AGM 2026

Sep 8, 2026

Slides

Summary

FY26 brought further margin improvement, profit growth and cash generation while maintaining low leverage. Priorities include growth markets, India expansion and cyber preparedness; FY27 progress is expected in line with market expectations.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the 2026 Annual General Meeting for Trifast PLC. My name is Christopher Morgan, and I am the Company Secretary. Before we start the formal business of the meeting, just a couple of housekeeping points for everyone. There is no planned fire drill during the course of this meeting, and not even today. Should the fire alarm sound, can you make your way through the doors, steps back up the stairs and exit on the side door, which is straight in front of you as you go up the stairs and follow the lit-up exit signs on the way. The team here from OSiT, the company that run this building, will ensure that we exit the building safely, and there is a congregation point outside. Thank you. If I could now please introduce you to the company's Chair, Serena Lang. Thank you very much, Christopher, and good afternoon to you all and a warm welcome from me as well, for those both here in the room and for everyone online. The last 12 months have seen another step in the rebuild process, and we have continued with the company's transformation, establishing a more resilient and sustainable business. I have spent the last 12 months going around the business, visiting our people and seeing our operations, and I continue to be extremely impressed by all the good work that our people are doing. Of course, now we are working in this environment where there is always something else that we have got to contemplate or another bit of tariff or something that we are looking at. Yet despite that, our teams continue to push ahead and focus on those core structures that we have put in place. Let me take the opportunity to introduce the board to you, first of all. On my right-hand side here, our CEO, Iain Percival, and next to Iain is Nicholas Mills, our Non-Executive Director. Next to Nick is Kate Ferguson, our CFO. Clive Thomas, our Senior Independent Director, Laura Whyte, who is our Chair of Remuneration, and Louis Eperjesi, who is our Non-Executive Director. I think we are continuing to be a really strong business. We are continuing to ensure that as we rebuild the business, we are building from a place of strength, and I think that shows through in the numbers that we have got. But I do not want to take the thunder away from Iain. Iain is going to do a presentation to you on where he is and what the team have been doing. With that, Iain, I will hand over to you. Thanks very much, Serena. Let me add my welcome and thanks to all of our shareholders, both here in the room and those of you that are joining online. We are very grateful for your continued support into Trifast as a company. Before I get stuck into the presentation business update, I wanted to share with you a short video, new video that hopefully some of you will have seen online. It is really focusing on how we are driving forward into our supply chain solutions value proposition. Let us play the video. Every application relies on thousands of critical components, but achieving manufacturing excellence depends on much more than simply purchasing the right parts. For many manufacturers, managing low-cost, high-volume category C components can be surprisingly complex and resource intensive. Valuable engineering, procurement, and production time can be consumed managing suppliers, processing orders, monitoring inventory, and reacting to shortages. At Trifast, we remove that complexity. As a strategic engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain partner, we take full ownership of the category C component supply chain from design support and component optimization, through to global sourcing, quality management, inventory control, and point-of-use delivery. Our intelligent inventory management solutions combine digital technology, real-time data, and tailored replenishment strategies to ensure the right components are available at the right place at the right time, keeping production moving without unnecessary stock, waste, or administration. With a global manufacturing footprint, technical expertise in smart infrastructure, medical and automotive applications, and a focus on continuous improvement, Trifast transforms component management from a daily challenge into a streamlined, efficient process. Because our role is not just to supply components, our role is to remove complexity, reduce total cost of ownership, and improve how products are designed, built, and delivered. Trifast PLC, engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain solutions designed around your success. Great stuff. I think you'll agree. Just a quick snapshot of who Trifast are, who we are as we meet today. We are 1,100 employees, all working each and every day to deliver and execute on our strategy of great quality, great service to our customers wherever they happen to be. Delivering on that value proposition of engineering excellence, manufacturing capability, as highlighted in the video, supply chain simplification and solutions. We're present in 18 countries around the world, and we supply and support more than 6,000 customers. As Serena mentioned, we've been executing the strategy that we laid out to shareholders and investors back in 2024, successfully delivering the first phase of that strategy, the recover phase, at the end of our FY 2025 financial period. It was really great for Kate and myself to be able to present our full year results just a couple of months ago in July, for our FY 2026, the first full year of our rebuild phase of this strategy, where we were able to demonstrate further progression in margin enhancement, profit improvement, cash generation, with a maintained focus on capital discipline, keeping low leverage. How have we been executing the strategy? Well, really, I think there are three key messages for shareholders in the room. It is about strategically repositioning the business into relationships with customers, where the value we deliver for them, whether that is in our engineering expertise, which is a highly differentiated value that we bring to our customers, or whether it is through supply chain solutions like you saw in the video. It is really encouraging to see that since we started out on this strategy, we now have more than 60% of our customer