges in the market with high levels of competition and a low level of opportunities, giving rise to pricing pressure. In the APAC division, Austral continues to perform strongly, offset by the Australia foundation business, which is up on revenue with reduced profitability due to Queensland weather, the impact of project settlements in '25 not repeating and price pressure as the business transitions between transport and new opportunities in energy, data centers and defense.

Moving to the next slide, I'll cover off non-underlying items. The analysis box shows the items that make up the GBP 5.4 million split between cash and non-cash items. We continue to invest in the ERP program and are getting close with the final build. We are entering into a phase of extensive acceptance testing that will lead to the pilot in Canada in early 2027, followed by the subsequent rollout across the group. The restructuring cost relates to the group's finance transformation program, which is now focused on North America.

I'll now move on to talk about cash. Cash generation does tend to skew towards the second half of the year with historic H1 levels being much lower and 2026 will be no exception. Whilst free cash flow has marginally increased, the conversion rate has reduced, driven by increased working capital and CapEx levels as the business grows. This is offset by a lower tax spend due to the change in the rules in respect of U.S. R&D deductions in 2025.

Below free cash flow, the major increases are driven by the return of cash to shareholders with the increased dividend and increased level of share buybacks at the half year. At the half year, we are GBP 32.4 million through the GBP 100 million buyback with the balance being what was left of GBP 50 million buyback in 2025 being purchased in 2026. In the bottom right, we highlight the reconciliation to net debt on an IAS 17 covenant basis to GBP 15.9 million.

This slide shows the monthly profile of net cash/debt. You can see for the majority of H1 2026, we were net cash with the final dividend payout in June pushing us to net debt. We expect the profile for the remainder of this year to be pretty similar to 2025 and hitting circa GBP 30 million net cash level after the impact of the share buyback by the year-end. Our funding facilities are in a comfortable position from a quantum and tenor perspective. We have headroom of circa GBP 655 million. This is a very resilient position, and along with our cash generating capacity, gives us confidence as we look to the future at organic and inorganic opportunities.

It is worth reiterating our margin performance and our confidence in sustaining margins above 7%. This is underpinned by the portfolio resilience referred to earlier and our continued focus on discipline and control in our bidding and execution activities. This is a snapshot of our order book with growth in North America, including the I-40 project driving the 20% increase. We have called out the I-40 project separately due to its scale and multiyear duration, which will underpin future years' revenue rather than the current year. James will talk more about the divisional movement later.

Finally, for me, a slide on capital allocation. We remain committed to this framework that we laid out in March. So no change here other than the value of numbers for H1 2026. We continue to prioritize the business first through working capital and CapEx, then continuing the dividends, and finally, the balance between capital spent on M&A and further shareholder returns through share buybacks.

That's it for me. Thank you for your attention. I'll now pass you back to James, who will take you through the operational review section.

Thanks, David. Our H1 2026 results demonstrate perfectly some of the key strengths of the group. Keller continues to showcase the power of our portfolio, and these are a record set of results driven particularly by volumes of infrastructure and data center work alongside superb Austral performance. But they do also come in the context of a slow South Florida market, one of our normally strongest performers. They come in the context of challenging volumes for Moretrench who had an excellent 2025. And they come in the context of a thriving but highly competitive Australia foundations market.

Keller's geographic portfolio aligned to our market-leading portfolio of products and techniques that enable us to win both small and large jobs is proving again to be a winning combination. On top of this, the quality of our people is ensuring that margins are maintained despite teams being very busy. Much of this is possible because the business has the scale to support itself where required and advancements in the last few years have transformed internal collaboration. I'm going to cover our U.S. I-40 project shortly, which is a perfect example of how all this comes together to deliver fantastic results for customers and for Keller. Safety also remains a strength. And as market leader, Keller sets the standard in our industry. However, we're not complacent, and our forthcoming Annual Safety Week is our opportunity to remind each other of this.

Now I'd like to cover a bit of subsector analysis. We're going to cover more of this at the Capital Markets Day, but I wanted to give a bit more color at these results because I think it really illustrates the power of Keller's portfolio, our sector agnosticism and our ability to pivot to the latest megatrends. This slide illustrates the top 5 subsectors for the group and for each of our 3 regions. The arrow denotes the trend versus H1 2025. Importantly, the top 5 represent less than 40% of group revenue, and I think that illustrates the breadth of our subsector coverage.

Aside from this, I'm sure nobody is surprised by the surge in data centers. They now represent the largest subsector for the whole group with 9% of group revenue compared with 3% in 2025. Excluding Suncoast from the revenue numbers, they're more than 15% of our U.S. revenue year-to-date. Data centers are also in second place in the APAC division, driven by new buildings in Australia. While we do expect the data center trend to continue, I also have great confidence in Keller's ability to pivot to whichever construction megatrends exist in our market.

Another notable trend on this slide relates to the decline in multifamily residential, largely because of Miami, this held up in 2025 despite an overall tough U.S. residential market. However, in 2026, as David just said, we've seen major developments delayed and the revenue in this subsector declining by approximately 1/3. All other top 5 group sectors were up with mining in APAC, particularly impressive due to Austral's strong performance.

Now I look at the regions in a little bit more detail. As David has already said, North America delivered a record first half performance with revenue up 16.7% to GBP 984.4 million and operating profit up 17.7% to GBP 93.8 million, both at constant currency levels and margin steady at 9.5%. Growth has been driven by underlying volumes across our Foundations business, especially within data centers, as we've just heard, but also in high-value major infrastructure projects such as I-40, the Hudson River Tunnels and the Second Avenue subway extension.

Data center demand is a true megatrend. We've done more of these projects in H1 of 2026 than we did in the whole of 2025. Again, Keller's ability to pivot fast to growth subsectors remains a key differentiator. The resultant standout contributions from our Southeast, our Central, our North and our Canada business units through strong project execution and commercial management of the increased volumes more than offset Q1 weather disruption and the softer South Florida residential market.

Again, as David said, RECON delivered a strong performance on a major Gulf Coast LNG project, offsetting the softer Moretrench trading. The order book is also up strongly to GBP 1.367.9 million, reflecting our major infrastructure awards and in particular the I-40 highway remediation expansion. The data mega center trend -- sorry, the data center megatrend continues, representing just over GBP 100 million of our work in hand. And finally, Suncoast stayed resilient despite weaker residential markets through diversification and disciplined cost management. We are confident on the outlook for the remainder of 2026 in North America with that record work in hand and a healthy pipeline, leaving us well positioned for continued profitable growth and strong cash generation in H2.

And now a little more in-depth look at I-40. So I-40 is the largest project by quite a distance in Keller's history. The job is to reconstruct the highway from the Tennessee Stateline to North Carolina following significant damage caused by Hurricane Helene in 2024. The multiple complex techniques required illustrate both the enormous technical expertise that exists in our business and the ability to marshal the resources required to deliver at scale. I think Keller has been transformed in this respect over the past few years with the One Keller initiative, a major factor in bringing the full power of the business to opportunities. This is a multiyear project involving a range of techniques critical to restoring to full operation a vital piece of American infrastructure.

Moving on then to EME. Revenue in EME was down 5.2% to GBP $396.1 million at constant currency level. Strong Scandinavia volumes due to the Lulea project that we talked about at full year were offset by Q1 weather disruption and fewer large projects than in H1 of 2025. Underlying profit -- operating profit was up 28% to GBP 19.2 million, with margin improved to 4.8% from 3.6%, driven by Middle East profit growth despite the conflict and also by strong European execution. The poor margin NEOM contract from 2025 has also not been repeated in 2026. Overall, the Middle East has seen resilient trading and profit growth despite the ongoing conflict. We've prioritized staff safety throughout and a brief productivity dip in March has been offset by a strong start to the year and a solid Q2.

As we look ahead, Western Europe remains subdued with government infrastructure and defense spend yet to materialize. The U.K. market remains particularly challenging with volume and profits down. The order book is very healthy, though, and it's supported by smaller jobs such as the 2 residential projects I saw recently on a trip to Warsaw. These are very much the bread and butter of Keller, particularly in Europe. Overall, the order book is up 16.5% to GBP 396.7 million, and we, therefore, expect continued improved trading in H2, supported by higher Q3 volumes and a very healthy tendering pipeline.

Finally, in APAC. APAC revenue was up 22.8% to GBP 227.5 million, driven by excellent momentum in Austral and record volumes at Keller Australia. Underlying operating profit was broadly flat at GBP 13.8 million, sorry, due to margin pressures in Keller Australia and the non-repeat of prior year project closure settlements. Austral continues to thrive with revenue and profit both up. I witnessed firsthand earlier this year the impressive civil works this business does in the mining sector and tendering volumes for complex high-value civil and nearshore marine projects for late '26 and '27 remain high. Indeed, we will be announcing today that Austral has won a project at Parker Point worth circa AUD 90 million which will go into our order book at the full year.

