Strategic review

Progressing with Sunbelt 4.0

2024/25 was a year of laser focus on the delivery of our new strategic plan Sunbelt 4.0, and its five actionable components, with clear momentum also building from our Sunbelt 3.0 investments.  We enjoyed a number of successes including strong growth especially among our top 200 North American customers.  Our strategic account team and broader organisation have strengthened relationships, driving year-on-year rental revenue growth, with 42,000 new customers added in 2024/25 on top of the 118,000 accounts added during Sunbelt 3.0.  This success stems from major project wins, cross-selling, and collaborative partnerships, benefitting both construction and non-construction markets.  We have implemented a full rollout of VDOS 4.0, our next generation vehicle dispatch optimisation system.  This reengineered platform enhances availability, utilisation, efficiency, and user experience, through a clearer path to saying yes to customers, with every branch and logistics operation now using the system.  Another key achievement is the performance of the 401 locations added during Sunbelt 3.0.  Collectively, these sites have grown rental revenues by 20% in 2024/25 while improving margins by over 200 basis points.  In 2024/25, we added 61 new locations in North America, of which 48 were greenfield sites and 13 locations from four bolt-on acquisitions.  These actions are a crucial step toward our broader Sunbelt 4.0 goal of leveraging our Sunbelt 3.0 investments and increasing margins by 3-5%, further improving customer satisfaction and streamlining operations to drive performance. 

Safety is always our top priority and in 2024/25 we achieved a Total Recordable Incident Rate of 0.65 and a Lost Time Rate of 0.1, both metrics representing record performance in frequency and severity of reported incidents which is the precise intent of our ground-breaking safety programme, Engage for Life.  In January, we launched the Driver Profile, a proprietary system which deploys a risk-based approach to reducing our exposures on the road, to anyone in our organisation operating a Sunbelt Rentals vehicle.  This is another example of not allowing complacency into our culture. 

The Group is in a position of strength, with the operational flexibility and financial capacity to take advantage of the ongoing structural growth opportunities we see for the business and enhance returns to shareholders as we follow our Sunbelt 4.0 plan.  The investments in and expansion of the business over Sunbelt 3.0 and into Sunbelt 4.0 are enabling us to take advantage of the diverse opportunities that we see while maintaining discipline and balance sheet strength that affords us considerable flexibility and optionality.

The Group is in a position of strength, with the operational flexibility and financial capacity to take advantage of the ongoing structural growth opportunities we see for the business.