Watches of Switzerland Group PLC (WOSGF) Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Hugh Duffy
CEO & Director

Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Our presentation this morning will commence with me, Group CEO, Brian Duffy. I’ll be taking you through our first half highlights and talking about our growth initiatives in the first half. I’ll then be followed by our CFO, Anders Romberg, who’ll give you more detail and color on the numbers. Then me again to give you a bit more background on our growth pillars and where we stand, and then we’ll open things up for your questions. So the top line numbers for the first half year that ended in October, our sales 845 million for the half. We were up 10% in constant currency for the group, driven by a very strong performance in the U.S., plus 20% in U.S. dollars. U.K. was decent at plus 5% when we adjust for the closures — store closures that we had last year. All in all, a good half year in terms of sales.

In terms of profits, EBIT came in 6% ahead of last year at GBP 69 million in constant currency. Our leverage is 0.6x EBITDA leverage to debt. Our free cash flow of GBP 48 million was 71% better than last year. Our expansionary CapEx, GBP 37 million following all of our projects that I’ll be talking more about in detail as we go through. We completed our GBP 25 million buyback, GBP 14 million actually going through in the first half of this year. Our ROCE, we were up 80 bps at 17.3% — so our pillars of growth and what’s delivered our first half year numbers. Showroom investment, both