Keller Australia has record revenues on the back of strong public spending demand in areas such as hospitals and data centers, but profit has been impacted by pricing pressure as well as unusually severe Queensland weather. In Keller Asia, revenue and profit were broadly flat with India expected to see volume growth in H2 after a slow start and with investment expected in the market. Our Singapore business is benefiting from growing construction demand, such as the new Terminal 5 at Changi Airport that I and our executive team visited back in March.

The team is confident of maintaining recent momentum despite the order book being 18.9% lower at GBP 174.6 million. This is mainly due to a strong comparable period in 2025, where Austral won several major marine contracts. We still have solid work-in-hand, good pipeline visibility and supportive market conditions, and we expect the order book to pick up in H2, and it certainly helps with that recent win from Austral.

So the summary and outlook, beginning with our strategy for long-term value. Clearly, we'll be using the Capital Markets Day to outline our strategic plans in much greater detail. The structure we will use is the same as I described for our 2025 full year results. I believe passionately that the power of Keller's geographic and product portfolio multiplied by the excellence of our people and their performance can deliver a highly attractive pipeline of opportunities.

During the event, we'll use both Keller and market data to illustrate why this is the case and to be clear on our growth ambitions. We continue to make progress on all of our 2026 priorities. As David said, as an example, our new ERP will be ready for rollout at the start of 2027, beginning with Canada. And I've hired a new Chief People Officer, Matt Stripe, to bring real impetus to our talent agenda. But clearly, much more to follow in October. I hope to see you all there.

For the summary and our outlook, the record results, I think, largely speak for themselves. We've continued our focus on commercial discipline and operational execution and volumes clearly, particularly in the U.S., have been really strong. The H1 2026 results are a testament to this. We've got strong momentum entering H2 with performance as ever weighted to the second half. We remain confident in achieving our recently upgraded FY '26 market expectations. Data centers prove that the business can pivot to growth sectors, and we remain confident that this trend is going to continue for some time. But even more so, we remain confident in Keller's ability to pivot to whichever construction megatrends exist in our markets at any given time. Our balance sheet remains very strong with optionality to grow both organically and inorganically through bolt-on acquisitions. And I look forward to sharing much more of these plans with you in October at our Capital Markets Day.

And with that, I'll pass to a Q&A. Thank you.

Aynsley Lammin from Investec. I think I've got 3, please. I wonder if you could just give a bit more color on the kind of data center megatrends you talked about in terms of where is that kind of all across the U.S.? Are we at the very early stages of that? Do you expect that to get bigger and bigger over the next kind of 12, 18 months? And second question, maybe mainly on the U.S. as well. Just any comment around cost inflation, whether cement, steel, higher energy costs or whether anything has changed on energy cost? And then third question, just on the EME margin. Is that step-up more of a function of kind of better execution of some of those bigger projects? Or is that actually some structural improvement that we should expect to be sustained in that division?

Shall I take the first one, you take the second 2?

Yes. That's fine.

So data centers are pretty much all over the U.S. There doesn't seem to be a particular trend. And there doesn't seem to be a particular trend in terms of rural or urban either. They pop up everywhere. We like them when they're in challenging geological conditions because they require more of Keller's expertise to make them happen. And in terms of the cycle, I think we believe the projections, and I think the number that I've heard quoted is $650 billion to be spent on data centers. And I think we're still relatively early in that cycle. So all the noises at the moment coming out of the U.S. so the trend will continue.

Yes. In terms of cost inflation, I mean, as we've always said in the past, we are a short order business. So we get the opportunity to reprice if things do increase. And if we have longer-term projects, then we always insist on some form of protection, whether it is an escalation clause or we'll price escalation into the job as well. So actually, we're not seeing that much impact even with the fuel cost, we did a bit of an exercise in the early part of the year to understand what the impact from the Iran war was. Actually, it didn't turn out to be that material at all. So we feel reasonably comfortable with that.

EME margin, I think it's a combination of a few things. I think one aspect is the fact that the Trojena project, which we provided for fully in '24 came through as revenue in '25 with no margin. So that's not repeating in '26. So that gives the margin a bump. But also the fact that the UAE has had good volume through its business and at a reasonable margin rate, that has helped as well. And I think the other aspect with the rest of the business is even though the market is sluggish, they are executing very well. And you can see there's even a bump in profitability from the rest of the business despite that -- the fact that the market isn't great. So there probably is a bit more to go on EME margin, particularly if the market turns.

Clyde Lewis at Peel Hunt. I think I've got half a dozen, but I'll do half of them now and come back later. Canada, no mention at all on the North American slide. So it'd be interesting to get an uptake on an update on where you are there and how that business is performing. The second one on acquisitions. Is there anything in the pipeline at the moment? Are you getting close to anything? And has your, I suppose, geographical preferences changed at all? And the third one, I suppose going back to Aynsley's question on data centers. It's missing from that top 5 list in Europe. Is there nothing happening in European markets in terms of data centers? Or are you just not in that market at the moment?

I can do Canada. I'll take that.

Sorry?

I can do the Canada bit.

You want to do Canada? Yes.

Yes. I think Canada from a couple of years back has actually transformed its deliveries, had a very good year in '25 and it continues to be. That's why it doesn't feature in that bridge slide is because it's had 2 good half years in a row. So there is a lot of infrastructure work going on in Canada, and we actually visited some sites in Toronto when we were there a couple of weeks back, very solid performance in that business.

Yes. It was really inspiring. We -- I mean, we have lots of young talent all around the world, but Canada, in particular, we have some really talented engineers and they're working on big projects for the Toronto Metro. But good note, we'll bring out a bit more in the Capital Markets Day. From an M&A perspective, I think the first thing to say is -- and I can't keep saying I'm new, right? I think that's just about run out. But this has been my first 12 months with the business. And I think before doing any acquisitions, big or small, you want to take some time to just really understand where we're at. And also, as you've seen from the numbers, the organic growth is terrific. So I think we can afford to be patient with M&A.

I still believe -- and we'll talk about it more at the Capital Markets Day. I still believe that there are opportunities in certain geographies to accelerate our organic growth through using some bolt-on inorganic acquisitions. We do have a pipeline, and we are actively looking at things, but I want to make sure that they really do make a difference to the business and don't disrupt that -- the fantastic momentum that we've currently got.

Data centers, that's a very good challenge. And again, I think that's something that we can pick up in the Capital Markets. We just aren't seeing the same level of opportunities in Europe for Keller as we are in Australia or in the U.S. I honestly don't know to what degree that's to do with how many are being built versus Keller's market positioning. I suspect less are being built, but we'll pick that up and provide a bit more analysis at the Capital Markets Day.

Ben Varrow, RBC. First one, just on the order book. You've called out that the duration has extended. Is that just the I-40 piece or is there anything else to that? And can you also chat through the current visibility the group has?

Within that second question, early days, but thoughts on growth heading into '27. Is there any early indication there, particularly in North America? Third, just on the group as it stands today, I think the narrative has been that you're content with the areas that you are for now. But from a divestment perspective, is there anything that could be done there to further streamline the group?

Do you want me to do the order book?

Sure.

Yes. So I think we are at pains to say the I-40 project, whilst it will chew through a good piece of that $380 million of that signed up contract in '26, there's an equal spread into '27 and '28. And I think other than that, the nature of the order book remains pretty similar. In terms of visibility, we do tend to chew through 2/3 of the order book in 6 months and then the balance gets made up by stuff that comes in and goes out during that reporting period. We don't see any change in that. But from a momentum perspective, we are seeing good tendering levels that continues, and we have no reason to believe that things are going to drop off as we go into 2027.

And in terms of growth, I'm going to completely duck under that bouncer. We'll tell you that at the Capital Markets Day. We know how enthusiastically the market is waiting to hear some of those thoughts on growth. And from a group perspective, really happy with where we are. I mean, from a geographic perspective, David, alongside Mike have, in my view, done a terrific job of focusing us in on the markets where we can really make a difference, get paid, collect the cash and contract sensibly. I'm happy with our geographic split. And from a business perspective, I mean, yes, Moretrench, as an example, has had a bit of a difficult year because of the Middle East conflict, but it had an amazing 2025. And Austral goes from strength to strength and RECON is having a very good 2026. So I think there's enough diversity without it being too much, right, diversity in the portfolio. So I'm pretty happy with where we are.

Yes. And you'll see in EME where we drop out of Seychelles and Mauritius, we continue to look at areas like that. There's not too much left in terms of small areas to drop off. But yes, we continue to look at it, but I don't think there's anything material left.

