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LLM Evaluations

Transcript Summary

Caledonia Investments plc reported a 5.4% NAV total return for the year ended March 31, 2026, ending with a NAV of GBP 3 billion. Despite underlying growth, the total shareholder return was -7.1% as the share price discount to NAV widened to 43.4% following market volatility in March. The Private Capital pool led performance with a 13.1% return, highlighted by the GBP 290 million agreed sale of Stonehage Fleming. The Public Companies pool returned a modest 1.2%, though management executed a highly successful partial exit from Oracle. The Funds pool saw improvement in its Asia holdings as IPO activity resumed. Caledonia maintained its exceptional dividend record, increasing the annual payout for the 59th consecutive year to 7.68p. The company remains highly liquid with GBP 415 million in available funds (cash and credit). To combat the share price discount, management has conducted GBP 100 million in buybacks since 2024 and completed a 10-for-1 share split. While cautious regarding geopolitical tensions, management remains committed to its long-term compounding strategy and disciplined capital allocation across its three investment pillars.

Full Earnings Call Transcript — Q4 • 2026-05-19

Operator: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for Caledonia Investments plc Full Year Results Presentation. The presentation will commence shortly. A copy of the presentation slides is also available to download from the results center on Caledonia's website, www.caledonia.com. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this call is being live streamed to webcast for a wide audience and will be recorded. I would now like to hand it over to Mat Masters, Chief Executive Officer, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.
Mat Masters: Hello. I'm Mat Masters, CEO of Caledonia Investments, and welcome to our results presentation for our year ended 31st of March 2026. Before I get to the results, I'd like to take a moment to update you on 2 changes to our Board. Will Wyatt has been appointed as successor to David Stewart as Chair. Many of you know Will. He successfully led Caledonia as Chief Executive for over a decade until becoming a Non-Executive Director in 2022. He is also a member of the Cayzer family and brings a deep understanding of Caledonia's culture, investment strategy and long-term approach. I'd like to thank David for his support and counsel throughout his tenure. In addition, after a little over 4 decades of service, Charles Cayzer has decided not to stand for reelection at the AGM. Charles has helped guide strategy and played a key part in creating Caledonia's unique culture, both as an Executive and latterly as a Non-Executive Director. We shall miss his wisdom and experience. And now on to the results. The past year once again demonstrated the strength of Caledonia's distinctive model and long-term investment approach. Against a volatile global economic backdrop, we delivered a solid NAV total return of 5.4%, with all 3 investment pools contributing positively. Throughout the year, we remained disciplined taking opportunities where we saw value and continuing to manage risk. A standout development was the agreed sale of Stonehage Fleming, which once completed will deliver a 3.2x money multiple. And pleasingly, the performance of our Asia funds has improved, reflecting the more favorable IPO and fundraising environment. Caledonia's balance sheet continues to be strong, and we have the flexibility to deploy capital selectively and decisively where we see compelling opportunities for long-term value creation. In March, the Iran conflict affected both our NAV performance and our total shareholder return. Over the year, Caledonia's shares traded at an average discount to NAV of 34%. That discount widened in March and by year-end was 43.4%. That move reflected weaker markets in the final month of the year. The result was a total shareholder return of negative 7.1%. We recognize that shareholders will understandably be disappointed by that outcome. Now, Rob will talk about this and our actions in more detail later. On dividends, today, we are announcing our final dividend of 4p per share, taking our total annual dividend to 7.68p per share, an increase of 4.4% year-on-year, extending our track record to 59 years of consecutive dividend growth at around 5% annualized growth rate. This slide shows Caledonia's long-term performance over 3, 5 and 10 years. Over 10 years, we have delivered NAV total return of 9.2% per annum, ahead of the FTSE All-Share and at the top end of our target range of inflation plus 3% to 6%. That reflects the strength of our diversified portfolio and the