Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the James Cropper interim results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged; they can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and will publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to the Executive Management Team from James Cropper.
David, Andy, good morning.
Good morning, everyone. My name's David Stirling. I'm the Chief Executive here at James Cropper, and we have Andy Goody, who is our Chief Financial Officer. Pleased to meet you on Investor Meet Company platform. Let's get into some of the detail. Where we'd like to start is just a little bit of a discussion about the overview of James Cropper. It's a business with two main divisions: Advanced Materials and Paper and Packaging. Paper and Packaging is the larger of the two divisions. It's where the business originated and came from. Advanced Materials is a technology-based division involved in a series of more technically demanding markets with products which are, in essence, somewhat similar to paper using non-natural fibers.
The Advanced Materials business also has a coatings division, so that's making effectively metalized mainly coatings on the fibers and on other surfaces, particularly in the hydrogen fuel cell space. I joined James Cropper just under a year ago, and after an initial review of the business, I set three main strategic priorities for us. One was that the Advanced Materials business, while profitable and well-run, had not really grown significantly, and growth became the number one driver for Advanced Materials. Paper and Packaging is a long-standing business, well-documented that paper markets are, in general, slow decline around the world and had not been profitable for some time, the Paper and Packaging division. Getting that division back to a profitable business was the priority there. Thirdly, the group had a large-ish debt position, and that was something that felt uncomfortable.
Third priority for the business: generate cash, increase the earnings, pay down the debt, and get to a more comfortable position there. We have made very good progress on all three. We will take you through the detailed financial outcomes in the next section of the presentation by Andy, and I will just run through a bit more detail on the division so you can see what we are talking about as we explain the financial results. I would like to start with the group. We can see that we have the two main divisions: Paper accounts for about 70% of revenue, Advanced Materials about 30%, and then we have a group function which looks after, as well as the PLC elements, things like the IT systems and finance, etc. The Advanced Materials, as I said, the Advanced Materials, the strategic imperative there is growth.
That's something that we have got a number of different things to do. We'll talk in more detail about that later, but effectively, we have a good product portfolio, and the markets that we're operating in are growth markets in some cases and really possibly very high-growth markets in others. We are thinking about how we actually deliver growth there. The Paper and Packaging is a very different proposition. It's a business that has been around for a very long time, and I think operational self-help is the number one priority to deliver there. The group overall, in the first half, delivered just over GBP 50 million revenue, which was very similar to the previous year, and a much improved EBITDA performance. Now, we've made EBITDA, which is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, as the primary financial measure for the group. It is a very close proxy to profit.
If you look at our trading update, you can see how you get from profit to EBITDA, but it is, in some ways, a cleaner metric given some of the exceptional items, etc., happening in the group, and that is the number one metric we're looking at. Around a 50% growth in that measure of profitability in the period, and that's a very pleasing start to my first year. Let's look at Advanced Materials in a bit more detail. Advanced Materials have got a series of different technologies, but the largest one is non-woven, wetly non-woven fibers. We create a paper-like structure, more open than paper, so it's more like a veil, called a veil, used in a huge variety of things, but quite often the biggest applications are in the composite technology areas.
We think about those as well as our coated products, so the metal-coated products, in two different segments, really, or types of market. The first one is established markets. Things like defense, aviation, construction, medical, sports, and leisure are all established markets that people know well. There is growth there in some of them, but it's not transformative growth. Generally more stable, and we can go in, and the business that we win there is not completely new; it's probably come from an improvement on someone else's solutions. The nascent markets are much more developing in themselves. We talk about battery technology, we talk about fuel cells, carbon capture, hydrogen generation, drone technology, these sorts of things. The markets are potentially very high growth. They are potentially very game-changing, but also much more difficult to predict.