And the model -- the way that the model has been set up, we're still able -- particularly in Europe, we're still able to pivot to countries where there are opportunities with customers that particularly want us to go there. So as an example, we've done a job recently in Iceland. We don't have a branch in Iceland. We don't have a team in Iceland, but it was a particular customer that wanted us to support them. So our Nordics team supporting in Iceland. So we can -- within the model we have, we can do that. But I don't think we need to go around putting any more flags in countries.

Jamie Murray from Bank of America. 2 questions from me. First one is what are the key bottlenecks that you're seeing, especially in North America where the opportunity is clearly vast and how are you managing that? And then secondly, just another stab at the order book. Clearly, GBP 1.9 billion is an unbelievable record that you guys achieved. How much of that is going to be executed in the next 6 months versus beyond?

So in terms of bottlenecks, look, it's always the same in this business. It's people. And it's -- to a degree, it's the operational executional people, depending on what the job is, sometimes the rig operators can be very specialists, and there's a pinch point there. Superintendents, the sort of site supervisors is always an area where there's quite a battle for talent in the industry. And then even though there's a good pipeline of engineers coming out of particularly U.S. universities, there's still quite some work to do to get those people in and to get them trained up and to get the right experience.

So when I referenced earlier about our new CPO, that's part of having a -- Keller does a good job at it at the moment, but I think we can do better in terms of planning that talent pipeline and planning those investments in people. So we'll be doing more of that. Kit's not a problem, particularly in the U.S. You can rent kit, you can rent equipment. So in terms of what we're doing about it, it is keeping up with that organic piece. This isn't a business where I could just go out and tell the team to recruit another 1,000 people so that we can do more work. But I'm not even sure we'd necessarily want to, right? We want to grow cautiously with the volume that's there.

And then in terms of the order book, as David said, we burn through -- you should sort of take I-40 out, which we've publicly disclosed what I-40 and the value of I-40 and then assume that the rest of it is relatively normal profile, which is that we burn through about 2/3 in the first 6 months. We actually burn through around 35% to 40% in the first 3 months, which I think one of the things when we talk in these results presentations, we like to talk a lot about the big jobs, right, because the big jobs are the exciting ones, they're the ones that sort of capture people's imagination. But the reality is that Keller's average size job is somewhere between GBP 0.5 million and GBP 1 million. So we are still -- as what I said in the presentation, the jobs I saw in Warsaw, they are very much the bread and butter of what Keller does. So 35%, 40% being burned inside the first 3 months shows you how quickly that order book turns.

And historically, we'd have somewhere between 10% and 20%, 10% and 15% maybe, that is more than 12 months. That's the bit that I-40 will skew. We'll have a bit more in that pot because it goes into '27 and even into 2028. So I would take off I-40 and then assume that our normal profile exists. Even with that Austral job that I mentioned a minute ago, that's a decent sized job, but that Austral already exists in those numbers I just quoted, and they do tend to have -- they're one of the ones that has a longer burn because they're bigger contracts with large organizations.

Second half...

Second half, part 2 is the tougher ones. Probably one for David. Did I miss the figure that you've got left to spend on the ERP program? Apologies if I did, but if not, could you let us know what that is? Second one around working capital. How should we think about the dynamics around inflows, outflows, probably outflows as the business grows going forward? So it would be useful to get an update on that. Have you got any material claims settlements to come in the second half of the year? So I suspect those are all yours, David.

And the final one is probably for James around the U.S. businesses, I mean we were talking about that sort of performing probably about as well as it's ever done. You've made it into a proper holistic unit. Is there anything you can take from that and apply it to Europe and Australia, in particular, I suppose I'm thinking about that, and you just haven't had a chance yet to do it.

Okay. Let me pick up. You didn't miss the number in terms of ERP because I didn't mention it. Yes. And I think, as I said, where we are with it is we're pretty close to the final build and doing extensive acceptance testing at this time, which will continue to run for the rest of the year. And then the plan is to launch in Canada now. And I think we've got to come to a choice as to how quickly we then roll it out. And I think that will drive a cost element. And I think we've got to make a choice around that because we could do simultaneous rollouts in different parts of the world or we could just sequentially do it, which would be a lower cost but longer time.

We do think there is significant benefit for us in terms of getting it in as quickly as possible. So I think the ultimate cost associated with the ERP is still something that we need to have that conversation about how we go about the final rollout and a lot of the work that we will do in Canada in the first 3 months in terms of testing that system and process will drive that decision.

Working capital, yes, I think you're absolutely right in terms of -- I would link it to the growth of the business. And you'll see that there has been an outflow in the first half compared to this time last year. I think the I-40 has a bit of an impact because there is inventory on that. There's quite a high material content, and that has bumped our inventory cost up. But yes, I use the normal metrics in terms of linking it to the growth of the business.

Material claims settlements in the second half, don't expect anything. I mean there is -- we do have a claims register. And frankly, nothing is in that register that will -- I don't think will lend from a material perspective in the second half. Never say never. And we've had situations where clients do go, okay, let's settle. But there's nothing in the forecast in that respect.

And then your question about U.S. performance is a great question. So I would say that One Keller, Mike and David's One Keller program has been pretty universally successful. So I think some of the history that existed in the U.S. also existed in Europe with different regions and countries not particularly working very well together, and that's not what I see now. There's a very collaborative approach. Of course, the one advantage that the U.S. has that I'd like Europe to have more of is scale. So we're massive in the U.S. and we have a good number of people. And therefore, I think that drives an overall higher capability. So some more scale in Europe would be good.

I think in Australia, yes, there are also opportunities, but we're already on the road with that because Keller Australia and Austral work a lot more together than I think they have done in the past. We've seen quite a lot of bids recently. So though Austral is more of a civils business, more of almost a general contractor, there are -- and they are experts in particularly in nearshore marine. There are elements where Keller Australia can come in and work with them. So we're seeing quite a bit more of that.

And then I think the final opportunity for us is really -- and this is mostly to do with how busy they are rather than how willing they are, but there is such capability in our U.S. business that I think they can help the other regions a bit more with some of the things we do. And in fact, we started a little bit of that in APAC where there have been some U.S. defense opportunities in certain parts of the world that are in that region. And we've seen more partnering up between the U.S. business and our other regions to drive opportunity.

Yes. And just to -- I think there is a bit of a difference, a structural difference between North America and Europe as well in terms of the regulatory environment. It's one regulatory environment in the U.S. So that's one factor, I think, because you have different regulations in France and Germany. You can't move a driller from France to Germany very easily. You've got to have German papers in order to do that. So that's one difference. And then I think the level of vertical integration as well is a bit of a factor in terms of pricing, not much vertical integration in the U.S. and a lot of it in Europe, which makes things very, very competitive.

We just got 3 questions that have come in on the webcast to finish off the Q&A. The first one is from Bruno Berry from West Yorkshire Pension Fund. And he's asked, the U.K. is a relatively small part within Keller. Any thoughts about the prospect for this market, level of competition or M&A opportunities? And then 2 final questions have come in from Rob Chantry at Berenberg. Could you give us some more color on the economic characteristics of data centers just in terms of resources needed, timings, length of bidding? And then the final question, having been involved in the I-40 project, has that opened up any broader scope for major projects, deals in terms of bidding capability, technical capability and just understanding of the process around major projects in the U.S.?

Yes. So I think if we start with the U.K., look, we're domiciled in the U.K., right? And it's a difficult market for everybody and the vertical integration that David has just described is probably the U.K. has got some of the most of it in the world. But it is an important market because of where we are and where we're domiciled. But I think we see there remain opportunities in the U.K. particularly at the more ground improvement end of things rather than the straight foundations. So we're committed to the market and we see those opportunities. And sooner or later, we believe that the U.K. market will turn and that there will be investments in infrastructure. So it's worth waiting for that.

In terms of the data centers, so we talked at full year about the number of jobs we've done and how much revenue, and it's quite easy to remember because it was basically 100 jobs for GBP 100 million of revenue. So even I can work out the math for what the average size of the job is. I think we've seen a slight uptick this year. I think the average size of the job has gone from GBP 1 million to sort of GBP 1.5 million. I think that's skewed by 1 or 2 projects where they've been a bit more complex. But in general, the thing to remember about what we do as a business is that what is being built is not the differentiating factor for the size of the job for us. The differentiating factor is the geology is what we're building or the ground that we are preparing. So a warehouse or a data center can have a completely different bill for ground improvement, ground engineering in one geography versus another geography. And that's got nothing to do with what's being built on them.

