Good morning. My name is Reuben Segal. I'm the Group CEO of ABL Group, and I'm joined here this morning by Stuart Jackson, the Group CFO. Today, we're going to take you through our Q2 results, and a little bit of how we see the market going forward, and a little bit of explanation behind the results. As I said,
I will start with a quick overview, and today it's going to be a slightly longer overview, just to give you some of the actions and updates around the activity of Q2, and in particular, because of the poor results achieved during the quarter. Stuart is then going to go through more detail of the financials, and then I will wrap up with how we see things going forward, and our market outlook. As always, we draw your attention to the disclaimer.
Please feel free to read this in your own time. Let's jump into the results. I have to say, we are disappointed at the results this quarter. They are some of the weaker results we've produced over the last few years and the last few quarters, and as a management team, we are disappointed, but as a management team, we intend to look into them and to try and get back to where we normally are.
I'm used to standing here and giving you very positive results, record-breaking results, and I'm not able to do that today. Myself and Stuart, along with the other management team, are looking heavily into this, and we're going to give you some of the actions that we're doing to get back to where we need to be. In terms of the revenues, it looks quite steady.
Quarter on quarter, it looks very, very similar to Q1, and if you look at the same period last year, we're up by about 1%, but the makeup of that revenue is quite different this time. If you look at where we normally are in the four segments, this time the revenue is quite different, and this is all affected predominantly by the renewables industry.
We'll talk about that a little bit later. We do see organic growth across AGR over this period last year, but we are seeing quite flat growth in ABL and a downturn in both Longitude and OWC, particularly OWC, which is the renewables sector. In terms of EBIT, that's where you see the biggest jump. We ended the quarter with $2.8 million, which is a margin of 4%.
All segments, with the exception of AGR, were down in terms of EBIT margin, and Stuart will show you a little bit more detail about a little bit later. On the positive side, we ended the quarter with $10.8 million of free cash flow. We had $4 million cash inflow from operations, which was quite steady. It was quite a good quarter in terms of cash inflow.
Then we had the payment of Ross Offshore, the acquisition we made during the quarter, and also semi-annual dividend. And as I mentioned, we did do the acquisition of Ross Offshore during the quarter, and we now start to integrate them during the summer. This is a slide we don't normally put in, but I felt it was important for us to explain what's been going on.
When you see the figures, of course, they jump out, and as I said, they are poor figures. These are poorer and weaker than we're used to seeing, particularly in Q2, which is one of the stronger quarters. So I think it's right that we tell you the actions that we're taking and why we see where we are. In terms of ABL, actually, the performance was reasonable.
It was quite a solid revenue performance, but all segments, with the exception of AGR, are affected by some way, shape, or form by the renewables. In the ABL sector, we have a small portion of ABL affected by renewables. This brought down our utilizations, brought down some of our pricing, and ultimately brought down our margins.
So in addition to that, this period last year, we get these one or two odd lumpy jobs which do come up every year. Last year was a maritime job, which we had in Q2 and in Q3. And this year, that has not yet been replaced. So that does happen, but predominantly, the performance was weakened through the renewables side of the business. In AGR, I said that's not the case.
We are not very much focused on renewables or in particular, offshore wind. So AGR had a good quarter, a steady period increase over last year, and now we continue to integrate Ross Offshore into the family. Sorry, just to add, if anyone has any questions at the end of this presentation, please feel free to put them in the chat or we can take them at the end.
So AGR is was okay. We continue moving as we said we would. I'm going to talk about Longitude before I get on to OWC. Longitude is the smallest part of the company and has a lot of very lumpy projects. These are more, they come on, they work for three, four, six months, and then they come off. We had quite a few of these running last year, and those came to a natural end, and some of them have not yet been replaced.
Longitude is affected by a lot more proportion of renewables. Longitude itself does a large proportion of its work in the renewables sector, and that did get having problems during the quarter, again, with utilization and pricing power.
So that's where this, they suffered quite a lot on revenue side and on the EBIT side, which is a smaller part of the company, which is why they're affected more. But then we get to OWC. OWC is 100% renewables part of the business and predominantly focused on offshore wind. Ourselves, like everybody else in the market, is seeing the downturn.
We did mention this during Q1, and that downturn has stayed quite heavy during Q2. And in fact, we did say we thought we would come out of that in the second half of this year. What we are now going to say, and I will talk about it at the end, is that we think we will come out of it more towards the second half of next year.