benefits of our long-term approach. The 3-year number is more mixed with NAV growth ahead of inflation, but below target, reflecting the more challenging market environment we have seen recently. The clear area of disappointment is the share price total return, particularly over 3 years. This reflects the widening discount to NAV rather than the underlying quality of the portfolio. So on to the first of our investment pools, public companies. This is a focused portfolio of around 30 public equity holdings, and it's all about really understanding the fundamentals of high-quality compounding businesses and making long-term investments. The idea is simple, buy well and then hold for the long term. We research companies for a long time and wait for the right time to invest. This tends to be when markets sell off. We treat those periods as opportunities. This is exactly what we did in April 2025, when markets fell sharply following President Trump's Liberation Day announcement. We deployed GBP 24 million into Charles Schwab, a U.S.-listed brokerage business, which we've been tracking since 2017. This derisked our entry point and provides a clear example of our Time Well Invested approach in practice. We also initiated 2 other positions, Cintas and Paychex, both of which we have been following for a number of years. For the year, the pool delivered a modest total return of 1.2% against a challenging market backdrop. In this context, it is helpful to look at the progression of the capital portfolio's total return over the last 5 years. In this chart, you can see the volatility over the financial year and the 2 market-driven troughs in March 2025 and March 2026, with pool returns declining by 7.8% in February this year alone. Whilst the portfolio comprises good quality companies, which we are very happy with, the more recent selloff was not quite enough for us to significantly add during the period. You can also see the meaningful recovery since the year-end. Another theme of the year was AI, and our investment in Oracle illustrates both the opportunity and the volatility it can create. The shares rose sharply in September as the market responded to a very positive trading update, and we risk-managed the position, realizing GBP 65 million. Since then, the shares have softened as market appetite has weakened. We made a 96.3% return in the year versus the stock's 2.4%. We first invested GBP 35 million in 2014 and have received GBP 112 million through top slicing and dividends and is in the NAV of GBP 42 million. That's a 4.4x money-on-money and 19% annualized return. That's a great result for us, demonstrating the benefits of compounding and our disciplined approach to risk management. On to private capital. This is where we partner with management teams, mainly in U.K. operating businesses to help them grow and improve over the long term. It's a portfolio of up to 10 companies focused on the mid-market. We look for control positions or at least a significant minority, where we can be influential, and we sit on the Board. And unlike a traditional private equity fund, we're investing from our permanent balance sheet. So there's no fixed time line, no pressure to do deals and no forced exits. We can invest at low volume with real conviction and focus on long-term value creation. We're also conservative on debt, typically around 2.5x EBITDA. The pool delivered a 13.1% return for the year. We agreed the sale of Stonehage Fleming to Corient Wealth. Since investing GBP 90 million alongside the founding partners in 2019, we have supported management with their growth plans. On completion in the coming weeks, we expect proceeds of circa GBP 290 million, equal to 3.2x cost. Stonehage Fleming is a great example of our partnership-led approach. AIR-serv delivered a strong return of 23.8%, as it continued to expand its footprint entering Portugal and Austria. It remains highly cash generative paying a GBP 24.5 million dividend to Caledonia while continuing to invest in its estate for future growth. AIR-serv is exactly the kind of business we seek to back, high quality, well-led and able to generate cash returns today while building for the future. The other companies in the portfolio continue to make progress in executing the value creation plans. The bubble chart plots realized IRR against uplift to carrying value for our major realizations. And you can see Stonehage Fleming there with a 30% uplift to the March 2025 carrying value. Since 2012, we have generated GBP 1.4 billion of proceeds, returning around GBP 700 million of net cash with realized investments delivering an excellent 17% IRR and a 2x multiple on cost. And with that, I'll now hand over to Rob to talk through our funds pool and the financials.