And the same applies -- just in case there's a follow-up question, which is around margin. Margins are not dictated by the subsector. Margins are much more about what technique are we applying to the job and how complex is it. And therefore, what is the range of competition that we would have for a particular job. But one thing I would say about data centers, which makes them particularly attractive for us, not universally, but in a lot of cases, schedule is incredibly important, right? Everybody is in a real hurry to get these data centers put up. And when schedule becomes the most important thing to a client, and we have to balance resources to meet that schedule, you do tend to find that margins are a little higher. So it's not universally the case with data centers, but I would say schedule being important is more prevalent in data centers than it is perhaps in other subsectors.

And then lastly, on I-40, look, we already do a lot with roads. That's why we've got that job because we have a lot of knowledge of it. I do think it demonstrates Keller's ability to do really big jobs. And I think that pre One Keller, Keller probably couldn't have done the I-40 job. It probably would have been too big. But now that we have an organization that has all the different branches and the different regions work very collaboratively with each other, we're able to share resources and meet the demands of a large project like that. That will definitely be useful for us in terms of referencing, I'm sure, because we'll get positive reputation from doing something like I-40.

Important to say, though, that that doesn't mean that we go to a strategy of wanting that bigger is better, right? Because as I said earlier, Keller's bread and butter is those smaller jobs and the smaller jobs drive the utilization of our people and the utilization of our kit. So whilst we want larger jobs, we wouldn't want to only be a large job business because that drives your productivity and your efficiency in too lumpy a way. So yes, great to have the reputation, great to have the opportunity to do more large projects, but definitely wouldn't want to just be a major project business. That wouldn't be a good route to go now.

Okay. Well, I'm conscious that this is a very busy week for reporting. So let you all go. Thank you very much for joining us today. We're obviously delighted with our excellent performance in the first half. Hopefully, it's come across how much we think it reflects the strength of our geographic diversification and just our sector agnostic Keller is supported, of course, by the brilliant people that we have out in the business. And as I've said a few times and ducked a few questions, we look forward to discussing our strategy in more detail at the Capital Markets Day in October on the afternoon of the 14th of October. In this very building. James, thank you very much. Thanks a lot.

Okay. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for coming. Welcome to the presentation of Keller's 2025 Full Year Results. For those of you who don't know, I'm James Wroath, and I was appointed Chief Executive last August.

Moving to the cautionary statements, which is a slide that I'm sure you're all very familiar with. Our agenda this morning, I'm going to take you through a brief snapshot of our results before handing over to David Burke, our CFO, who will take you through the financials in more detail. I'm then going to return to give you my initial reflections after 6 months in the business, followed by a summary and an outlook. And then finally, we'll finish with a Q&A.

So let's have a look at this results -- the results summary. The group has delivered an outstanding set of record financial results for 2025. This reflects operational and commercial improvements that are embedded across the business. Importantly, this has also been achieved despite a mixed market backdrop and a translational FX headwind.

I'm going to expand later upon the strength I believe Keller has in its business model, but geographic diversity, sector agility and resilience are definitely at the heart of the company's success.

Keller North America outperformed the wider U.S. construction market, growing revenues by 5% versus a 2% decline in the market. As expected, profitability in this division was lower versus an exceptional 2024, but nevertheless, this is a resilient result, particularly considering the softness of the U.S. residential market.

Again, as forecast, EME continues its outstanding turnaround. This was driven mainly by improvement in the performance of a previously challenging project in the Middle East in 2024 but was also supported by strong operational improvement across the businesses in Europe.

I'd just like to turn to the Middle East for a moment and acknowledge the current conflict within the region. Our priority, of course, remains the safety of our colleagues and their families, and we're in regular dialogue with our teams in the region. All our people are accounted for and are safe. Just to put the Middle East into context for the business, it's less than 5% in terms of our revenue and profit contribution within the group.

Finally, then moving to APAC. APAC has sustained its recent improvements with more revenue and profit growth, thanks to Austral and India in particular. The result of all this is an even stronger balance sheet with robust free cash flow generation, accelerating leverage reduction to a net cash position for the first time in 25 years.

These consistent returns lead us to be able to increase the dividend by 41.6% in 2025, continuing our track record of maintaining or growing the dividend since IPO. We're also able to supplement this return via the multiyear share buyback program launched last year. In 2025, we announced 2 tranches of GBP 25 million. And today, we've announced a further GBP 100 million.

I'm now going to hand over to David for a more comprehensive overview of our financial performance. David?

Thank you, James, and good morning, everybody. What can I say, another record year despite the market backdrop and the currency headwinds. In the financial results section, the key highlights that I'll bring out are the power of the portfolio, North America down as expected for market reasons, with Europe and Middle East and APAC more than making up for that. Another year of strong free cash flow generation. We are now net cash even after share buybacks. So I'll give guidance following our review of capital allocation.

Okay. Let's start with the P&L and look at underlying first. Looking at revenue, we have solid revenue growth of 5.9% on a constant currency basis against a market backdrop that hasn't been stable. You can see the breakdown by divisions with all increasing. I will talk more about divisions in future slides.

Our underlying operating profit increased by 6.5% on a constant currency basis. And we held margin rate at 7.1% despite a strong prior year. This is a very pleasing result for us and one that demonstrates the resilience of our portfolio with North America resi market challenged, the other divisions have more than made up the shortfall. I'll bridge that operating profit performance in the next slide.

Net finance costs are broadly flat and pretty much represent the outlay on the USPP fixed debt. Taxation at GBP 45.2 million is at an effective rate of 23%, similar to last year. And the underlying earnings per share has increased by 5.7% to 211.3p, driven by improved underlying profitability and the impact of the share buyback. The Board has proposed a final dividend of 52.1p, bringing the total dividend for the year to 70.4p, a 41.6% increase on 2024. I will talk more about the rationale for this when discussing capital allocation later.

We'll now move on to the operating profit's bridge slide. So moving from left to right, starting with 2024, underlying operating profit of GBP 212.6 million. There's an FX impact of GBP 7.8 million due to the dollar weakness against sterling compared to 2024.

So coming to North America first, which is down GBP 17.7 million versus last year. The reduction is driven by Suncoast, which is largely exposed to the residential market in the U.S. The price differential is predominantly driven by the great first half we had in 2024, not repeating in 2025. And the volume variance reflects the trough in resi in '25 versus '24 in the U.S.

Moving on to the block on foundations, down on last year given the strong year we had in 2024. However, I must say that, that differential is a lot less than what we envisaged at the outset of the year. The foundations business has proved itself to be quite resilient with margins holding up as the competitive environment has tightened.

The combined Moretrench RECON business has had an excellent year with favorable weather conditions ensuring more volume was worked through and with RECON undertaking a sizable LNG project in the Gulf Coast. The balancing order does include some legal settlements that came through better than our expectations in the year.

Now turning to Europe and Middle East, where operating profit was up GBP 30.7 million compared to 2024. 2024 was a low base for the division and -- but they have performed remarkably well in 2025. In Middle East, contract issues not repeating has helped along with the growth in the underlying business. All other businesses other than the U.K. have performed very well as evidenced by the green GBP 14.6 million block in what is still a tough market. The GBP 3.3 million relates to Mauritius and Seychelles, which we are winding out of from the beginning of this year.

The APAC division continues to perform solidly as evidenced by the consistent year-on-year performance from all the businesses. The Austral business continues to flourish and is building a sizable order book.

So moving to the next slide, I'll cover off non-underlying items. The analysis box shows the items that make up the GBP 10.9 million split between cash and noncash items. We continue to invest in the ERP program, and we are currently in the testing phase and expect to launch the pilot in the second half of 2026. The restructuring cost relates to the group's finance transformation program, which is now focused on North America following the setups in APAC and EME.

I'll now move on to talk about cash. The group continues to deliver very healthy free cash flow levels with GBP 175.9 million achieved in 2025. We continue to invest in CapEx, with gross CapEx levels continuing to hover around our depreciation level. Movement in working capital is predominantly driven by a higher level of advanced payments on a couple of contracts in 2024 compared to 2025.

Other call outs, cash tax payments have reduced given the change in tax treatment for R&D tax credits in the U.S., allowing a full in-year deduction. And you can see the impact of the share buyback in 2025 with the GBP 38.9 million of an outlay by the 31st of December. In the bottom right, we highlight the reconciliation to net cash on an IAS 17 covenant basis to GBP 59.7 million.

The cash generation from operations has driven the reduction to net cash on an IAS 17 basis despite the outlay on the share buybacks of GBP 38.9 million to the end of December. The improvement in December is predominantly driven by collections as the industry tends to pay up at year-end. Given this trend, we are well within our covenant limits. Our funding facilities are in a comfortable position from a quantum and tenor perspective.