I just want to make that clear, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. They had a downturn in utilization. Of course, that affects the rates, and overall, their revenues came down, and ultimately, their utilization and ultimately their EBIT came down. OWC definitely struggled during the second quarter. However, we need to take action.
As a management team, it is our responsibility to take that action and get back to where we need to be. And we all know where the renewables industry is. Our job is to be nimble and to be lean and mean so that when we come out of it, we're able to do what we always do, which is grow. And that's exactly what we will do. This is not. We're not in the game for the next three quarters or the next two quarters.
We're in the game for the long term. So I want to point that out. So we are doing certain things. The actions that we've taken, we've included some cost-cutting across all parts of the business, but particularly within OWC. We've had a recruitment freeze within OWC. If you remember, we keep growing very fast on the recruitment side. This quarter, in fact, this year to date, there is a freeze on recruitment. Saying that, we also need to diversify.
We felt that we were very, very focused on offshore wind, and now we've tried to diversify into new parts of renewables, predominantly onshore wind, technical due diligence, and other regions as well, Americas in particular. So there's a cost to that diversification. There's a cost to bringing people on board, which ultimately affects our EBIT. But the actions are required.
The actions have already been implemented. We will continue to look at them. We will continue to take more action if necessary, and the aim is to get through this period in renewables, come out at the other end, be stronger, be fitter, be leaner, so that we continue that growth story in twenty twenty-five. So at that point, I'm going to hand across to Stuart, and I'll talk a little bit more about it later on when we wrap up at the end.
Thank you, Reuben, and good morning, everybody. Before I go into the financial results for Q2, just wanted to cover Ross Offshore, which is the acquisition that we completed during the quarter. This was completed in June of this year. The acquisition was 100 million NOK in terms of overall price and $9.5 million equivalent.
We did this with a lock-box mechanism for the first half of the year, and there was good cash collection in the Ross Offshore business during that period. So the net purchase price or net consideration we paid was actually $5.4 million at the end of the period. In terms of where this will go into our business, this will be part of the AGR segment that we...
So you'll see that coming through as we move into Q3. So the balance sheet of Ross Offshore comes into our sheet by the end of this quarter, but the P&L impact from Ross Offshore starts on the first of July. So you'll start to see that as we go through the first quarter. I think the other thing to note is that this coming into the AGR segment, we've mentioned before, that's a structurally lower margin segment that we have within the business. And we indicated that, you know, through the cycle, we'd probably be about 7.5% in terms of the margin we expect across the group from the mix of businesses we have.
Obviously, with adding Ross Offshore in, which is again, you know, a structurally lower margin business, we expect that to be 6.5% or so going forward. Turning then to the quarter, and I guess the first is the split of the different businesses. From a revenue perspective, and therefore the proportion of businesses, there's not much change from the previous quarters you've seen. So still dominated by ABL being just over 50% of the business. AGR, 31% now, but that will start to grow as we bring in the Ross Offshore revenues from Q3 going forwards, and OWC and Longitude broadly in line with where they've been in previous quarters.
From a margin perspective, I think, you look at ABL and AGR, they're broadly in line with where we were this time in quarter two of 2023. As Reuben mentioned, yeah, we had some good projects coming through in ABL in that quarter, which actually we hadn't replaced in terms of strong projects in quarter two of 2024. So there's a slight reduction in margin there.
And then from an AGR perspective, slight increase in margin in terms of where we were 12 months ago. But obviously, OWC and Longitude is where we've had the impact, and I'll go through that in a bit more detail. In terms of the segmental results, therefore, over the quarters, this takes you back over 5 quarters.
From a revenue perspective, you know, we're broadly flat in terms of revenue, overall revenue, so no growth. We've obviously lost the growth engine that we've had with OWC, with a downturn in the market at this time, but not much growth actually, in terms of the other areas of the business as well, with the exception of AGR, which has shown 7% growth compared to the same period twelve months ago. In terms of the margin side of it, ABL, we've had lower utilization, so the growth hasn't occurred. So utilization of our people is slightly lower. That obviously drags in terms of our EBIT results as we go forward.
And then from an OWC perspective, we're suffering from the downturn in the renewables market, which has been with us probably for about nine, if not 12 months, and we'd anticipate that's going to continue probably into the middle of 2025. That's why we have, as Reuben's mentioned, a number of different initiatives around OWC.
