SPX H1 2026 - Preliminary Earnings Alert

Event: Quartr H1 2026 event Retrieved: 2026-08-11T10:40:00Z Comparison mode: maximal Scorecard contract: v1 Source status: release=available (earnings release 3673853, 35 pages, pages 1-7 read) | financials=not consulted; every displayed actual is read from the release | transcript=available, complete, not live (post-call stage still open) Reporting period: Spirax Group reports on a half-yearly cycle. Quartr's event identity for 557785 is "H1 2026" and every figure below covers the six months ended 30 June 2026, against the six months ended 30 June 2025. Currency is pounds sterling throughout.

Consensus scorecard

• Consensus scorecard, bulleted equivalent:
  • Revenue / group revenue: Quartr actual £863.8m; API Ninjas estimate unavailable, so the row is not scored.
  • EPS / adjusted basic: Quartr actual 150.0 pence; API Ninjas estimate unavailable, so the row is not scored.
• No formal Beat, Miss or In line result is published for this event. API Ninjas carries no rows at all under the LSE primary ticker SPX, and the US OTC line SPXSY carries actuals only, with no estimate on any historical row and no 2026-08-11 row. Neither the strict ladder nor the maximal-mode provider-reported fallback has an estimate to score against.

Reported results and guidance

• Reported results, bulleted equivalent: group revenue was £863.8m against £822.2m, up 5% both reported and organic. Statutory operating profit was £154.2m against £106.8m, up 44%, with the statutory margin up 490bps to 17.9%; the release attributes that step-up to one-off restructuring costs in the 2025 base. Profit before taxation was £135.4m against £87.9m and statutory basic EPS 132.2p against 85.0p. On the adjusted basis, operating profit was £171.1m against £158.8m, up 8% reported and 6% organic, with the adjusted margin at 19.8% against 19.3%, up 50bps reported and 10bps organic; adjusted profit before taxation was £152.3m against £139.9m and adjusted basic EPS 150.0p against 137.6p, both up 9%. Adjusted cash conversion fell 700bps to 54% from 61%, statutory net cash from operating activities fell 14% to £84.3m and adjusted cash from operations fell 6% to £91.6m. Net debt was £618.2m against £658.0m and leverage 1.6x against 1.8x. The interim dividend is 50.4p against 48.9p, up 3%. ROCE is stated as up 180bps.
• Segment results, bulleted equivalent: Steam Thermal Solutions revenue £419.8m, up 1% organic and 1% reported, with adjusted operating profit £92.3m at a 22.0% margin, down 170bps organic and 140bps reported. Electric Thermal Solutions revenue £232.9m, up 11% organic and 10% reported, with adjusted operating profit £40.0m at a 17.2% margin, up 220bps on both bases. Watson-Marlow revenue £211.1m, up 7% organic and 8% reported, with adjusted operating profit £58.0m at a 27.5% margin, up 80bps organic and 160bps reported. Corporate adjusted cost was £(19.2)m against £(20.6)m.
• Guidance, bulleted equivalent: full-year guidance is reiterated unchanged at mid-single-digit organic group revenue growth well ahead of IP, with the group adjusted operating margin expected to increase organically on the 2025 margin of 20.0% and adjusted operating profit and EPS growing ahead of organic revenue growth on operating leverage. STS second-half sales growth is expected ahead of the first half with a higher second-half margin, consistent with a typical 45%:55% split of adjusted operating profit, leaving the full-year STS margin broadly in line with 2025. ETS is guided to high-single-digit second-half sales growth against a +12% comparative with margin slightly ahead of the first half. WMFTS is guided to high-single-digit second-half sales growth against a +10% comparative with margin broadly similar to the first half. Corporate costs will be higher than 2025 on growth investment, with the remainder growing broadly in line with inflation, and net financing costs, the effective tax rate and cash conversion are all expected to be similar to 2025. The market backdrop assumption is a CHR forecast of 1.9% global IP for 2026 both including and excluding China, against first-half IP of 1.8% and 1.5% excluding China. On exchange rates, end-July rates prevailing for the rest of the year would have a negligible impact on 2025 sales and adjusted operating profit.