We have headroom of circa GBP 730 million. This is a very resilient position and along with our cash generation capacity gives us the confidence as we look to the future at organic and inorganic opportunities. I'll talk more on capital allocation later. We are pleased with the level and quality of the order book. Whilst there is a reporting period drop, this has pretty much come back in the month of January as it always tends to do. I'll pick up on the divisional commentary in the following slides.

Coming to North America first. I've talked about the moving parts earlier. The team have done very well to grow the revenue given the residential decline outperformed the rest of the market. Looking at margin, the division has achieved a margin greater than 9% despite Suncoast's performance and the broader market backdrop. Looking at margin through the cycle, Keller North America is beginning to look comfortable at 9% -- at circa 9%. Even though the order book has reduced slightly, its quality and the visible pipeline gives us confidence for 2026. The team expects to continue to outperform the market and deliver resilient margins by focusing on key segments that support growth.

A fabulous year for Europe, Middle East with their margin gravitating to where we want them to be. The market does remain tough. The team have done a great job to grow the business, perform with excellence and deliver an impressive result. When the market turns, we are hopeful the division could deliver through-cycle margins between 5% and 6%. The order book has increased with some larger projects in the Nordics region. When the market turns, the team is very well placed to benefit with increased revenue and profit growth.

Another solid year for APAC. All businesses performing very well. The margin level achieved in 2025 is impressive given 2024 was helped by a profit on a property sale. Whilst the order book has reduced with some larger projects delivered in Austral and India, the pipeline looks good for all businesses with a bit of softness in Australia foundations. However, we do expect another solid year in 2026.

A couple of trend slides before I talk about capital allocation. Firstly, operating margin. This shows the improving profile over the last 7 years. 2025 wasn't the best market backdrop, but we still managed to achieve over 7%. This gives us confidence that the commercial mindset and contract discipline has really been embedded across the business. And this level of margin is sustainable through the cycle going forward as reflected in consensus.

Again, another trend slide, which reflects strong performance across our metrics. I showed this for the first time last year, demonstrating the step change over the last few years. This level has been sustained in 2025. These results and the movement to net cash has triggered a review of our capital allocation policy, a nice segue to the next slide.

Given the sustained financial and operational performance, the Board has reviewed our capital allocation and whilst not changing the framework, has made some changes in emphasis. Our leverage target is 0.5 to 1.5. We see no reason to change this. We have confidence in our cash generation and believe the [ range ] provides the right balance between capital efficiency, the capital requirements of the business and gives us significant financial flexibility and headroom.

Our primary capital allocation to the business, working capital and CapEx remain paramount. No change there. And in 2025, we spent gross CapEx of GBP 90.4 million. We are very proud of our dividend record. The group has a 31-year track record of maintaining or growing its dividend since listing in the stock market.

Reflecting on the evolving maturity of the business and the improved predictability of our cash flow, the Board has adopted an enhanced dividend policy, which will deliver a sustainable and progressively growing dividend, with a target cover range of 2.5x to 3.5. For 2025, we are at 3x covered compared to 4x in 2024, resulting in a dividend of 70.4p and a total cash cost of GBP 49 million.

We believe there is an opportunity to accelerate our strategic plans and enhance our market leadership positions through selective acquisitions. The value case for all potential acquisitions will be judged carefully based on clear financial and strategic criteria. We do have a pipeline, but no imminent purchase, which brings us to surplus capital and the opportunity to execute further share buybacks.

We launched 2 tranches of GBP 25 million in 2025 with the second tranche nearing completion. Today, we announced our intention to launch a further GBP 100 million buyback that we plan to undertake in 2026. The group's capital structure and the return of surplus capital will continue to be assessed on an ongoing basis, in line with the wider capital allocation framework.

That's it for me. Thank you for your attention. I'll now pass you back to James, who will take you through his reflections on the business.

Thanks, David. So I think the most important thing to say right at the start is I'm absolutely delighted to be here at Keller. And my #1 priority since joining the business has been to do nothing to disrupt the positive momentum that the business has delivered over the past few years, and as you've just seen from David's slides.

We deliver very locally, so I focused on seeing as much of the business as I can firsthand. I've learned what we do. I've understood the culture and formed a view on Keller's key strengths and the significant opportunity that we have ahead of us. This experience has been essential in preparing the ground for our strategy discussions.

So in APAC, I've been to Australia to see both of our businesses, Keller Australia and Austral as well as a trip to India. In Europe and Middle East, I visited both Dubai and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East. And I've spent time with operations teams in France. And as you can see from the fantastic photo, minus 15 in Sweden, the U.K. and Germany, and that has included our KGS manufacturing facility in Germany.

As our biggest market, I've also made a number of trips to North America, visiting sites in Canada, Texas, New York and Florida as well as our specific businesses of Moretrench, RECON and Suncoast. And if you pardon the pun, my key takeaway from all this travel is that this is a business with really strong foundations. It's built on highly engaged people with deep technical expertise and a genuine passion for adding value to projects, both big and small and across a diverse range of sectors.

Keller is really well positioned to take advantage of positive market developments and to capitalize on pretty much any construction megatrends. And finally, the strength of the balance sheet and our market-leading position in key geographies make Keller a compelling proposition for both investors, colleagues and customers.

So let's have a little look at how I see Keller's strategic process. I think this is a business where it's really important to understand history and the significant progress Keller has made over recent years because it very much informs where we are today and what our future strategic direction should look like.

At this point, I must also pay tribute to the work that Mike and David have done in the past few years to deliver a truly impressive improvement in performance. They've reset the business through a relentless focus on fundamentals. Various acquisitions over many years have been finally fully integrated and a culture is embedded that prioritizes margin delivery and execution within a clear geographic strategy. They've invested in systems and processes that will firmly embed these disciplines systemically across the group.

This means that Keller today is a disciplined organization, delivering consistent returns and a strong balance sheet. Our portfolio is diversified and sector agnostic with a commercially minded but risk-conscious culture of bidding and contracting. The 2025 results are absolutely testimony to this.

The group has demonstrated strong top and bottom line results delivery for a third year in succession as evidenced by David earlier. So going forward, underpinned by a clearly defined strategy, I see a lot of opportunity ahead. Without losing any focus on the fundamentals of margin, profit and cash delivery, I believe that Keller can evolve and continue to grow.

The Board and team completed a strategic review exercise before I joined, which identified the criticality of local market share as the key driver of earnings in our business units. Whilst we're the leader in a number of our markets across the globe, the exciting prospect for me as CEO is a significant white space for Keller to continue to grow and turn established regional market presence into new market leadership positions.

To achieve this, we must continue to invest to drive organic growth, particularly focusing on opportunities for deployment of our industry-leading portfolio of products and techniques. We can also further leverage the sector agnosticism of our offer by targeting customer segments where we are currently underrepresented, such as nearshore mining -- sorry, nearshore marine in India, mining in Canada or federal government work in the U.S.

Bolt-on M&A in certain markets can also be a key tool to further accelerate organic growth. This growth will be supported by process-driven operational excellence, harnessing the power of the global group and its strong culture of engineering innovation with the latest developments in technology and AI. And finally, as David has outlined, our capital allocation priorities underpin our growth strategy and our ability to generate returns for shareholders.

I want to pause for a moment to show you Keller's investment case. This is a slide that has been presented before. The significant strategic progress made over recent years, combined with our positioning for continued success, creates a compelling investment case for Keller. Although, as I say, this slide has been presented before, I wanted to repeat it because the essential elements remain true today. Keller does have a proven strategy that delivers resilient revenues, sustainable margins and strong cash generation. This is absolutely built on disciplined governance and sector agnosticism that means we can capitalize on favorable market trends around the world. As I look to develop this further over the coming months, we're going to focus on Keller's growth potential, underpinned by the engineering excellence inherent in our business model.

As I said previously, the central conclusion of the 2025 strategy work was the criticality of local market share. This slide illustrates our position across our areas of operation, but it also clearly shows the great work that's been achieved optimizing our geographic portfolio and making sure we are in the right places in the world. Keller has leading or established positions in our primary markets, but with room to grow either organically or inorganically or through a combination of both.

Our success today has been built on this strategy and the more recent disciplined integration of the group. We win with consistent high-quality delivery for customers in local markets, establishing Keller as a trusted partner and creating a virtuous circle that drives further market share over time.

So a little bit about how I see our strategy. Firstly, we anticipate holding a capital markets event in the second half of this year, where we will lay out our strategic plans in more detail. The focus of this is going to be on 3 strategic levers. Firstly, as you've just seen, Keller's portfolio of businesses and our branch network is a real strength. Geographically, we are well positioned to capitalize on favorable market trends, and we're in countries where we are confident that we can contract robustly and more importantly, collect the cash.

