Our strategic priorities

Having launched our strategic plan, Sunbelt 4.0, in April 2024, our focus is now on the implementation of this plan, our next level of ambition with purpose.  The continuing shift from ownership to rental and the increasingly essential nature of rental for customer success, mean the industry in which we excel continues to expand rapidly, providing the springboard for our next chapter of growth.  Our size, experience and expertise mean that we will continue to get disproportionately larger in this growing and highly diversified market.  Our history of strategic planning and execution has built a highly successful and robust business.  Sunbelt 4.0 is designed to deliver further growth, resilience and performance.  

Sunbelt 4.0

• Positioned to execute and realise the benefits of ongoing structural change present within the rental industry
• Strategic growth plan designed to deliver a period of strong performance through growth in volume, pricing, margin and return on investment
• Ever-strengthening financial position through earnings growth, strong free cash flow, and low leverage, providing significant operational and capital allocation optionality for the benefit of all stakeholders

Over the course of decades, we have been both influencing and realising the structural change agents in our industry, the first being the ongoing shift from ownership to rental.  Secondly, we can now say categorically that everything has changed in the eyes of our customers.  Rental, and therefore Sunbelt, is essential to their success.  Our business is now mainstream.  Rental is the first option for our customers, rather than being the ‘top-up’ provision of the past.  That is the platform for growth we saw coming together through our previous strategic plan.  It is the industry-built foundation for our current plan, Sunbelt 4.0.

Traditionally ours was a highly cyclical business and we managed the cycles that impacted us to accommodate the changing nature of our business.  We are significantly less cyclical now.  Construction accounts for less than 50% of our total business, rather than being the majority.  We are far more resilient to market changes than ever before.  We have a much larger addressable market given the diversification we have built throughout the business, because rental is now core in a multitude of areas.  

The change in the role and importance of rental means that industry pricing is also evolving, and rental rate discipline and progression has been seen across the industry.  It used to be that the bigger our fleet was, the more money we made.  There was little variation in pricing available.  We now see ourselves more as a business services company and envisage having pricing progression as our norm.  We and the industry have demonstrated this over the last couple of years as, despite lower levels of physical utilisation and used equipment prices, rental rates have continued to progress.  This marks a huge change for us and the industry and is part of our growth algorithm which did not exist in the past.  When we have the scale we have in these market conditions, we expect to see increased margin performance, particularly when we combine these market conditions with confidence and excellence in execution.  

SUNBELT 4.0 ACTIONABLE COMPONENTS

At the heart of Sunbelt 4.0, we are guided by five actionable components, powered by three foundational elements.  We have called the actionable components Customer, Growth, Performance, Sustainability and Investment, and these are the backbone of the Sunbelt 4.0 runway for success - the core components of the next level of our ambition with purpose.