Key bullish aspects

• Organic revenue growth of 5% ran well ahead of the 1.5% first-half industrial production growth excluding China that the company uses as its demand benchmark, and ahead of the 1.8% figure including China. The company describes this as growth ahead of its markets rather than with them.
• Electric Thermal Solutions grew organic sales 11% with margin up 220bps to 17.2%, driven by operating leverage, the absence of lower-margin legacy orders and a higher proportion of Semicon and Heat Trace sales, and delivered despite ramp-up costs at the new Medium Voltage facility in Ogden. Large Medium Voltage heater shipments more than doubled year on year and Semicon shipments rose a further double digit.
• Watson-Marlow Biopharm order intake ran ahead of sales, with second-quarter orders at the highest level of any quarter since the COVID-related 2021 peak and above pre-COVID levels. That is a forward-looking data point rather than a delivered one, and the company links it directly to continuing sales growth.
• The China drag in Steam Thermal Solutions is moderating as expected: China sales were down 1% organically against a 6% organic decline in the first half of 2025, with the decline in large project sales continuing to moderate while MRO and solution sales grew strongly.
• The balance sheet improved on both measures: net debt fell 6% to £618.2m and leverage fell to 1.6x from 1.8x.
• Statutory operating profit rose 44% and the statutory margin 490bps, which closes most of the gap between statutory and adjusted profit that the 2025 restructuring charges opened.
• Full-year guidance was reiterated in full rather than trimmed, and the company states it remains on track for the medium-term targets set in October 2024.
• Decarbonisation commercialisation produced identifiable orders rather than pipeline language: ten PoweringZero orders worth approximately £12m in Oil & Gas, Power Generation and Chemicals, Steam System Audits across 80 sites for multi-national Food & Beverage customers, and the first Medium Voltage SteamVolt delivery.

Key bearish aspects

• Steam Thermal Solutions, the largest business at 49% of group revenue, grew organic sales only 1% and its adjusted margin fell 170bps organically to 22.0%. The company attributes this to shipment phasing and a first-half weighting of investment, but the delivered result is a flat, lower-margin half in the biggest segment.
• The group adjusted operating margin improved only 10bps organically, to 19.8%. That is below the 2025 full-year margin of 20.0%, so the guided organic margin increase for the year has to be produced entirely in the second half.
• Cash conversion deteriorated materially: adjusted cash conversion fell 700bps to 54% from 61%, statutory net cash from operating activities fell 14% and adjusted cash from operations fell 6%, all against 8% reported growth in adjusted operating profit. The release attributes this to usual seasonality and planned inventory builds, and guides full-year conversion to be similar to 2025.
• The second half carries the year on every line. STS sales growth must exceed the first half's 1%, ETS must deliver high-single-digit growth against a +12% comparative, WMFTS high-single-digit growth against a +10% comparative, and group margin must rise organically from a first half that was 10bps better than the prior year and 20bps below the 2025 full-year level.
• Corporate costs are explicitly guided higher than 2025 on growth investment, which works against the operating leverage the margin guidance depends on.
• The 44% statutory operating profit increase is flattered by one-off restructuring costs in the 2025 base, which the release states directly. On the adjusted basis, which strips those out, growth was 8% reported and 6% organic.
• The interim dividend rose 3% while adjusted EPS rose 9%, so distribution growth trails earnings growth.