Our portfolio of products is also impressive. On our website, you can see 50 different techniques. Not every one of those 50 is appropriate everywhere, but the broad scope of capability is one of the key features that makes Keller a market leader. Furthermore, given we are the largest geotechnical provider, we can leverage our rig capacity to get work done quicker.

Secondly, performance is critical. The strategy work indicated that price and reputation are customers' 2 key buying priorities. We need to continue to be safe, efficient and innovative to deliver solutions that continue to generate significant value for our customers.

Finally, then we're going to focus on pipeline. This is where it all comes together. We have an optimal geographic footprint with the ability to deploy our portfolio of products globally. Growth in our pipeline will arise from more systematic and widespread deployment of techniques, allowing us to access new customer segments to drive market share.

I want to illustrate this through a couple of case studies. And one of the reasons I want to do that is because one of the main things I love about Keller is just how many inspiring projects we work on. And you can see as you go through this presentation, the number of photos from real-life projects, and I could talk for quite a long time about most of them. And I know listening from previous feedback that this is something that shareholders want to hear more about and this room wants to hear more about.

So the first one is a case study from Lulea in Sweden. It is where the lovely picture of me came from. This is an ongoing project. It's risen out of an investment that the business made before I joined in Northern Sweden. We opened a small office because we believe that there will be opportunities arising from an iron ore-rich area. This proved to be a really shrewd move as shortly after SSAB announced the construction of a new fossil-free steel mill in Sweden.

On receipt of some early requests for support, largely with the design for seeing concrete piles, our design team went to work and saw an opportunity to value engineer a much more cost-effective and lower carbon solution. The team brought together a range of Keller experts from around the world and deployed a wider range of techniques, including vibro compaction and vibro stone columns, dynamic compaction and wet soil mixing. In combination with the originally envisaged concrete piles for the heaviest load areas, this produced an optimal cost-effective design for the customer and was therefore chosen as the winning concept.

Furthermore, as we execute the project, Keller brings engineers from around the world into a relatively remote geography to ensure that we deliver on plan. Geotechnical engineering services are often bought from local contractors for local market delivery. However, this example illustrates perfectly how Keller can bring the strength of the group's collective expertise to win business and to deliver superior results for customers.

The second case study I'd like to talk to you about briefly is data centers, which is another area that we get a significant amount of questions on, has been a significant area of focus during investor meetings since I joined the business.

So following on from warehouses post-COVID and then EV gigafactories, the data centers are a great illustration of how our sector-agnostic business model can pivot to the latest growth opportunities within our industry. Growth in AI and demand for high-powered computing is clearly a global megatrend, and data centers present an attractive opportunity for Keller. We've got a strong pipeline of this work across the group, and we're well positioned to meet demand.

They're also, though, a good example of the importance to Keller of smaller jobs as well as our higher profile big contracts. In terms of contract scale, in 2025, around 90% of Keller's global contracts were less than GBP 1 million in value. And these projects amounted to around 30% of our revenue. A steady flow of smaller jobs is hugely important in our revenue mix and provide both a reliable revenue stream and the opportunity to maximize our resource utilization.

The Serverfarm development in Texas is one of the many data centers we've worked on in North America that fit this profile and had a revenue of less than GBP 0.5 million. It was a design and build project, where we redeveloped an existing site. And through our design solution and real-time adjustments, we completed the project in around 6 weeks, deploying 10 rigs and installing 1,475 piles. In 2025, we completed 120 data center projects in North America that contributed more than GBP 100 million of revenue to the group.

And finally, moving to a summary and outlook. Looking ahead, while we remain mindful of macroeconomic uncertainty, the group enters the new financial year with a high-quality order book, healthy tendering activity, a strong balance sheet and clear strategic direction. The actions taken by management that led to the operational and financial improvements achieved in recent years have continued to be embedded across the group, giving me confidence that our operational performance is sustainable over the medium term.

The majority of our markets are robust and bidding activity is at a healthy level. We're well placed to address the demand for our services being fueled by long-term structural growth drivers, including infrastructure investment, population growth, energy transition, climate resilience and the adoption of new technology. We have a clear growth strategy to enhance our position in the chosen markets -- in our chosen markets by continuing to offer solutions backed by our product and engineering capability and by focusing on higher-growth customer segments.

As we grow, we will not lose the exceptional culture of margin discipline that has become a critical part of Keller's DNA. And as I said previously, we plan to share with you in more detail our growth strategy plans at a Capital Markets Day in the second half. I am confident that the group is well placed to build further on its momentum and to deliver further progress in 2026 and in the years ahead.

Thank you very much. So as I said, we'll now move to Q&A, which I'll let David compare.

Rob Chantry at Berenberg. Three questions. So firstly, just a bit more color, I guess, on the North American and European M&A backdrop. Can you just give us some context around how many companies are out there? How many relevant? What are price expectations doing in both regions? Is there any kind of main reasons you've not executed any so far?

And secondly, Germany, can you just give us some more color on what you're seeing on the ground there with regards to infrastructure fiscal spend? We're hearing quite a lot, but clearly, it's quite early days. Is there any color you've got on key end markets or timing with that?

And then thirdly, Suncoast, clearly, the pricing dynamic was a huge factor in the '26 -- rather '25 results. Are there any remaining lags to consider going forward into '26, '27? Or would you consider full year '25 pricing normalized?

Thanks, Rob. So I'll leave Suncoast to you David. Maybe I'll have a go at the first 2 and then you can fill in any gaps. So firstly, M&A, look, I mean, even before I joined the business was doing a lot of scanning around M&A. It's fair to say that this is a very local business, as I said in the presentation, and that means it's highly fragmented, and that means there are a lot of potential M&A targets to look at. I think the strategy work identified a number of above 1,000 just in the U.S. alone.

You'll ask why haven't we done anything? I'll try not to say this too often, but I've only been here 6 months. So I do want to take time to understand where we might need organic help to accelerate -- inorganic help to accelerate organic growth. So I'm picking up the work that's been done, and we're looking at things in both Europe and North America.

In terms of price, a little difficult to say unless you get a lot further in terms of discussions. Clearly, David and Mike have talked in the past about there being a differential between the price in the U.S. and Europe. I would say that anecdotally, that's probably narrowed a little bit. I think maybe some of the very narrow businesses in the U.S. and the decline in the market and some of the markets that we're looking at means that some of the prices have perhaps cooled a little. I don't think that puts us off looking at acquisitions because for us, it's more about the revenue synergies we can generate from bringing our techniques to any particular acquisition. So we almost see that as an opportunity.

In terms of Germany -- sorry, David, is there anything you want to add on M&A?

No, no, that's fine.

In terms of Germany, I think we'd say at the moment, we haven't seen anything. I think we've heard the discussion that you've heard about potential future infrastructure spend. I mean the business has done some big jobs in Germany from infrastructure. You'll have heard about the Rauheberg Tunnel that was talked about in 2024. So we're well positioned for that. But at the moment, we're not seeing it. I don't think it's a great time to make big political comments, but I would assume that a lot of it is hanging on whatever happens in terms of the Ukraine conflict and where public spending across Europe has to be prioritized, but we're well positioned to capitalize.

Yes, yes. So on Suncoast, that red block that you saw in the waterfall diagram really is a representation of a pricing boom that was there in '24, and it was the first half of '24 that we benefited from that. That's pretty much been gone since the second half of '25 -- sorry, '24 and wasn't really there at all in '25. So from a look-forward perspective, we do think that pricing has normalized and really what will move the dial for us in terms of Suncoast will be volume going forward.

And in terms of our view of that in our forecasting for '26, we haven't put too much emphasis on that improving. I think it will really be dependent on rate cuts in the U.S. in respect of that moving. So I think it's in a trough at the moment, and it continues to be there. Hopefully, by the second half of the year, we should see it come out of there. But we're not building a whole lot of profitability into the forecast on that basis.

Aynsley Lammin from Investec. Just 2 for me, please. On the U.S., maybe just a bit more color kind of you said the order book is still good, good tendering, which end markets are kind of better, which are slower? And just kind of what are the people saying on the ground in terms of underlying trends of construction markets for this year?

And then secondly, I guess, just on the M&A, any indication in terms of size? What's the kind of level of market share that you'd like to get? I think you say 12% for the group, but when the margins really start to get supported in terms of a market share level?

Yes. So taking the first one, we obviously take a view on or look at the data around which major sectors we're seeing bidding activity. And for our business at the moment, there's quite an uptick in the U.S. around infrastructure and public spend. We've got a couple of quite big projects ongoing at the moment around the Hudson River, which I think there was a photo on the Hudson River in there and also on I-40, where there's a repair after one of the hurricanes. So we're seeing a bit of a skewing towards infrastructure and public and obviously, a bit of a downturn in terms of residential at the moment.

