In commercial shipping, we continued to benefit from our outstanding specialist design skills in offshore wind farm support vessels and ferries, but demand for our innovative superyacht design services slackened in the face of the global economic slowdown. The value of our environment and climate solutions was clearly evident during major flood events in eastern Australia and we continued to grow our operations in Canada through the addition of dedicated resource to work with state and local government agencies, critical infrastructure, finance, health, defence, and security sectors in their climate risk, resilience and adaptation strategies.. Overall, this highlights how our diverse portfolio and the essential nature of our work provides us with some resilience in challenging economic times. Now, with a strong pipeline of work in place for the year ahead, and excellent longstanding relationships with our customers, we can turn that solid base into a strong foundation for growth. As an organisation, we have a particular focus on sustainability, not only in terms of how we manage our own resources, but also in the way we help customers to achieve sustainable outcomes. Therefore, we saw widespread support from our people in setting an ambitious target to achieve net zero in our business by 2035 which, along with our commitment to supporting sustainable development goals, will have an increasing influence on the future of our business. Customers While the ongoing war in Ukraine has made governments around the world reassess the importance of both their defence spending and energy security, this is likely to be a longer-term driver of demand for our services, given the significant lead time for projects. In fact, for much of the year, delays in project decisions were the reality. This situation began to improve in the latter months of the reporting period and continued beyond it with the FSS win in the UK. It was a similar story in our energy markets, where, as the reporting year progressed, rising energy costs and the need to transition to green power sources started to overcome the geopolitical and economic headwinds seen earlier in the year. ‘Despite considerable macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges we were able to grow revenues, invest in the future, maintain profits and reward our employee members with a £5.2m profit distribution.’ Sarah Kenny, OBE Chief Executive, BMT Outlook Having made strategic investments in our capabilities and processes, and with key markets improving, I believe we are in a strong position to deliver consistent returns in the year ahead and beyond. 7
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