Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the full year 2023 trading update for Wood Group. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I will now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ken Gilmartin, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead. Thank you. Hello, everybody, and Happy New Year, and welcome to our full year 2023 trading update call. I'm here in London with David Kemp, our CFO, and we're pleased to talk with you about the highlights from today's trading statement ahead of taking your questions. Starting with the key highlights for this period, trading was in line with our expectations. Revenue was up 9%, with good growth across all business units, and Adjusted EBITDA was slightly ahead of our guidance at $420 million-$425 million, thanks to a slightly higher margin performance. We continue to see good momentum in the delivery of our strategy. Our order book is up 4% and underpins our growth expectations for 2024. This was following some significant wins in the quarter, and I'm pleased that around 40% of the work in our pipeline is sustainability-related, which enables us to continue to grow our sustainable revenues by helping our clients to decarbonize and digitize. We continue to review our portfolio in line with our strategic focus on select markets, and as a result, we have started the sales process for our stake in the EthosEnergy joint venture. And we continue to see an improvement in their underlying cash flow generation. So operating cash flow in 2023 was $275 million higher compared to last year. So turning to the financials in a little bit more detail then. As I said, revenue was around $6 billion, up 9%, and this includes revenue growth across all of our business units, with particularly strong revenue growth in Consulting, driven by client demand for front-end work and decarbonization and digitalization solutions. Projects saw good growth across oil, gas, and chemicals, while Operations benefited from higher activity levels during the year. Adjusted EBITDA for the group was slightly ahead of guidance at $420 million-$425 million, and up around 9% on last year. So net debt, excluding leases, was around $680 million. This included a significant improvement in our operating cash flow to around $210 million, and exceptional cash flows in line with our guidance at around $140 million. Net debt was also impacted by foreign exchange and the timing of customer receipts in December that we flagged previously. Crucially, we have a clear pathway to sustainable free cash flow, as we set out in our capital markets day, and we remain on track to deliver modest positive free cash flow in 2024 and significant free cash flow from 2025 onwards. We won many key contracts in the fourth quarter, a few I would like to pull out. Wood would deliver detailed engineering design for Woodside's Trion, which is the deepest semi-submersible facility in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, and a noteworthy energy security project. We're working with Dragados Offshore in Germany to deliver engineering design for one of the world's largest offshore wind-to-grid connection clean power projects. In energy transition terms, we've been appointed the owner's engineer for a world-leading hydrogen project in Spain. In the UK, we won a major brownfield engineering project for BP's Murlach development in the North Sea and secured a two-year contract extension with Equinor for the Mariner field in the basin. In life sciences, we won an engineering contract in Europe, helping to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients for medicines. To conclude, we continue to make good progress in delivering on our three-year growth strategy. We're well positioned for continued growth in the right markets with the right clients, and we're winning higher quality work at better margins, as well as increasing the amount of sustainable work we do. We continue to be focused on our core energy and materials markets and making decisions to support that growth, in turn, continually delivering financial results in line with expectations. We have delivered the first year in our three-year strategic journey and look forward to continued growth and momentum in 2024. With that, David and I will now take your questions. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. We will now take the first question. One moment, please. From the line of Alex Smith from Investec, please go ahead. Yeah, morning, guys. Thanks for the call. Just on the slightly higher than expected margin number, just like you mentioned, slightly above 7% despite the OpEx investments, can you give a bit more detail in what is driving that? I can see central costs are only marginally up, I guess, a solid result given inflationary pressures, but then maybe it's a bit more, what are those OpEx investments in the business, and could you elaborate where you're investing and where you expect to see benefits? Thank you. Yeah, sure, sure, Alex, and thanks for the question. You know, I think we had said, obviously, as you outlined correctly, you know, our 2023 number that we were continuing to, we're continuing to invest some OpEx money into some of the businesses that we were trying to grow, predominantly in consulting. And I think you'll have seen from a consulting standpoint, good performance, and as we've started to see that materialize into into winning more work from a consulting standpoint, so that's positive. That investment starting to pay fruit, and we see that investment continuing to bear fruit as we go into 2024, and consulting continues to grow. We are seeing pricing improvements across the board, in all of our business units. What I would say as well, Alex, also, that, you know, we are a large organization. It takes time for pricing improvements to start to drop through into increased performance because there are large contracts, and they take a period of time to run through the books. But starting to see positive momentum there, and there is a backdrop of that pricing