revenue defined by one or both of those core differentiated value propositions. It is about positioning the business into growth sectors and growth markets. I will talk later about smart infrastructure in particular. But we are also investing into the business for growth in those end markets, whether that is in engineering capability, in sales capability, or indeed in physical assets and infrastructure. It has been about improving the commercial execution and processes and discipline rigor using data that we now have available at our fingertips as a result of the investments that we are making into modern, AI-supported D365 ERP platforms. So very focused activity to drive and execute this strategy in the business. Look, there is lots more about the great work that our 1,100 employees do each and every day, and some fab examples of this strategy in action that you can read online, that it covers all four of our key strategic initiatives. So please, take the time to read the material and celebrate with us the work that our teams have been doing during the last year. Our journey is very clear. It is about repositioning and getting our business back to double-digit EBIT margins. You can see from this chart on the left how each year we have successfully, through that focused execution, been delivering on that journey of enhancing the EBIT margin. Again, doing that through strategic repositioning of where we play with which customers in which markets, and making sure that we use the process, the data, the capabilities, the team that we have available and that we have invested in to drive that execution. Now, often I get asked about fasteners. Well, why are fasteners so critical? Each one of the products we supply, whether it is a male threaded fastener, like a screw or a bolt, or whether it is a clip or an injection molded component that we buy in and we support our customers with, each one of those products is critical to our customers' success. Without them, they cannot assemble the products that they manufacture, they supply, and they assemble. Importantly, Trifast or TR as a partner, globally is supporting our customers right across the value journey, whether that is helping them design and engineer the products, right the way through to helping them with manufacturing solutions. Of course, delivering on the supply chain simplification, removing the complexity out of their business, and making sure that we deliver that great quality, great service that is reliable and allows customers to focus on the higher parts, higher value-added parts of their bill of material. I think this is a nice graphic because it illustrates very clearly what the key message was in the video about the removing complexity and helping customers with the total cost of ownership. Fasteners and C-class components typically only account for a few percent of our customer's product. But if they have to manage 2, 3, 400 components one by one, it takes a huge amount of their team, their resource, their working capital, and their effort. So actually, what we are doing for our customers is helping remove that complexity from their supply chain, and that is a significant differentiated value that we bring. I mentioned we have been investing in the business, and I want to share with you a few examples of how we are investing for growth in this business. You saw in the video that supply chain simplification, providing that solution to customers is so critical and differentiated. We have been investing in our technology opportunity that we can offer to customers that make that relationship at product line side on assembly lines at customers even more efficient, even more simple, even more seamless. There is a great example online on YouTube, which we shared with one of our customers in Ireland called Grant Engineering. Again, I would really direct you to go and have a look at that excellent example of how we collaborate with a customer on bringing this supply chain simplification to life. Second example of investing for growth is how we have been positioning the business in smart infrastructure. We all read each and every day in the news about how AI is generating an unquenchable demand for data center investment. The amount of investment projects are enormous. What we see from our customers who might be providing power transformation or water solutions, or they might be providing HVAC, is that their order books and their demand is significantly out into the future. What they are telling us is, "We really want you as Trifast to help us with the engineering, with the supply chain simplification, because we need to be focused on how we are going to support our customers in delivering these data centers." The third example is a growth market, India. India, as we all know, the fastest growing industrial market globally. We have had a presence in India for a number of years, but we are really doubling down on the investment we are making. We have significantly enhanced the team and the team's capabilities in engineering, in supply chain, in commercial, in operations and finance. We are doing that deliberately because we want to drive also growth in the India market, bringing to our existing customers who are there, and also domestic Indian MNCs who are there, the capabilities that we deliver globally to our customers. It is great to see that in the first quarter, we have seen a payback on that investment with significant double-digit growth, which is continuing as we go through the remainder of this first half. Our projection is we expect that to continue for the full year and beyond, to the extent that we are about to move into a new, larger purpose-built distribution center in Chennai to support that expansion and growth with our customers. So some great growth stories in this business that illustrate how we are repositioning. To summarize, we are repositioning as we execute the strategy into growth market sectors like smart infrastructure, like medical equipment that you saw in the video. We are investing into the growth in markets as well, India, a good example. We are being disciplined in managing the commercial execution using the quality of data that we have around us now by the investment in the technology platforms that we have to drive standardized commercial execution focus. I want to leave you with three key messages. First of all, we are driving our strategy. We are repositioning our business into those higher growth markets for the future. Secondly, we are on