Rob Memmott: Thank you, Mat. Good morning, everybody. I'm Rob Memmott, the CFO. Our funds pool partners with managers and provides access to 2 significant market opportunities. These funds tend not to market in Europe, meaning we are often the only European investor, a real differentiator. The pool NAV of GBP 941 million is a diverse portfolio invested in some 82 funds by 46 managers and in 600 underlying businesses. 62% of the NAV is focused on the North American lower mid-market buyouts. The funds are typically the first institutional investors into relatively small, often owner-managed businesses that are profitable, cash generative. The playbook is to transform the companies by strengthening the management team, improving operational efficiency and growing sales by product and by geography and both organically and through bolt-on acquisitions. These improved companies with greater scale provide the feedstock to mid-market private equity. It's a very pure form of capitalism. The remaining 38% is invested in Asia, where we target 2 megatrends. The first is focused on domestic consumption and supply chains, fueled by the aging population, growing middle class and tech adoption. The second is world-leading innovation, where we invest in government-supported new technologies. The pool has delivered solid returns of 11.4% and 13.1% over 5- and 10-year periods. Pleasingly, the performance from Asia improved over the last 6 months to generate 7.7% return in the year in local currency. This reflects good execution, but also an improved IPO and fundraising environment. The North American funds delivered 6.8% in local currency, continuing the good trading performance of the underlying companies. Overall, the pool produced an annual return of 7.1% in local currency or 4.9% in sterling. Looking at the cash flows in a little bit more detail. The chart shows realization and investment activity over a recent 12-month period. The last few years, activity has been at subdued levels following higher interest rates, the U.S. tariff announcements and the economic uncertainty caused by geopolitical tension. In the second half of the year, there was some pickup in activity, but still below normal market conditions. And this has resulted in a slightly higher weighted average life of our primary portfolio increasing to 4.7 years. Our capital commitments of GBP 346 million, 78% of which is to North America, GBP 117 million was invested in the year and a GBP 55 million of new commitments were made into 2 North American managers. So to the numbers. During the year, our NAV total return was 5.4%, growing our NAV to GBP 3 billion, of which GBP 2.8 billion is invested in a diversified portfolio of listed and privately held companies and funds that have global reach. Cash on balance sheet was GBP 90 million. This, combined with our undrawn revolving credit facility of GBP 325 million, enables us to act quickly to invest in companies and funds that we find attractive. This was demonstrated in April 2025, when we deployed approximately GBP 50 million into the public company strategy, including that new position in Charles Schwab that Mat mentioned. On the 13th of May, we renewed our revolving credit facility. The RCF is provided by 3 banks. Of the GBP 325 million, GBP 150 million has 5 years of maturity and GBP 175 million has 3 years. We are proposing a final dividend of 4p, which will bring the dividend for the year to 7.68p, an increase of 4.4% over the prior year and making this the 59th year of progressive dividend payments at an annual growth rate of 5.3%, well ahead of inflation. The final dividend will be paid to shareholders on the 6th of August 2026. Of course, now to my beloved waterfall chart. This chart shows the movement in NAV over the period. We started the year at GBP 2.9 billion. The portfolio return of GBP 167 million includes the negative impact of FX. We then deduct management expenses of GBP 29.9 million. This equates to an operating cost ratio of 83 basis points. There is then the cash return to shareholders, GBP 34.6 million, allocated to share buybacks of GBP 47.4 million for the prior year final and current year interim dividend. And this results in a closing NAV of GBP 3 billion. 53% of the assets are domiciled in U.S. dollars and 38% in sterling. Movements in the dollar-sterling exchange rate, therefore, will impact on our in-period results. And in the year, we suffered an FX loss of GBP 22.4 million, reducing our NAV by 0.7%. We have a robust balance sheet with no structural leverage. Walking you through the cash movements, we started the year with GBP 151 million, and net GBP 5.8 million has been invested into the portfolio. The investment income from our assets was GBP 58.7 million, higher than in previous periods, as it includes the GBP 24.5 million dividend we've received from AIR-serv. We have consumed GBP 32.2 million in the cash cost of management expenses and working capital. And next, you have the payment of the dividend GBP 47.4 million and GBP 34.6 million allocated to share buybacks, resulting in that closing cash position of GBP 90 million. We expect to complete the sale of