improvement, again, as I said, across all of our- of all of our business units. Yeah, Alex, just to add to that, we were, you know, very pleased with the margin performance because you need to set it against an increase in our pass-through revenue, which generally is close to nil margin for us, and the investments that we made. So, you know, the improvement in margin that we've seen coming through pricing and through the work we've done in our central costs and keeping them flat is pleasing to us. Got it. Very clear. Thank you. Thank you. We will now take the next question from the line of Guilherme Levy from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, everyone. I have one question, please. Looking to 2024, can you walk us through the expectations in terms of your free cash flow generation profile? What can you share with us in terms of working capital account dynamics throughout the year, disbursement of the remaining exceptional cash flows, as well as CapEx and overall investments? Just for us to have a picture of how that is expected to evolve during the year. Thank you. Thanks, Guilherme. Yeah, the headline is there's no real change to our expectations in 2024 and 2025. You know, we set out almost a three-year journey, our Capital Markets Day in November 2022. You know, we're really pleased with how our operating cash has grown this year. You know, as Ken mentioned in his remarks, you know, it's up $275 million year-on-year, and H2 is about $140 million better than H1. So we're seeing the improvement in our operating cash. And the second leg of that cash story was controlling our exceptional costs. As we said, for 2023, we expect those still to be around $140 million, and the only change from the Capital Markets Day is the additional $5 million we had in Apollo costs that obviously we couldn't foresee at the time of the Capital Markets Day. So when you pull all of that together, you know, there's no change in overall guidance. You know, it's positive free cash flow in 2024, and we expect more significant free cash flow in 2025. And so we think we're one year into that 3-year journey, and we're heading along the right track. Thank you. Thank you. We will now take the next question from the line of Richard Dawson from Berenberg. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. My first one is maybe just sort of, following up on the first question on the central cost. They were maybe slightly, slightly better than we'd expected. Is that $75 million a reasonable run rate as we look into 2024, or are you expecting some inflation to come through this year? And then secondly, on the contract award with BP, the major award, is the size of the award in line with your previous comments that a large award is in the region of sort of $100 million+? And how will this contribute to the medium-term EBITDA targets or the sort of medium, medium-term growth on that? Thank you. In terms of the central costs, yeah. You know, you've picked up to the, you know, the competing pressures. You know, we've constantly looked. You know, as we said before, we've looked to, you know, keep our central costs flat as we, as we've grown. We continue to look at how we can be more efficient, and we'll continue to do so. And, you know, the other, particularly this year, the competing pressure was obviously inflation. A lot of the costs are people related or they're service related, such as audit fees, et cetera. So there are significant inflationary pressures, but we'll look to compensate for those with becoming more efficient, and that will continue to be our focus. In terms of guidance for 2024, we'll come back to that in detail in March and set out where we are. Yeah, maybe on the question around the contract and the contract size. Look, I think back to the question around, you know, a $100 million contract for us would be very large, in terms of where we were talking about this. You know, across our whole portfolio, you know, we are in that mode, and we've continued to have that discipline in where we play and how we play. Staying away from the lump sum turnkey element of the larger awards that are out there and really focusing in on what is and what will continue to be very much a cost-reimbursable type- engagement that we have, right? In order to mitigate the risk, and as well as making sure that the returns that we are, were consistent with the strategy that we're doing. So, look, in an overarching piece, you know, one individual contract or one award really impacting kind of bottom line for us from an overarching standpoint on a $6 billion company that we have, really isn't where we're playing, Richard, right? We're very consistent, very clear on the strategy that we have, and I think as you said outside, making progress against all of our end markets and all of our business units as well, which is good. Maybe a couple of other things just to add to that, Richard, just in terms of a step back. If you look at our overall backlog, you know, it's up 4% to $6.1 billion, and within that, we've seen good growth in Operations, of which the Murlach contract fits. You know, part of that backlog is actually in terms of the pricing. And so we talked about it, you know, quite a few times in the recent past. We are seeing improving pricing throughout our business, and so when we look at our backlog, the margin within our backlog is better than it was, you know, this time last year. And you're starting to see that come through in terms of the business's margin performance. As Ken mentioned, there was always going to be a lag to that, and so we've always talked about 2024 and 2025 being a margin improvement story for us, and 2023, our expectation was flat margin. So that's come in slightly better than we expected, and the area, one of the areas where it's been better is operations, and so we are winning work at better margins in operations. Perfect. Thanks for the additional color. Thank you. We will now take the next question from the line of Mark Wilson from Jefferies. Please go ahead. Thank you, good morning, and