But again, David and I must have used the phrase 10 times in the presentation around sector agnosticism. That is the beauty of the Keller business model that we can pivot between the different opportunities that exist. From an M&A perspective, size, I don't want to put a specific number on it, but David has always talked about bolt-on, and I'm absolutely within that. I think you talked about less, that meaning sub GBP 100 million. I think it's probably a bit less than that, to be honest.

Our focus would be -- or my focus would be on opportunities that can drive either geographic revenue synergies, so filling in a bit of white space. It's not about going to different countries, it's just some country -- big countries, in particular, there will be certain areas where we could have more local presence. It might be about buying somebody where a technique, they were particularly strong in a technique that we'll obviously do because we have the 50 techniques around the world, but we're stronger in some places than others or it might be a customer subsector where we're not quite as strong. And I think the greatest value for accelerating organic growth through inorganic comes from acquiring something that helps us with 1 of those 3 things or preferably more than one of them, geography, the technique and the subsector.

In terms of market share, market shares are really interesting because it's such a local market, and I think David said this a number of times. When we think about markets, we don't think about the U.S. We don't even think about Florida. We think about Miami. We think about Tampa. So the 12% is interesting but sort of meaningless because it's more about what is our market share in Tampa, what is our market share in Florida. And the work that was done and the work that informs the globe that I showed earlier is done at a very, very local level. So that's where we'll absolutely be focusing.

Joe Brent from Panmure Liberum. Three questions from me as well, if I may. Firstly, can you give us some indication of the legal settlements that you talked about in the profit bridge?

Secondly, you talked about some of the faster growth areas you're focusing on. I would be interested to have a little bit more color on that. And probably related, you said that data centers has been a good market. Do you see that as continuing to grow from this increased level going forward?

Okay, I'll do legal settlement.

Yes. So you would have seen the block in the waterfall and the value that's on that. So these are legal settlements that happen quite often in the business, but I thought it was only right in the interest of transparency that we bring out the fact that in '25, we had some good ones that did just come through and they're embedded in that number. Sorry?

[ Is that the full GBP 7 million, I think ].

GBP 7 million is a net number in terms of other things. I think it's probably fair to say it's single-digit millions in terms of the overall impact.

And then on the other 2 faster growth areas, I would -- look first to say, it comes back a little bit to Aynsley's question, we're seeing infrastructure and public across the globe about 7 percentage points higher in our order -- forward order book than it was in 2025 actual. So that's certainly coming through for us. If you'll allow me, we'll talk a bit more about the sort of future faster growth areas when it comes to the Capital Markets Day because that's where I want to bring more focus to that.

But your third question, absolutely data centers. We gave some stats around North America in the presentation, but we're doing data centers around the world. They are very interesting, and there's a lot of them. I would just underscore that they are smaller jobs. So they're not likely in GBP 100 million in North America, they're not likely to make a massive movement in terms of our revenue numbers, but they are very good in terms of productivity and getting in and out. So they are pretty critical.

And they are also quite often, they are -- they play to Keller's expertise because they are technically reasonably difficult, right, because the data center has to be, as you'd expect, incredibly -- on incredibly solid foundation. So therefore, Keller's reputation, Keller's expertise plays into that. But as I say, on both those questions, we'll dive deeper, both from a geographical and from a segment perspective in the Capital Markets Day.

Ben Varrow from RBC. I'll do 3 as well, please. First one, just on the U.S. Obviously, you've outperformed last year. Can you shed some light on your expectations for market growth this year and whether you think you can maintain the same level of outperformance?

And then coming, sorry, back to growth as well, on a sort of 3- to 5-year view, just to get your initial sense of the relevance of M&A versus organic in that growth mix. And then within that, on organic growth, do you see many opportunities to accelerate organic growth without doing bolt-ons? Or are bolt-ons really the unlock to drive organic growth?

Yes. Would you mind saying the U.S. performance?

Yes. I think in terms of 2026, the order book, as James has mentioned, is strong, and we're quite pleased with the quality of that. Bidding levels are still -- the teams are as busy as ever in terms of bidding. And as we sit here today, we have no reason to believe that we shouldn't repeat what we've done in '25 and '26 in North America. There has been some weather issues in the early part of the year, but we don't see that as a challenge. We should be able to get that back as we go through the year.

And then if I could just take your other 2 questions together. I mean, firstly, they're really helpful questions in preparing for our Capital Markets Day. So thank you. And we'll bring out some more numbers as part of that process. Look, there are certain areas of the world that it's clear to me we don't need inorganic, right? There are some areas where we can make investments. Lulea is a great example, right? That's completely organic, setting up an office somewhere where Mike and David and our EME team suspected there might be an opportunity, turned out the opportunity was completely different from -- well, actually not completely different because obviously, a steel plant is connected to the iron ore area, but we actually thought there will be more work around the railways that are moving the iron ore around.

So we organically invested in an area and then a massive opportunity comes up and now our business in Keller Sweden has grown exponentially. So there are definitely those opportunities around the world. And in truth, Keller could choose to only grow organically, right? The reality is that's about investing in people and putting people into different geographies and different markets. In my view, though, some of that will be too slow, right? If you're trying to crack into a new subsector, let's give an example, federal in the U.S., right, where we do quite a lot of work for public authorities in the U.S., but not so much for the federal government. You'd have to hire people. We would have to hire people who are very experienced in federal bidding. But then beyond that, you have to have the reputation that goes with it and just hiring people doesn't bring Keller that reputation. So a 5-year plus organic time line could be much quicker to deliver within an inorganic time frame.

And then to your point about, well, where does that -- where is the proportion of growth between organic and inorganic? I think, as I say, we'll take that question and put it into our CMD preparation. But I think the reality is that what inorganic can provide is the spark for the organic growth. So in that example, if I were to buy a business that was selling 3, 4, 5 techniques into the federal government in the U.S. and I bring our other 20 that we're doing in the U.S. for different customers to that customer relationship, I drive a lot of revenue synergy in my view. So whether you then say that's organic or inorganic is kind of a moot point. The inorganic, organic debate for me is all about speed. And there are certain areas where I think we will want to grow with a pace and therefore, the smaller bolt-on inorganic acquisition will really help us to accelerate that growth journey. But yes, we want to take the right amount of time to be clear on where we really need to make that investment versus a Lulea-type opportunity where we can literally open an office with 3 or 4 people and organically grow.

Johnny Coubrough from Deutsche Numis. Firstly, in terms of capacity utilization, James, you mentioned that the smaller jobs are really important for, I think you said resource utilization. I'd be interested to hear where you think capacity utilization is across the North American foundations business. And related to that, I know David you're guiding to CapEx in line with depreciation, but presumably, you're still depreciating a lot of kit that was bought 7 years plus ago when -- since then, we've had a lot of increase in costs of machinery. So do you think you can maintain that through the cycle?

And then the last one would be going back to the portfolio and you had a slide in the presentation showing where you're market leader versus -- perhaps not market leader. I mean it looks like in Europe, I appreciate that's white space to grow into. But do you feel there are some markets where you'd rather not be in them?

Thanks. So if you can take the middle one, David.

Yes, yes.

So capacity, great question. And I'll be honest with you, I'm still trying to get my head around capacity utilization to a certain degree within Keller. It's quite easy to see with equipment. It's harder to see with people, not so much the people who are doing the physical work, but the management, the amount we can cope with from a bidding perspective is an interesting question. There are a couple of reasons why the smaller jobs are important. One, as I said in the presentation, because it's easier to move rigs from one job, particularly in very tight geographies where we have a lot of strong market share. It's easier to just move those rigs around rather than have them tied up for long periods of time.

The other thing that's important that we keep doing the smaller jobs is that I don't -- particularly in North America, I don't want Keller to become a very lumpy business just doing major projects, right? Because that may -- it becomes -- obviously, everything is binary, you win or you don't win. But if you're binary around just major projects, you can end up with space and time where you're waiting for the next job, and that's not good. So the combination of the 2 allows us to have much greater utilization.

I think one of the questions that -- one of the questions I want to be able to answer is how much is this business, particularly in North America, capable of from a revenue perspective. Now there's mix in there because you can distort that with 1 or 2 very big jobs. But understanding how much we're capable of and how much we need to grow the organization is one of the key questions before that CMD and understanding the growth plans.

If I just -- I'll take your third question and then hand over to David for depreciation. I'm really pretty happy with the geographic footprint that I inherit. I think as I say, I think Mike and David have done the hard yards in terms of getting us into the right places and out of the wrong ones. So I really see it all as opportunity. You're right to highlight Europe. All the markets are different in Keller, which makes it even more fascinating industry. But in Europe, obviously, we've got some very -- some of the very biggest almost global competitors there.