So cost reduction initiatives, the hiring freezes, and actually the investment in a different area of renewables, so we start to spread the risk amongst different markets within the renewable sector. And then from a Longitude perspective, there's a roll-on effect in terms of the renewables business into Longitude. It's a reasonable proportion of Longitude's business, but also that's a quite lumpy business.
I'd say that the larger projects and high-performing projects we've had in the past, we haven't seen one of those come through as we've gone through the second quarter of twenty twenty-four. Turning to the income statement, so a flat revenue, as you see, 1% up and operating costs up 4%. So a squeeze in terms of the overall margins of the business.
I would remind you that, you know, as we said at Q4 and Q1, we changed our accounting in terms of the withholding tax. So we're now showing that going through the operating costs, which we haven't in prior periods as well. So that's had an impact as we've produced these results. Then from a tax perspective, we've also changed the way we do the tax.
Historically, we've been just reflecting the cash tax payments as our tax in the income statement. Now we're doing an assessment of the expected tax at the end of the year and providing that on a proportionate basis. I would also remind you, as we've indicated before, we don't have a policy of taking deferred tax assets onto the balance sheet.
So where we have losses, we don't take the benefit of those losses in the future onto our balance sheet. Now, from a cash perspective, as Reuben mentioned, reasonably strong cash generation from operations during the period, so a positive impact from the working capital changes and the FX, $1.2 million in total, 'cause there's $4 million of cash generated during the quarter.
On the investing side, obviously, the majority of this is the payments we've made in respect of the Ross Offshore acquisition that was concluded in Q2. And then from a financing perspective, a drawdown under the RCF to finance the acquisition we've got, and then cash going back out to shareholders, both in terms of the $4.8 million we had on the dividend payment during the quarter, and in addition to that, we had a buyback program of some shares for $250,000. So that leaves us with a net cash outflow of $2.4 million at the end of the quarter, and a balance sheet position of $28.4 billion in terms of cash going forward.
And finally, in terms of the balance sheet position, I guess other current assets, other current liabilities, those aspects on the balance sheet are reflected by bringing in the Ross Offshore balance sheet for the end of the quarter. Our net cash position was $10.8 million at the end of the quarter, after the payments to shareholders and the purchase of the Ross Offshore acquisition. I'd just bring your attention to the fact that we're treating our RCF from HSBC as a short-term borrowing. Its maturity is January 2027, but it has technically an annual clear-down. We think we should reflect that as a short-term borrowing, not a long-term borrowing.
And finally, in terms of the working capital ratio we look at, on a regular basis, this is without any impact from Ross Offshore, so we're looking at like for like comparison. So at 40-40%, broadly in line with where we've been for the last few quarters and where we've guided. If we were to add Ross Offshore in here, together with Ross Offshore's revenue for the last two quarters, that would probably drop to about 30%. So we're seeing the same type of impact of bringing Ross Offshore into the business as we did with AGR, in terms of improvements in working capital turnover. And also, I think, we do this over the trailing two quarters.
I think it's probably more appropriate now for the business to do this over the last quarter, so we may well change this ratio when we come back to it in the third quarter. With that, I'll hand back to Reuben to take us through the market outlook.
Okay. Thanks, Stuart. So just before we get to the outlook, just the usual slide on headcount. And there are comments I want to make around the headcount. Predominantly, you have always seen us grow and grow and grow and grow the headcount. At the end of the quarter, we ended up with just over 1,600 full-time equivalent employees, which is an increase of last year by about 4%, the year-on-year growth.
But if you look at the segments and what is now growing, particularly if you look at the bottom one, OWC, you see that that is actually starting to come down, and there's a reason for that. And that is because of the way the market has gone. We've taken the action to stop that recruitment, put a freeze on it, and only do the necessary recruitment that we require.
Once we bring Ross Offshore into the equation as well in Q3, we'll end up with a headcount of just short of eighteen hundred people. So the headcount does keep increasing, and parts of the business, ABL in particular, is increasing. As you saw from the revenues, they've been quite steady quarter on quarter over the last four quarters. So it's a mixed bag when we come to recruitment and not recruiting.
But the biggest number in particular, which we've talked about in the past, is our freelancer mix. We have this freelancer mix to take care of the problems that we see today. When we get parts of the market going down, we have the option to remove some of the freelancers and try and get the utilization of our permanent employees up. When we have a more buoyant market, we use more freelancers. That's why we do it.