Key uncertainties

• Whether the STS orderbook converts on the stated schedule. The entire STS story this half is that shipments were specified by customers for second-half delivery and that the orderbook is strong; no orderbook value, book-to-bill or coverage percentage is disclosed in the pages read, so the claim cannot be sized from the release.
• Whether the group can move the adjusted operating margin above 20.0% for the full year from a 19.8% first half while corporate costs rise. The arithmetic requires a second-half margin comfortably above 20%, and the release quantifies neither the required level nor the expected corporate cost increase.
• Whether the working capital build reverses. The release describes planned inventory builds but does not size them, so the path from 54% first-half cash conversion back to a full-year figure similar to 2025 is unquantified.
• Semicon durability. Semicon was 13% of ETS sales in 2025 and is cited as a driver of both revenue and mix-led margin improvement, but no order or backlog figure is given for it, so the sustainability of the double-digit shipment increase is not testable from this document.
• The absence of any published consensus for this event on the permitted estimate source means there is no external benchmark in this report for whether "in line with our expectations" corresponds to in line with the market's. The company's own framing is that the half was in line.
• The Ogden Medium Voltage facility ramp-up cost is named as a partial offset to the ETS margin gain but is not quantified, so the underlying ETS margin trajectory is not separable from the ramp drag.
• The Copeland/SPH strategic commercial partnership and the WMFTS ERP first implementation are both second-half events with no financial sizing attached in the release.

Market context

• API Ninjas returned a price of $51.39 for SPXSY on OTC with volume of 8,671, retrieved 2026-08-11T10:37:32Z. SPXSY is the US over-the-counter line for Spirax Group, not the London primary listing on which the shares principally trade, and the retrieval time is before the US over-the-counter session opens, so this is a pre-open quote carrying the prior session's volume. It is not a reaction to this release.
• No permitted source in this project supplies a London Stock Exchange price for the SPX primary listing, so the intraday reaction to a release published at 07:30 UTC is not characterized here.
• The API Ninjas ticker "SPX" resolves to a different, unrelated US issuer and was not used for either estimates or price.

Source limitations

• DASHBOARD PUSH IS EXPECTED TO FAIL FOR THIS REPORT. dashboard_sync.PERIOD_PATTERN accepts only titles containing "Q1-Q4 YYYY" or "FYYYYY Q1-Q4". Quartr's event identity for 557785 is genuinely "H1 2026" (eventType h_1), the local ledger agrees, and Spirax reports half-yearly, so unlike the IWG case there is no honest quarterly retitle available. The report is saved and the stage completed regardless, per the policy that a sync failure never suppresses a report; the push result is recorded in the run log. This affects every half-year reporter in the universe and needs a code change the monitor is not permitted to make.
• No consensus scorecard result is published for this event. API Ninjas has no SPX rows and the SPXSY series carries actuals with a null estimate on every row back to 2000, with no row dated 2026-08-11. Neither metric can be scored on any basis, including the maximal-mode provider-reported fallback.
• EPS BASIS: Spirax's headline non-GAAP per-share measure is "adjusted basic earnings per share", stated on a basic share count. The release pages read carry no diluted per-share figure on either the statutory or adjusted basis, so no adjusted-diluted or GAAP-diluted rung of the ladder was available. Adjusted basic EPS of 150.0p was displayed as the headline figure and is labelled as basic in the scorecard.
• Pages 1 to 7 of the 35-page earnings release were read, covering the summary, the summary financials table, the Group Chief Executive Officer's review, the strategic update and the full-year guidance section. The financial statements, notes and the alternative performance measure reconciliations in the appendix were NOT read. Any item disclosed only in those later pages is absent here.
• The Quartr text layer for the summary financials table on page 3 returns the segment block with its labels and values interleaved out of column order. Every segment figure quoted in this report was placed by matching against the values and growth rates restated in the Chief Executive Officer's review and the guidance section on pages 4 and 7, which agree with the table on STS 22.0% and -170bps organic, ETS 17.2% and +220bps organic, WMFTS 27.5% and +80bps organic, and group revenue growth of 5%. Segment figures that the narrative does not independently restate - the statutory segment operating profits and statutory segment margins - are omitted from this report entirely rather than read out of the scrambled table.
• Percentage and basis-point changes are as stated by the company; they were not recomputed locally except where noted.
• This report is factual only. It contains no ranking, no recommendation, and no view on the security.