track to deliver further progress in FY 2027, in line with market expectations. Thirdly, as a board and as a management team, we are confident in the medium term delivery of the targets that we set out, double-digit margin and profitable growth. With that, let me hand you back to Serena. Thank you, Iain. As you can see, we continue to invest in our leadership capability and combining that with our strong and stable board really gives us what we need to drive forward. I should mention, we have had the pleasure this year of having a board apprenticeship, Pooja Bagga, who is with us for the last year. Our board meeting this morning was her very last board meeting. She has added huge value to us in terms of just asking us questions that we might not ask, but also sharing insights from her perspective as well. We thank her very much for being part of our board and wish her all the best with her onward journey. I would like to remind you all that there will be an opportunity for questions at the end of the formal proceedings of the AGM. For those of you online, please do use the question facility to ask your questions. With that, I will now formally welcome everybody to this year's Annual General Meeting. I have the pleasure in declaring the meeting open. Unless anybody objects, I propose that the notice dated 8th of July 2026, convening this AGM meeting be taken as read. Thank you. Now on to that formal business, looking at the resolutions. Unless anyone has any specific questions about the resolutions, we will take the questions at the end. So resolutions one. Anything in terms of resolution two? Also approved as of resolution one. Resolution three. Approved. So moving on to the next slide. Over the coming four resolutions around electing the Directors. Anything on the re-election of the Directors, resolution four through to resolution eight? I think it is three to eight. On the re-elect Clive. Just check on. Yeah. So we're covering resolution 4 to 10, except resolution 6. Resolution 6 is to re-elect Serena Lang as the director. Anybody got any objections? No. Thank you. Moving on to resolution 11 to reappoint the auditors. No objections. Approved. Thank you. Resolution 12. Thank you. Resolution 13. No objections, also approved. Then on to the special resolutions. So resolution 14. Thank you. Approved. Resolution 15. Resolution 16. Thank you. Finally, resolution 17. Super. Well, thank you all for those. The final results of the meeting will be available on our website later today and reported to the market in the usual way. So that now concludes our formal business of our 2026 Annual General Meeting. Thank you very much. With that We will now move on to questions and answers for any of the directors. I'll open it up to the floor if there are any questions from anyone joining us physically in the room today. Yes, Mr. Castle? Right. You've mentioned about AI, the increasing use of AI, which will no doubt be very beneficial for the company. But AI is also one of the three main principal risks that have increased this year. It's mentioned in the section on cybersecurity, how with some of the risks of cybersecurity, you employ external specialists. I wondered how you manage the increased risk of AI, whether this is through getting external specialists in, whether it's training the staff to be on the lookout, how you manage that. Thank you. Do you want to take that? Yeah. I think firstly, you're absolutely right. AI has both a huge opportunity for the business, which we need to embrace how that technology can help in efficiencies and in driving value in what we do for our customers. But you're also, of course, correct that AI and cyber generally represents a material and increasing risk to the business. The first and most important response and mitigation is to make sure that we have a trained workforce. So we routinely ask our colleagues, 1,100 colleagues, to participate in training to make sure awareness is first and foremost in their minds. So that's the first and most, I think, most important defense. Secondly, yes, we employ both internal and external specialists to help keep the firewalls, the protection around our systems and our data safe and monitor the threats as they are coming in so that we can take any additional action necessary. So combination of internal training, preparation, awareness, and capability, as well as where we need to using external services. I think if I could build on that as well. We have done quite a bit of board cyber training, and we will continue to do that, and we are always working on the assumption that it is a when, not if, and how do we ensure that as a business, we are prepared for that? What happens when that does happen? It is absolutely top of our focus, key priority, key risk. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions? I would encourage anyone online, if there are any questions, please use the online system to prompt any questions coming through. Thank you. Are there any other questions from anyone joining in the room? Yes, Mr. Castle. It's just a small point, but this year I note the charitable donations have decreased from, I think it was GBP 7,000 last year to GBP 2,000 this year. I just wondered what the reason for that was, whether it's anything to do with a more difficult trading environment. No. Thank you for the question. Certainly, no, it's not related to any management decision or choice. We, of course, welcome opportunities to give back to our communities. What's been really encouraging to see, and there's plenty of good examples in the annual report actually, is how our teams globally are doing just that, giving back to their local communities through various activities. Even if it's not a charity donation, it's still contributing to the local community in which we operate. Those kind of activities are honestly super for the employees themselves. They generally work really well as part of a team-building kind of activity, as well as contributing meaningfully to the local community. That's been the approach. But no, there's no specific choice or reason for the reduction in charitable donation. Super. Well, I can see that we don't have any questions online, so unless there are any other questions in the room, then I'll say thank you again for joining us today. We hope very much to see you again. For those of you that are in the room, there is some light refreshment being served outside. Thank you again. Wish you a good journey home. Goodbye. Thank you very much. Thank you.