Good morning and welcome to Kier Group's full-year 2025 bondholder call. The Group CEO, Andrew Davies, and CFO, Simon Kesterton, will share some brief opening remarks on the Group's performance before giving the bondholders the opportunity to ask any questions. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two on your telephone keypad. Please, Andrew and Simon, go ahead.
Okay, good morning everyone. First, we could just find out who's online first. We know we've got people to talk to.
No, I believe that we've got HSBC on and S&P and a couple of our internal colleagues at the moment. I don't think we've got anyone of the investors on currently.
Right, so.
As S&P have dialed in, you should give them an assurance on how you feel the numbers have gone down.
Perfect. Okay, good morning everyone then. Y ou've got the pack which we distributed and you should have online, which we're using at the results presentation and therefore with all the debt and equity calls. The page I'd suggest we start at is page 11, if you could go to it in your pack, which is headlined "Our Access to U.K. Infrastructure Via Frameworks." That sort of summarizes what we see in the market at the moment with the opportunity that Kier has. T he government has announced a pipeline of £725 billion worth of investment that it would like to make in infrastructure in the U.K. over 10 years. I t's set itself up organizationally with organizations like NISTA based in Treasury to monitor, to approve that investment.
It's also underpinned that investment with a three-year spending commitment, which they settled as part of the Spending Review in June 2025. That's important because that gives us a high degree of confidence for certainly the next three years, if not for 10 years, in the scope and the opportunity we've got ahead of us. T he question then comes is, how do you access that pipeline of work? And if you go down to the slide, you see the addressable market, which we estimate to be GBP 156 billion. T hat's made up of the framework positions we've got in the sectors we've outlined there, like health, education, postal, housing defense, et cetera. T hat GBP 156 billion is the value, the advertised value of the frameworks which Kier has positions on. And the frameworks can be anything from 5 to 10 years.
They can have anywhere sort of five to sort of 10 people or entities on them as well. Clearly, you're not going to access all GBP 156 billion, but the point here is the frameworks act as a chinning bar to get access to that GBP 725 billion opportunity. If you're not on the framework, invariably you simply cannot bid for those contracts within that pipeline. Kier has got an extremely strong position in frameworks, and that really is our hopper which then feeds our order book.
Our order book of GBP 11 billion is made up of contracted income and also income which we deem profitable, and that's really positions where we're in a two-stage negotiation with a client on an exclusive basis for a funded contract, and really what you're doing there is you're allocating risks, getting the pricing right, the terms and conditions right, getting your program finessed, et cetera.
Invariably, they don't always end up in a contract. It's very rare they don't. Simon and the finance team have very high degrees of confidence that that GBP 11 billion order book is absolutely real and is fed by the GBP 156 billion addressable market and framework positions we have. So the point we're saying there is that we've got very strong visibility of our future revenues. I f you just turn the page to page 12, what this really says there, that translates into 91% coverage of our FY26 revenues and 70% for FY27. I f you look at the graph below, the reality is, whilst we did burn through the 91% and the 70%, it's underpinned by those framework positions. So we're very confident in our revenue forecast as sort of certainly for five years. I ndeed, there's a government commitment through 10 years.
The question we're always asked is, how is government going to afford this? And that's a very valid question. T hey will have to embrace private finance in many ways. But let's not forget some of our frameworks, of course, with water companies or energy companies which are privately funded. T hey're out of government finances. And we've a very, very high degree of confidence because given the state of the water industries, infrastructure, and the environmental and social pressures on them, as well as the regulatory pressures that that money will get expended. W e'll probably touch on that a little bit later. T he outlook, the hopper, the framework positions, the order book give us a very high degree of confidence in the visibility of future, the medium-term future revenues.
If we then just go back, and this is where it gets probably more relevant and interesting, the highlights, excuse me, on page four. We're turning that record order book of £11 billion and the visibility it's giving us into good growth, and we're turning that revenue into profit with, I think, with cash. Our free cash flow the last year was £155 million, slightly less than the prior year, but that prior year, we had very strong working capital inflows due to the recovery in revenues which we've had over the last two years. £155 million is bang on where we want it to be, an excellent performance and ahead of our conversion in our long-term target, and that's given us options then how to allocate our capital.
Simon has options, and we've left it to increase our dividend, final dividend to 5.2, which means a 7.2 annual dividend. That's a 38% increase. M ore tellingly, we've met our target of the three times cover on dividend. We're halfway through our £20 million buyback. W e've invested our investment in property, now shared over £200 million, which when that matures, that investment will deliver us 50% royalty by probably the back end of FY27, certainly by FY28 as well. W hy are we confident? Well, on page five, this is the track record of delivery. We've had really consistent delivery for the last five years. You can see all of the graphs going consistently the right direction and probably telling you the one on the bottom right, the average month-end net debt has reduced through various mechanisms to £582 million.
That's our monthly net debt figure in FY21 down to GBP 49 million, which is exactly where we want to be, allowing us to then make these investment choices and allocation of capital choices. So our performance has been excellent over the last four or five years, giving us very strong confidence that Simon and Stuart, my successor as CEO, will really drive the performance on in this business and turn our future revenues into, as we say, good profit and cashback profits. I'll probably just stop there, the introduction, and really sort of open it up for questions or anyone wants to talk about any of the numbers and specifics.
Okay, I can ask if you remind the callers how they can lodge a question, please.
Yes, thank you. To ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star followed by one now. We currently have no questions. I will hand back to Mark.
Thanks, Clare. It's Mark Downey, everyone. I will take the lack of questions and ringing endorsement of Andrew, Simon, and Stuart's company. As always, you have my email address. You have our investor relations email address. If there are any questions subsequently that you'd like to ask, please don't hesitate to get in touch. I think, as you can tell from our numbers, we're quite proud of them, and I'm happy to talk about them. P lease ask any questions you have down the line. Thank you very much all, and have a good day.
Thank you all.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.