CRH chairman Richie Boucher has insisted that holding its annual general meetings (AGM) in Ireland remains “appropriate”, even as investors approved a resolution allowing it to hold such meetings oversees in future.
Some 99 per cent of voting shareholders backed a resolution at the building materials and services giant’s AGM in Dublin on Thursday that would allow it to amend its articles of association to enable general meetings to be held outside of the Republic.
Mr Boucher told investors at the meeting that the resolution was put forward to give CRH, which moved its main listing to New York in late 2023, but remains based in Dublin, the “flexibility for potentially unforeseen circumstances”.
The chairman, who served as chief executive of Bank of Ireland post the 2008 financial crash, said CRH “has no current intention” to move its AGMs overseas and that, as chairman, he feels “it is appropriate” to continue to hold them in Ireland.
Still, he added that he did not want “tie any future chairman” to that position.
Earlier this week, CRH stuck to its forecast that earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation will rise as much as 11.6 per cent to between $7.3 billion (€6.5 billion) and $7.7 billion this year and that it has not seen any sign of customers scrapping or delaying investment even as the global economic outlook has become more uncertain in recent months.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, group chief executive Jim Mintern said a “much needed” recovery of the US home construction market was likely to be pushed out to next year, amid ongoing economic uncertainty and high prevailing interest rates.
“It’s not a demand issue in the US. There’s a shortfall of somewhere between four and six million homes in the US. It’s affordability. The typical mortgage in the US is structured as a 30-year fixed [product]. The rate today is 6.8 per cent and that needs to come back to something beginning with a five before you get that moving again,” he said.
The residential construction market makes up about 30 per cent of the group’s sales in its Americas units. The Americas accountsfor 75 per cent of group earnings, which are mainly geared towards infrastructure and non-residential building.
Group chief operating officer Randy Lake highlighted on Tuesday that only a third of what was earmarked for motorways in the Biden administration‘s 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has been spent to date. CRH is the biggest road builder in the US.
Momentum across North American data centre construction and high-spec manufacturing was “positive”, in particular, according to the group.
The CEO said CRH is beginning to see what it described as “some green shoots” in construction in Europe. “I don’t think it’s fully appreciated how tough a time western Europe has had with Brexit, the pandemic, the war [in Ukraine], the energy crisis, and a lot of elections last year,” Mr Mintern told reporters.
Meanwhile, Mr Mintern said that it remains a matter of “when, not if” CRH joins the S&P 500, the most widely followed stock market index in the world, as the group feels that it has ticked all the boxes necessary for the committee presiding over the index to include the group.
He said that CRH moving in January to become a “US domestic” shares issuer, after the group crossed the threshold of more than 50 per cent of its shares being held by US residents, was “not unhelpful” to its S&P 500 inclusion case.
