OREANDA-NEWS. John Wood Group PLC (“Wood Group” or “the Group”), issues the following Annual General Meeting (“AGM”) Statement.

Trading performance

Overall performance for the year to date, whilst down on 2014, reflects the relative resilience of our business model. We are flexible and asset light, with a range of predominantly reimbursable activities across customers’ opex and capex spending. We remain focused on SG&A cost reduction and utilisation, and are helping customers to reduce their project costs, increase operating efficiency and safely improve performance.

We now have improved visibility on customers’ spending plans for the year, although market conditions remain challenging. We are confident that we can deliver SG&A cost reductions of over \$30m in 2015 and anticipate that full year EBITA will be broadly in line with analyst consensus.1 Looking further ahead, we remain confident of delivering good growth as market conditions improve.

Engineering

In Upstream, activity remains subdued, continuing the trend we initially communicated in the second half of 2013. Although we still see a number of projects being deferred we remain encouraged by the high volume of early stage work as customers look to re-engineer projects with a view to improving project economics. We remain active on a number of detailed engineering projects, including Det Norske’s Ivar Aasen in the Norwegian North Sea and Hess Stampede in the Gulf of Mexico. In March we were awarded the FEED and procurement scope for Statoil’s Kollsnes gas plant in Norway leveraging our strength in automation and control engineering and our 2014 Norwegian acquisition, Agility Projects. Also in March, we were awarded an Offshore Maintain Potential contract from Saudi Aramco for six years covering engineering, procurement and construction management.

In Subsea and Pipelines, activity levels have reduced somewhat, with a smaller number of large subsea capex projects coming to market and as a result we are seeing an increase in the proportion of operations support activity in certain areas. Our UK business is supporting activities in Africa, Middle East and the Caspian, including activity with BP on Shah Deniz, with Zadco in Abu Dhabi and with Tullow in Ghana. We have also recently secured a five year maintenance contract for subsea well control spanning the UK, Singapore and Brazil as part of a joint industry project. In Australia, we were awarded a FEED contract with Woodside in February and we remain engaged on the Gorgon project, expected to complete later in the year. Our onshore pipelines business is benefitting from the impact of US customers seeking to improve transportation to downstream facilities.