We've talked about it on a number of occasions. Now you see it's down by about 5%, and that is to try and take care of the situation happening within the renewables division. So it is working, 'cause ultimately it's still profitable business, but we need to continue to monitor this and do the necessary while we get through this period in renewables.
So how do we see things in renewables? Like I said, we're not here for the quarter. These are not good results. We are not happy with these results. They're poor results. But ultimately, we're not here for a quarter. We're here for the long term. ABL's growth story is a long-term growth story. And if you look at the renewables division, we expect that to continue. It is going through this, what can you call it?
Recession, at the moment, I think is the best way to describe it. But the long term is still the same. If you look at where ABL plays, particularly OWC plays, they play right at the early phase. ABL works more in the operation phase, with the install. So if you look at the installations today, they're down, which is why you see the revenues down in ABL, because they work in the installation phase.
In terms of the upfront, when we do the bidding and the auctions, that's where OWC play. And if you look at what's going to happen in twenty twenty-seven, twenty-eight, and so on, all that's happened is everything has moved about two years to the right. We've. We're seeing that. That's where OWC is today.
We're about 12 months into this, and that's why I said, I think if you look at it, it's another 12 months until we start to see the pickup. We believe we may have hit the bottom, but we won't see that upturn for another 12 months. But the long term is still very positive, and that's this part I want to get across. OWC is here to grow for the future, not just for tomorrow. In terms of the oil and gas side, still very strong.... In terms of CapEx and OpEx, there's no change in the CapEx side of the business. We're doing a lot of installation work at the moment. You see a lot of new projects coming online. It follows the trend that you're seeing in the oil and gas.
It's still a very strong market, very bullish market, and ABL is very well-placed to continue that charge into that market. In terms of the rigs, yes, there's a little blip. You will see a little blip, and the jack-ups have come down a bit, but that's predominantly through to the likes of Saudi Arabia that have made a conscious decision to move out. It doesn't necessarily affect ABL Group, or part of it moving out. Any movement is a movement. Right now, the activity, both in CapEx and OpEx, is very strong across all four regions, and ABL is in a really good shape to continue taking that forward. The issues that we have around the renewables, and we'll take the necessary action.
So just to wrap it up, like I said, this was not the greatest quarter in this company's history. But like I said, this is not about quarter on quarter. This is about the overall long-term sustainability of ABL Group. These are poor results. We accept they're poor results, and we will fix it. The actions that we're taking as a organization, with Stuart's involvement, my involvement, the rest of our management team, are here to take the actions to get back to where we need to be. The acquisition of Ross. I've said we're going to continue acquiring. We're going to continue acquiring. I'll get to that at the end. The Ross Offshore acquisition is an excellent acquisition.
It fits in very, very nicely with AGR, and over the next six to 12 months, we'll integrate Ross Offshore into AGR and we'll get Ross back to where they need to be as well. So that's an exciting venture for us going forward. And as I said, in terms of the market, oil and gas is looking still very bullish, looking very strong. We're in good shape.
We're a market leader in many parts of the business, so we think things look good going forward. But in the renewables, we did say that we thought the way things were going, it would be the second half of this year. We think we've come to the bottom, but by the time you get to see this uptick, it could be the second half of next year. So I just want to put that word of caution out.
We will take all the steps necessary to be ready for that growth, and for now, we will stabilize it to make sure that we continue being profitable and be ready to come out at the back end of it. We did pay out the semi-annual dividend in June, and as always, we will declare, we hope, in the second half of the year, the next semi-annual dividend.
The last line is always, we remain active. We still want to continue to grow. We still want to continue to consolidate. If we find the right opportunity and never lose a good crisis for an opportunity, right? Right now, with what we see going on, we will continue to be very bullish.
We will continue to look, and if we find the right opportunities, we will get in there and continue to grow this organization through consolidation. That's the intent. So I hope when I see you next quarter, we have slightly better news to report. Thank you, and take any questions you may have.
Great. Thank you. Martine from Nordea Markets. I just wanted to ask if you can give some color on the development in Ross Offshore this half year versus the history and what we can expect of that one going forward.
Yeah, well, Ross has been through quite a bit, as you may or may not know. Do you know they've been sold a few times? This is, I think, the second or third rodeo show they're having with us. I think their performance in the first half of the year was, was not great. It was okay. Wasn't great, but it was okay. It was where we thought it would be. If you look back at AGR, when we bought AGR, it wasn't great, but it could do better. And when we bought AGR, we said we would do better. We've only just acquired Ross, and I don't want to sit here and say, we're going to do this with it tomorrow.
