Shares of Brambles Limited (ASX: BXB) will be in focus today after the pallets and logistics business group revealed its half-year report to the market.
Here are five things investors need to know about Brambles' half-year report for the period ended 31 December 2015.
- Revenue fell 1.2% to $US2,753.2 million, but in constant currency terms rose 8%
- Profit rose 2% to $US290.9 million but rose 14% in constant currency
- A 25% franked interim dividend of 14.5 cents per share was declared, up from 14 cents per share last year
- The company's Pallets business saw underlying profit growth of 0.4%
- Full-year underlying profit guidance increased from between 6% and 8% growth to between 8% and 10% growth, in constant currency terms
The company said disciplined capital allocation, like-for-like volume growth in Pallets and an expansion with new and existing retailers in Europe buoyed results.
"We are very pleased with this first-half result, which reflects our strategy of investing in our strong network position to drive growth, as well as the delivery of indirect cost and supply chain efficiencies and a lessening of some external cost pressures," Brambles' CEO, Tom Gorman, said.
"We continue to see considerable opportunities to invest for growth at attractive rates of return, where we can leverage the strength of our existing customer relationships, intellectual property and embedded network scale. As such, we continue to anticipate growth capital expenditure during FY17 to FY19 of approximately US$1 billion."
Given its strong start to the second half of the financial year, the company upped its full-year profit guidance (in constant currency terms).
"The new range translates to Underlying Profit of between US$1,015 million and US$1,035 million at 30 June 2015 foreign exchange rates, up from the previous range of US$1,000 million to US$1,020 million," Mr Gorman said. "Although Return on Capital Invested is likely to be lower in FY16 than FY15 as a result of recent acquisitions and currency translation impacts, we continue to anticipate a constant-currency increase in Return on Capital Invested prior to the impact of acquisitions made since December 2013 and remain committed to our objective of achieving 20% Return on Capital Invested by FY19."
