Ibstock (LON: IBST), which holds a leading share of the UK clay brick market, reported a statutory pre-tax loss of £27m for the first half of 2026, reversing an £8m profit a year earlier, after taking a £25m non-cash impairment on mothballed soft-mud brick facilities. Shares were volatile as trading got under way on Wednesday.
The stock changed hands at 95.6p, down 2.25% from Tuesday’s close of 97.8p, having swung between an intraday low of 88.99p and a high of 101.6p in the roughly two hours since the interim results were released at 7am BST.
The impairment reflected clay facilities Ibstock mothballed as it waits for the UK housebuilding recovery it has long expected. Excluding that charge, adjusted EBITDA, earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, fell a smaller 28% to £26m from £36m, which chief executive Joe Hudson said was “in line with our expectations” given “focused execution” against “a backdrop that remains challenging”. Reported revenue dropped 15% to £164m from £193m, with like-for-like sales down 10%.
The pullback was deliberate: management cut brick production by 20 million units and ran down inventory rather than chase volume into a market where UK brick deliveries fell 8% in the five months to end-May. Ibstock’s own volumes fell a smaller 7%, meaning it gained clay market share even as it shrank output. The company also pushed through a February price rise and a June fuel surcharge to offset Middle East-linked energy cost inflation.
Ibstock cut its interim dividend to 0.5p from 1.5p to preserve cash as net debt rose to £151m and leverage climbed to 2.5 times EBITDA from 1.9 times a year earlier, a rise management expects to reverse toward 2 times by December. Hudson said the group still expects “a stronger adjusted EBITDA in H2 than H1”, though full-year EBITDA is guided to the lower end of current market expectations.
The reaffirmed H2-weighted guidance and preserved market share give management a case that this is a controlled reset rather than a deteriorating recovery story, leaving the day’s wide trading range, and the rest of the session, as the clearest gauge of whether the market agrees.