What I like about what's been done in the last few years, though, is we sort of have -- some people in my business don't me describing it this way, but sort of a hub-and-spoke management, right? So we will support other countries from bigger countries, a bit like we did with Sweden, actually. We didn't have a huge local presence in Sweden. We were supporting it from one of the other European regions. But then as it grew, we're able to then invest more resources and now Sweden is much more -- well, Sweden is stand-alone within that unit. So I think we have the right model with Europe. And I think as eventually Europe turns on its spend -- construction spend, I think we're really well positioned to capitalize on that, and I think we can grow share as that happens.

Yes. On CapEx and depreciation, I mean, you look at constraints in terms of growth. And I think James is absolutely right that we don't consider equipment to be a constraint. It is more around people. I think a couple of features of what we've done over the last couple of years in the CapEx space. One is we've got a discipline in around making decisions in respect of acquiring equipment. And there is a rental market for rigs, and we get people to go through the process of asking themselves whether we should be renting or whether we should be buying. I think as a result of that, I think we can -- with the rental market, we can ramp up as needs to be. And you've seen that with the Serverfarm example where we were able to put 6 rigs on a job in the space of 5, 6 weeks.

I think the other feature from the last couple of years is we have actually reduced the lifespan of our fleet of rigs over the last number of years. We're probably not 3 or 4 years off the lifespan in terms of churning the rigs across the business. And we are -- we do look a whole lot more at a global level in terms of rigs than what we used to. And -- but it's still very much managed locally.

And the one thing I always look out for as we start to churn through the rigs is when we do sell all rigs, are we making profit on sale of the rigs or are we making losses? Because if we're making losses, that means our depreciation charges aren't right. But actually, we've been consistently making minor profits in terms of any sales. So I'm very comfortable with the depreciation rate we've set in the business as well.

Clyde Lewis, Peel Hunt. I've got 3, if I may. You've not said much today on costs. Do we take from that, that everything is relatively under control and pretty benign? It would be useful to get an update on where you are there. And I suppose a corollary to that would be whether the sort of pricing and the bidding that you're out there for new work, whether that is covering any cost pressures that might be there. And the second, I suppose, third ones would be useful to get more of an update on Canada and India as to how the operations are going there currently.

You'll take the costs. Yes, I mean we are a relatively short form business. So we do get the opportunity to reprice. And where we don't, if we are entering into longer-term contracts, then we'll try to contractually protect ourselves. We'll either have price escalation embedded in the contract or we'll hand that risk over to the client, depending on what the client wants. So we are able to pass it on. I do think there is some investment which we are doing, and you can see there's an increase in the central costs. We have -- we are -- as the business is growing, we are bringing in the right functional level of expertise. We've got a new General Counsel, which is a new cost for us, and we've invested a bit in HR in terms of some of our processes and people as well. But I think that's all good stuff for us to be doing, and we are covering it in terms of the margin.

Yes, short order business, which means that, that link between pricing and cost is pretty well used muscle within the business, I would say, we're pretty reactive to it. Canada and India, so yes, really interesting markets. Canada was the first place I visited. So I know for those that are longer in the tooth with Keller, I think Canada has had a bit of a mixed reputation. I visited a business that's completely unified under one management and everybody has got very, very clear focus.

And a lot of really good young-ish talent actually, a lot of really strong engineering talent. And the 2 pieces of work that I visited were both to do with the Toronto Metro extension. So I think we're pretty optimistic about our market positioning in Canada, but also what opportunities there might be. And without too far into our sort of commercial plans, there are a few areas, one of which I did reference in the script around Canada, where we might be able to make some organic investments and see more opportunities.

India, yes, I -- it was my first ever trip to India. Actually, I've never run a part of a business that's had India in its portfolio. So it was a new experience for me, and the whole country is just full of entrepreneurial energy and investment. We are -- if anything, with India, it's more -- that we're cautious about those projects we do and don't work on within that market. And we're quite selective. We have a very impressively local management team. So I think not all but some global businesses perhaps bring quite a lot of people into markets like India. Ours is very much a local team, and they've grown up with the business and in my view, have the potential to continue growing with it.

The interesting -- or the most interesting parts for us are the things outside of the cities and marine is a particularly interesting one. So when I went, I visited an hour outside Chennai, which isn't very far, but an hour's drive outside Chennai and a port where they're sort of doubling capacity, and we're doing a lot of work in terms of preparing what was beach into capacity for more cranes. And just on that one specific, India is announcing more and more investments almost on a daily basis into their ports. So we see a lot of opportunities in India. We want to make sure that we capitalize on those, but we also want to make sure that we're sensible about the projects that we take on, but very, very exciting.

And it's one of the great things about Keller that yes, as I said in the presentation, there are some markets that are difficult, right, around the world. But the geographic diversity that we have means that if you're ever feeling depressed about a market, you can always spend half an hour thinking about another one where there's much more optimism and much more opportunity for growth. India is definitely my go-to if I'm ever feeling that.

Stephen Rawlinson from Applied Value. One of the things that you've not really talked about today is in and around your observations about Keller's involvement in early contractor involvement in projects, design work, which would be higher-margin business. It may be an agenda item for your Capital Markets Day later, but your observations on that. I mean, quite clear, there's a huge amount of expertise within the company. But if you talk to other contractors, they're always talking about much greater involvement in the earlier stages of a project in its design phase. You are obviously involved in the early stage of any project. But is there a scope? Do you see it now as an observation to get more involved in consultancy, design work, et cetera, rather than simply digging to other people's recipes?

So firstly, I'm sorry if I've underplayed it, right? The expertise within this business is enormous and profound, right? But very specialist and very much focused on our knitting, right? We know what we're good at. The level of education in the business through bachelors, masters and PhDs is really outstanding. And even when we're not paid for design, we're always pretty much -- as far as I can see, we're almost pretty much asked for our opinion on design.

And our engineers are -- first and foremost, they're passionate about being engineers, right? I mean they love working for Keller. Keller is seen as a market leader of us both as a business with customers, but also as an employee brand. But fundamentally, they're engineers and you can feel if you talk about a project, they light up around the details of it. And there's no way that I or David could say to them, don't share your opinion unless we're getting paid for it, right? It just -- it isn't how the business works.

But what I would say is yes, we always drive for higher margin, but the reality is where our margins are versus the wider construction sector shows you the value that we bring to projects. And yes, sometimes -- we're always better paid if it's design and build. I'd sort of characterize it as design and build, there's advice and build and then there's just build. But even the just build has a certain amount of advice in it. And yes, the margin will be higher at design and build level. But our margins are still pretty good at a build level as well.

So consultancy, consultants already exist in our space, to be honest. They phone quite a lot when they're doing their consultancy work. I'm not -- I haven't finally finished the thought on it, but I'm not convinced that's an avenue for us. I think the full service -- I think the integrated offer that we provide works pretty well. We just need to make sure that when we're giving that advice that we're getting our reward for it.

Take the project like Lulea, I mean, our team really didn't -- I don't think that was -- it wasn't design and build, right? That was a design done by the client, done by a consultant. Our team completely value engineered that design, brought the cost down significantly, lowered the carbon. And our reward for that was winning the project, right? Still a competitive market, very competitive market in some areas around execution. So sometimes we're trading that advice, we're trading that knowledge for making sure that we're the ones who win it and then we win the project at a decent executional margin. So -- but I take the feedback as well because if I've underplayed that, I don't want to, right? This is a business, where if you go and visit any of our sites and talk to any of our people on the ground who are delivering or the bid managers, it's just the level of expertise is just really incredible.

So I think that brings us to the end. Just one final thing I'd like to say before we finish because I know a number of you have been in and around Keller for a number of years. This is sadly, but maybe not for her, Caroline Crampton's last day with Keller. She stayed with us until today's results day. I have only obviously worked with Caroline for 6 months, but I wanted to publicly say she is an absolute outstanding IR professional. Keller has been very lucky to have her. We wish her all the best wishes for her trip to Vietnam. She's not leaving us because she doesn't like me, by the way. Maybe she is, I haven't asked her. But we wish her all the very best for her travels. Huge thank you, and yes, good luck.

Yes. Just to add to that in terms of the last 5 years, it's been a real pleasure. These days and the weeks that follow have been made a whole lot easier, and I'm sure the guys who have been interacting with you will also agree. So thank you very much for your time. We'll miss you desperately, but we've got Nicola to take us forward. But yes, it's real shame, but good luck, and thank you very much.

Thank you, Caroline. And thanks, everyone, for coming.