CRH plc (NYSE:CRH) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Albert Manifold: Look, we were very clear when we spoke at our event in September that our business is 75% United States and 25% Europe, and we like that profile of our businesses because we have a lot of the advantages of Europe, a lot of the innovation, a lot of the technology we have in Europe and we bring it to scale in the United States, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. With regard to divestments, divestments take place across CRH where we see that perhaps somebody else is a better owner of a business that we own. I’m happy to say I don’t think we’ve got any really bad businesses left in CRH. I think we’ve — over time, our business has been repositioned over the last 10 years. And just to remind everybody on the call of the businesses that we owned in 2012 and 2013, we have sold 50% of those businesses over the last decade for about $10 billion.

And by the way, we’ve invested $20 billion in new businesses. So it’s a new CRH that’s focused on going forward rather than going back. But that’s not to say we don’t continue on our work on portfolio. Really for all of us as a senior management team, we are consistently looking at the performance of our businesses and the capital we have invested. And if we see opportunities to switch capital from lower returning areas into higher returning areas, we will do that, much the same as anybody on this call would do that. So we will continue to do this. But when we do it, it will be an expression of how we believe about the opportunities we have in the business we sell and use the money from that opportunity to buy other businesses of higher returns.

It won’t be anything to do with the strategy of the business and whether we enter or relay to the product area, a region or around [international]. I can assure you, we are actively looking at rotating our portfolio continuously. It’s something we talk about all the time. Some years, it will be tens of millions. Some years, there could be hundreds of million. But it will all be about repositioning ourselves into high growth areas, higher returns, higher cash and higher margin businesses. Okay. Listen, I think that’s all we have time for today. And I just want to say thank you for your participation. I hope we’ve managed to answer all of your questions. But as always, if there’s any follow-up questions you have, please feel free to get in touch with our Investor Relations team.

We look forward to talking to you again on the 29th of February next year when we report our full year results for 2023. Thank you for your time, and have a good day.

Operator: I’d like to thank our speakers for today’s presentation, and thank you all for joining us. This now concludes today’s call and you may now disconnect.