Stonehage Fleming in mid-2026. Many shareholders have asked how we intend to allocate the expected proceeds of circa GBP 290 million. Following the sale, private capital will represent 23% of Caledonia's NAV. So we will want to deploy a meaningful share of the proceeds into new private capital companies. However, we feel no pressure to invest, and we will continue to appraise investment opportunities across all 3 pools on their merits and as they arise. Overall, we have a prudent capital allocation policy to investments, our dividend, and where appropriate, share buybacks. During the 12 months, we allocated GBP 34.6 million to share buybacks, increasing the total since March 2024 to GBP 100 million, delivering 9.72p NAV per share accretion or 1.8%. The average discount over the financial year was 34%, but at its widest in March, in part due to the Iranian conflict, ending the year at 43%, which has resulted in a negative 7.1% TSR. Whilst the discount has recovered during April to 37%, we continue to believe fundamentally undervalues the quality of the portfolio, our track record and prospects. We are taking action over the things that we can control, continue to invest in a quality portfolio, allocating capital to share buybacks. We've completed a 10-for-1 share split. In addition, we have rebalanced the profile of the dividend. These measures will improve visibility of income, make payments more balanced and make dividend reinvestment easier. We continue to evolve our IR and communications to ensure that the Caledonia investment proposition is understood and rated. We have held capital market spotlight events focused on the investment pools. And if you've not had the opportunity, I would encourage you to visit the website and watch the presentations. They provide a great insight into how the pools operate, what differentiates us and how we add value. When you visit the website, you will see that this has been significantly improved with new content, which we will continue to develop so that along with the results announcement, investors understand the progression of the pools. I will now pass back to Mat.
Mat Masters: So to close, while we expect uncertainty to remain a feature of markets in the year ahead, we believe Caledonia is well placed to continue delivering long-term value for shareholders. Our diversified portfolio of high-quality companies and active approach to risk management have helped deliver NAV growth against an uncertain backdrop, demonstrating the resilience of our model and the strength of our investment discipline. At the same time, our strong balance sheet and liquidity gives us the flexibility to pursue opportunities as they arise. Our focus remains on compounding net asset value per share over time, delivering shareholder returns, including maintaining our progressive dividend policy and ensuring the strength of our investment proposition is more fully reflected in the share price. Thank you for your time. There will be a short pause, and then, we'll take questions.
Rob Memmott: Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us today. We will be taking questions initially from the analysts, and then, we will take questions from the webcast. Where questions cover similar themes, then we will group those together and address them collectively. And if we are unable to get to your question during the session, we will be sure to follow up with you via e-mail shortly after the event. I'll now pass across to the moderator to assemble the queue.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Anthony Leatham from Peel Hunt.
Anthony Leatham: Hopefully, you can hear me. I'm just asking about the quality focus on the listed equity portfolio. Obviously, that's been quite challenging for a number of actively managed strategies, certainly over the last 12 months. Have you and the team gone back through the key criteria and maybe looked at how challenging it's been and considered whether there's anything to be adjusted in that public equity selection process?
Mat Masters: Anthony, Mat here. Thanks for the question. Yes, so the team were -- unfortunately, this year, the portfolio obviously sold off during March. And that's the second time that's happened because that happened last year as well. So the results have been depressed by this strange phenomenon happening at 2 year ends. We remain very happy with their approach and the way that they're investing. They handled the volatility of Oracle pretty well during the year. They sold a lot of Oracle when that shot up, and that gave some protection when it came off again. So I think they're managing the portfolio well, and we're sort of happy with their approach.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] We have another question from Anthony Leatham with Peel Hunt.
Anthony Leatham: Great. Sorry for dominating the questions. Could you just give us a bit more color on the funds portfolio? You mentioned, I think, that the Asia portfolio was -- had been performing better. Obviously, the market is hoping for a turnaround in terms of IPO activity. Any additional detail on the 2 parts of that funds portfolio would be helpful.