thank you for the questions. Quite specific, I agree with what you say in terms of no real change to 2024 and 2025, which is excellent. But let me just drill into the cash flow side of things, given that timing collection that has driven your year-end 2023 net debt slightly above expectations. So, could I ask then, if we stripped out the FX effect, $50 million, is it fair to assume there's about $30 million-$40 million due to this timing of customer receipts? And, if that is the case, if that is a timing issue, collection is still the expectation. Hence, my question is, your modest free cash flow expectations for 2024, should we assume that that will be free cash flow above the recovery of the customer receipts that you're missing this year? Thank you. Mark, let, let me take you through some of that and pick up the, the points you're raising. So, you know, in our Q3 updates, we guided to a modest inflow in the, in the second half, and so at the end of the first half, our net debt was about $654 million. And so now we expect the net debt to be $680 million. So instead of a modest inflow, we've got a modest outflow, so it's, it's at the margins. You know, as we said in the, in the release, you know, the underlying reasons for that, about a third of it was FX, and the remainder was working capital, of which the majority of that was customer collections. But just to give you some context to that, you know, that relatively small number, we probably do about $900-$1 billion of working capital movements in December. So it's a relatively small number. And as ever, as we go through 2024, we'll have ups and downs, and we'll come back to guidance in March, as I said. And, you know, we'll give, you know, we'll give more granular guidance on the various areas. But just now, you know, within that envelope of, you know, small movements, our expectations unchanged. It's positive free cash flow in 2024 and more significant free cash flow in 2025. So you are right, you know, the customer collections elements, you know, they're not disputed accounts, so they'll come through in the, in the first half. But what I would say is, they're relatively modest in the grand scheme of things, and as ever, you'll have ups and downs as we go through 2024. So, you know, for me, it's the step back and looking at the bigger picture. You know, we set out that three-year journey at our Capital Markets Day in November. As I said, we've seen a really good recovery in our operating cash flow. It's up $275 million year-over-year. You know, our aim is to continue to grow that operating cash at a faster rate than our EBITDA, and that's what's going to deliver the positive free cash flow in 2024 and significant positive free cash flow in 2025. Got it. Okay. No, that, that's very good color, and, I'm gonna take it as a yes, David. The second question I'd like to check on is the sale of EthosEnergy, something you talked about selling, selling before. It's restarted $30 million EBITDA in that. Guidance for 2024, should we think of that as excluding EthosEnergy as the first point? And then the second point, can you speak to the market dynamics in that business, please? Yeah, maybe, let me, maybe I'll start with that one, if you want, Mark. In terms of the sales process, we've just started the sales process around Ethos. We've not set out any detailed timing at this point. You know, largely because it will depend, to a certain extent, who any potential buyer is, you know, whether you might trigger any regulatory stuff that's required in some jurisdiction. And so we'll come back to the timeline in March, and that will allow you to come up with a view around guidance for 2024. So we'll come back to it in March. In terms of the market dynamics, you know, we've talked about Ethos before. For us, it's a non-core asset. It's in turbine maintenance overhaul. It's a good industrial business. It's been a significant recovery. You know, we looked to sell the business, I think it was back in 2017. Since that point, we've changed the management, and the management's done a very good job in improving the business. So we're now up to $30 million of EBITDA, our share, and so it's a sizable industrial business. You know, would my expectation be that it'll attract a premium multiple? No, but I would love to be pleasantly surprised, Mark. Thank you. We will now take the next question from the line of Alex Paterson from Peel Hunt. Please go ahead. Morning, everybody. Could I just ask, on your Investment Services division, should we look at any other of those holdings as being non-core as well, please? You know, when we talked about, you know, looking at our portfolio, and we've talked about it in the past, we will continue to assess parts of our business and look at whether they're a good fit for us. And just now, the only part of the business that we're flagging that is a potential disposal is the EthosEnergy joint venture. In our Investment Services division, you know, we have it, we put businesses in there, and they, they tend to either be improved and put back into the business or we dispose of them. But it doesn't necessarily mean that all of the businesses and Investment Services are going to be disposed. Some of them we improve and put back into the business. Yeah, and I think just to add to that as well, Alex, you know, the portfolio rationalization, you know, we always continue to look across all parts of our business, and, you know, whether that's in consulting, whether that's in projects, whether that's in operations or Investment Services as well, to see, you know, is there a clear kind of rationale or strategic fit with where we're going? And then we will always continue that process. Thank you. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back to Ken Gilmartin for closing remarks. Yeah. Thank you, thank you all very much for your questions and for listening today. So we look forward to talking to you again in March for our full year results. So thanks again, everybody. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Thank you.