I know what our long-term strategy is with Ross, and when we get Ross Offshore into AGR, we'll get it, we hope, to where AGR is. That's the plan. It might take some time. We've only just acquired them. We acquired them right in the middle of the summer holidays. Probably not the best time to acquire, but the opportunity was there. We have to do it. They were okay. I don't want to say more than that at the moment.
Great. Thank you.
Any other questions? Anything online?
We do have a couple of questions online, regarding the offshore wind market and OWC. The first question is: Why are OWC growing less than the capacity additions in the markets, and what are the activities in offshore wind, which are core to OWC that have failed to materialize in new orders?
Yeah, so OWC works very upfront, okay? When governments decide to give out the various auctions, and we bid for those, and various people bid for those auctions, that's where ABL, OWC gets in. There's been a lot of projects pushed to the right over the last two years. This is what you see going on is what you see that was given four, five years ago, so when decisions were made four years ago to install a wind farm, you still see that activity.
It's not necessarily stopped or even that has slowed down. What you're not seeing is the new projects being pushed through the system, particularly the UK, European sector. The American sector has been quite heavily affected. I think in 2023, if I remember, there was no bids.
There was zero bids in the U.K. sector for new rounds of offshore wind. So we've kind of followed that trend. Now, what you're seeing is the shackles have come off. Various governments have said they will spend more. I think the U.K. in particular, Germany, did the same, and you're starting to see that come on board.
But we're just following that trend at the moment, and that trend is about three years behind the installation work that you see today. So it's not a surprise. It's just the surprise really is that with all the noise in the governments that you hear about offshore wind and renewables and energy transition, that's not transpiring to new projects today. It's not that they won't happen, but they've all been pushed to the right by about two years.
A follow-up question is: What actions are you going to undertake to manage OWC for value and growth? Do you believe the team has the right capabilities and capacities, given where the market is now?
The team absolutely has the right capability and capacity, I have to say. This team is not there just for growth. This team is there to build a business. So I have no problem with the team that we have. We've been very bullish, so we've been growing very fast, trying to get on more and more people. We have taken the action to freeze that recruitment.
Freeze the recruitment, not necessarily in all of OWC, but in the offshore wind side of the business. If you look at onshore wind, for instance, and other parts of renewables, actually, it's quite active. It's the offshore wind that's had the problem, and OWC plays predominantly in offshore wind.
So that recruitment freeze is there for offshore wind side, but we're going to diversify into more onshore wind, onshore technical due diligence, and other renewable type of activity. So, we're not... If you go back in our history, we used to be very, very dominant in Middle East about jackups. When there's no jackups, we had a problem, and we tried to diversify across the business. We're gonna do exactly the same within OWC, but at the same time, keep some cost-cutting measures in place, try and keep a little bit more control over the spending, and in particular, recruitment. Any more questions?
So I guess we shouldn't expect any revenue growth, probably in OWC in the near term, but do you think the measures you're taking now could improve the margins at least somewhat over the next few quarters?
The question is, do we want to continue more revenue growth or we want to just stick and get that EBIT margin up? I don't want to tell you what has been going on since then, necessarily, but we're trying to we still want to try and grow. It's not like we want to just stop, okay? We're not that type of company. We'll just stop, put the brakes on, and that'll be the end of it.
We would like to still grow if we can, which is hence the diversification, because I think if we diversify into other parts of renewables, we can still grow, keep that growth story. But there is a cost to diversification, at least in the short term. You have to recruit certain individuals, you may have to have new entities, and there is a cost to that.
So I don't want to say that all our margins will increase because we put a stop on everything, because we're not stopping all our business. We're just being very cautious in offshore wind. But we want to diversify, we want to continue to build. So I hope we continue to the revenue, but it may not be in offshore wind. But some of that diversification may cost a bit.
So I don't want to sit here and say, all of a sudden, our margins will go up to 10, 12% because we've put the brakes on. So I hope that answers the question. We could just say, "Let's stop, get the margin up to 10% and all go home." It's not in our nature to do that. We want to continue to grow, and we have to look at what's right for the business long term, not what's right for the business for the next one quarter. Any more questions?
We have no more questions online and, no more questions in the room.
Okay, well, I thank you everyone for attending. I hope next time I come back with more smiles on my face, and, I look forward to seeing you in Q3 results. Thank you.