Rob Memmott: Yes. Thanks, Anthony. So with respect to Asia, we've seen a significant uptick in fundraising activity and IPOs. In the year, 6 companies successfully IPO-ed. And really, that was through the sort of back end of 2025 and in the first quarter of 2026. We've also had 2 companies IPO since our financial year-end. And there are 5 that are in the process of filing for IPO. So I guess that gives you a sort of feeling of the increase in activity. The companies are performing well. But as people will be aware, activity has been subdued for a number of years. So it's particularly pleasing to see that uptick in activity now. And I should just remind people that when -- firstly, the companies are relatively small, given the diversification of the portfolio. And then secondly, when a company does IPO, we are often locked up for a 12-month period. So it will take some time for the managers to decide or be in a position to liquidate that position. And with respect to North America, again, trading activity of the underlying companies has been strong, and it's really that that's driving the underlying performance. There has been some exit activity, and we benefited from some uplift in value through exit activity. Really, we sort of started to see that improvement after -- in the final quarter of 2025. And so that starts to sort of pick up into 2026. There's been a sort of further sort of pause given the Iran conflict. So currently, I think the portfolio is performing well, but the sort of visibility and the sort of cadence of exit activity remains a little bit subdued.
Operator: There are no further questions on the Zoom. I will now hand back over to Rob to cover the written questions. Please go ahead.
Rob Memmott: Thanks very much. I'll just pull together a few of the questions. There's one with respect to Stonehage Fleming, which is, why did we decide to sell that asset? Mat, maybe you can take that.
Mat Masters: Well, thanks for the question. It's obviously a really good success for us. We invested for many years and really enjoyed partnering with Giuseppe and his team, and the business has developed very well over that period of time. And I think often what we find is that when you take a longer-term view and you really improve the quality of these businesses, they become sort of strategically very interesting for purchases, and that's exactly what happened with Stonehage Fleming, so we got an approach from Corient. It made a lot of strategic sense. They were very keen to buy the business. And so it just made -- it made sense in the context of everything in and around the business to enter into discussions with Corient and then -- and sell the business. So that's how that came about.
Rob Memmott: Okay. Thank you. We've got -- there's a sort of a few questions obviously around discount, capital allocation. And if I sort of try and just sort of pull those together, as we sort of mentioned on the call, we have a sort of prudent capital allocation strategy. We want to remain invested in the investment pools that we have. We will be receiving just under GBP 290 million from the sale of Stonehage Fleming in due course. But at that point, as I mentioned on the call, the share of assets of net asset value within private capital will be 23%. And our strategic allocation range is 25% to 35% for private capital. So we will want to add a meaningful portion of the -- of that GBP 290 million to private capital. But also, we will allocate to the other investment pools for appropriate opportunities. And then, with respect to buybacks, we completed GBP 35 million in the year. People are sort of saying, why have we not done more because of where the sort of discount has been. And I think you'll probably see that in the -- in March and April, the level has picked up. We were a bit lighter in the first quarter of the year, partly through being in a sort of closed period and not been able to act. So there will be some sort of -- we'll continue to buy back, particularly where the shares are, but it will be balanced with making sure that we are invested in the portfolio. We've got a question, which has come through, which is why the funds so diversified, so 600 underlying companies and 48 managers. Maybe, Mat, if you take that.
Mat Masters: That's a good question. So it does look very diversified. I think we've got to accept that, not necessarily a bad thing. The team are very good at keeping track of everything and understanding what's going on. However, one of the reasons for the diversification is, of course, it's across 2 geographies. We're covering North America and Asia, and hardly any other funds cover both geographies. I think there's only one that sort of covers both. And then there's a sort of mathematics of it all that we want to -- we're not chasing investments here, but we're looking to get a certain amount of money at work into the lower mid-market or earlier-stage funds in Asia. So they're not big funds. And so just the math of getting a certain amount of money to work into funds that themselves are quite small, and then, it doesn't make sense for them or for us to be over a certain sort of size in those funds just ends up sort of driving that sort of diversification, which I think we would all admit does look very diverse, but not necessarily a bad thing.
Rob Memmott: Great. Thank you, Mat. I think we're about there on time. I think we've answered the majority of the questions which have come through. And what we will make sure that we do is that we will come back to each of you with specific answers to your specific questions if we have not already called them. So thank you very much for your time this morning. Have a good day.
Operator: Thank you for joining today's call. We are no longer live. Have a nice day.