GOODWIN PLC

MARCH 2024 TRADING UPDATE

The Group's trading activity has remained in line with expectations and the profitability of the Group in the second half of the year will be similar to the first six months, with the current workload at the time of writing being £252 million.

During the year, the Board has created an Executive Leadership Team that consists of the five Main Board Executive Directors and currently two additional members to broaden the experience at the senior level.  We are pleased to announce that the Executive Directors have been joined by Adam Deeth, who following the retirement of John Connolly has been the Group Chief Accountant for the past year, and Anthony Thomas, the Group's General Counsel.  Both individuals bring a wealth of experience from their previous roles within significant engineering groups and are actively contributing to the progression of the Group.

In line with our activities to reduce CO₂ emissions in relation to our manufacturing activities, our woodland creation plan that involves the planting of over 500,000 trees has been formally approved by the Welsh Government and verified by Natural Resource Wales.  The planting of the scheme is expected to commence over the next two years and over the life of the scheme has the potential to generate an estimated yield of 150,000 tonnes of carbon equivalent (tCO2e). Such a scheme was necessary as it would currently be impossible using carbon neutral alternatives that are commercially available to substitute natural gas within the energy costs of some of our manufactured products.  We are still awaiting permission from the Distribution Network Operator to connect a further 1MWp solar installation into Goodwin Steel Castings and for planning permission on a 4.3MWp Solar installation at Hoben International to compliment the 5.2MWp of Solar already installed. 

Following a record order input last year at Goodwin Steel Castings of £77.2 million, higher than the cumulative input over the last five years, the level of throughput at the foundry is increasing.  Consequently, the foundry will be contributing a greater level of profits moving forward as a higher proportion of the work will relate to highly technical and specialist mission critical castings that are priced accordingly. Over the past five years nearly all of these components have been through a development process and have successfully been delivered to our customers. With activity levels continuing to increase throughout the year, the Board sees this as an exciting time for Goodwin Steel Castings going forward.

We commented in the 2023/24 Outlook section of the Interim Report that we believed Easat Radar Systems, over the next six months, will be announced as the successful bidder of a number of contracts, though we have nothing further to report at this time as the tendering processes are still ongoing. In turning around this part of the business, no different than what has been achieved at Goodwin Steel Castings to address different market areas, the Easat team have been diligently working to position Easat to deliver commercially attractive and technically advanced Radar Systems rather than just components to integrators and as such our confidence level of success remains resolute.  We look forward to updating shareholders as the Easat story evolves in due course.

With respect to dividend payments, we confirm that the second and final instalment of 57.5p per share in relation to the year ending 30^th April 2023, which was approved at the last Annual General Meeting on the 29^th September 2023, will be paid on the 12^th April 2024.

T.J.W. Goodwin

Chairman

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