Vesuvius plc announces the financial results for 2024

2025-03-06

Mar. 6, 2025 - Vesuvius plc, a global leader in molten metal flow engineering and technology, announces its audited results for the twelve months ended 31 December 2024.

 

(1) Underlying basis is at constant currency and excludes separately reported items, and the impact of acquisitions and disposals.

(2) For definitions of non-GAAP measures, refer to Note 16 in the Condensed Group Financial Statements.

 

Highlights

 * Robust Group performance with market share gains in Flow Control and Foundry, delivered in challenging market condition
 * Together with resilient pricing and cost reductions, this partially offset weak end markets experienced in the Foundry Division 
* Group revenue, trading profit and return on sales stable year-on-year on an underlying basis
* Good performance by our Steel Division despite weaker markets than originally anticipated
* Positive net pricing across the year
* Flow Control continues to gain market share
* RoS improved by 110bps (underlying) to 11.4% driven by cost savings and net positive pricing
* Challenging year for the Foundry Division as markets outside of India weakened, offsetting strategic progress
* Good market share gains overall
* Accelerated delivery of cost-savings
* Return on sales reduced by 230bps (underlying) to 7.4%, with low activity in EU+UK, North America and North Asia
* Acceleration of our group-wide cost reduction programme with £13m delivered in-year and exit run-rate of c. £18m
* New product sales increased further to 19.1%, with 33 new products launched in 2024 and a strong pipeline of new products for the coming years
* Strategic expansion programme in Asia and Flow Control largely completed
* Acquired PiroMET, a refractory and robotics business in Turkey, in February 2025, enhancing our position in the strategically important and growing EEMEA market
* Trade working capital intensity reducing by 50bps to 22.9%

* Share buyback programmes successfully implemented in 2024, with 5% of shares in issue bought back during the year. Second programme

* launched in November 2024, continuing in 2025

* Strong balance sheet with net debt / EBITDA of 1.3x (31 December 2024)
* Proposed final dividend of 16.4p, bringing the full year dividend to 23.5p, up 2.2%
* Strong safety performance with a record Lost time injury frequency rate of 0.52
* Reduction of 27% in CO2e intensity vs. 2019 baseline, exceeding our intermediary target of -20% by 2025 

Comment from Patrick André, CEO:

 “This has been a challenging year for Vesuvius with Foundry markets in Europe, North Asia and the Americas weakening significantly and global Steel production outside China negatively affected by the sharp increase of Chinese steel exports. Despite this, thanks to significant cost cutting, resilient pricing and market share gains, we have delivered a robust performance, maintaining our results at the level of 2023 on an underlying basis, demonstrating again the strength of our technologically differentiated business model.     

 

For the year ahead, while we remain confident in our own performance, we are cautious on market conditions due to the uncertain economic environment arising from the negative impact of trade tariffs which continue to evolve, geopolitical volatility and the continuing structural weakness of Steel and Foundry markets in Europe. We currently anticipate that our trading profit in 2025 will be at a broadly similar level to 2024 on a constant currency basis and including the contribution from the PiroMET acquisition. We expect that cashflow for 2025 will be significantly ahead of 2024, benefiting from our working capital focus and a more normalised level of capex.    

 

Given the near-term uncertain tariff and geopolitical environment and the decline experienced in Foundry end markets over the last 18 months, we are now targeting to achieve our mid-term Return on Sales target of at least 12.5% by 2028 and to deliver our cumulative £400m free cash flow target by 2027. This will be partially dependent on a return to normal conditions in our end-markets and will be supported by an extension of our cost reduction programme which we are increasing from £30m to £45m by 2028.”