Will there be markets, and who will be the technological winners? Much more difficult to understand those. We think about those markets differently and how we approach them and how we invest against them. Advanced Materials as a division, we had about 13% growth in there. Some of the material goes to North America there, so we have the tariff situation, and the top line is boosted a little bit by tariffs, but also we have an exchange rate situation, top line taken down a little bit by the dollar exchange rate. Overall, I think that slightly higher than double-digit growth in Advanced Materials is a good performance in the period. If we look at the established and the nascent markets separately, we are seeing growth of about 9% in established markets.
That's probably slightly higher than we would think the long-run average would be there, partly due to some customer timing. In the nascent markets, 21% growth. Again, that's probably in line with where that growth could be subject to the technology position in those markets unfolding in a sensible way. We do risk in those sorts of markets, a little bit potentially boom and bust because of the nature of them. I think the underlying position, 20%, seems about right. If we'd grown by 30% or 40%, I wouldn't have been overexcited by that because likely that would not have been sustainable. Similarly, if we'd grown by 5% in a six-month period, I wouldn't have been particularly downbeat about that because that would have been probably just due to timing of orders.
We need to be very aware of the higher volatility in some of the nascent markets. Overall, a really good six months in a business which is well-positioned and operationally well-run, making decent margins. Strategically, as I said, the different markets have different characteristics, and we can see that as well as growth, we think about complexity and risk on the markets. You can see on the map there that the higher-growth markets are those probably nascent markets. They are more complicated, they are risky, our route to market, our investment, our focus is different from both. Both types of markets have got growth opportunities. I think certainly in all cases, our technology can be sold to more customers in those markets. We are putting a decent amount of money into operational costs, commercial, technical, and marketing to deliver a higher pipeline flow into the business.
All very positive, but feels like a slightly more front-foot approach than we've adopted in the past, and we are hopeful that that growth can be delivered in the pipeline over the medium term. If we turn to Paper and Packaging, we see a slightly different position. The key markets we have are the European and U.K., particularly craft papers, art, binding, special display, print packaging, and the packaging, particularly premium and what they call mass-stage, mass-prestige packaging for high-end consumer goods. There is also a small amount in the Paper and Packaging division at this point of recycled fibers, card, etc. These markets generally, as I said, have been in decline. The interesting thing, though, is James Cropper, relative to the markets, is a small player, and so the ability to take market share in all of those is something that we have to do.
If we look at our what we call finished and added value products, it's about 40 % of revenue. Our core markets are just over 50% of revenue, both with drift-down characteristics in the market. A better customer service, a better, more agile approach to pricing in the market, etc., will be necessary to win business, and that's something that we are making the transition to. The other thing we're doing is picking up more of the commodity business. Why is that important? We are a specialty mill. When we make paper, we will make waste, and when we make waste, we need to do something about that. Having products which use that waste, having products which fill up the capacity of a high-cost asset is always important, and these are markets where we can make money by growing in more commoditized products.
Substantially, Paper is about getting the operations right, though. When I joined, it was very clear to me that we had a business which was losing money, and the primary reason for losing money was the operational way of working. If we think about the cost of operations and what we're trying to do, we have got to cut costs. Those costs are primarily pulp and raw materials, so we just waste energy. Run the machines efficiently and shut down the power plant when we're not running the machines and people. We have gone through a couple of restructuring programs which should be completed in January, fully effective January, to take overheads out of the paper business and to group, to a certain extent, and restructure the operational approach in paper.
That is something which, while not completely happening in the first half, is going to get us to the point where we expect to be break-even on an EBITDA basis at some point in the final quarter of this financial year. That is a very important milestone. We also have, in the Paper business, something called Colourform. That is a molded fiber operation. We have structured that so it is not a separate operation, does not have a separate overhead and management cost, and that is absorbed into the Paper business as one of the product lines within Paper. If we look medium-term strategically, where do we think we are going? As I said, priorities: operational effectiveness, knowledge management to become better at doing what we are doing, and embedding know-how of our people more in the processes of our business. Market positioning, really important.
Our core products, what we call Peak Two, there are markets which, as I said, are declining but also can exhibit a bit of volatility, a bit of up and down, particularly in the monthly or quarterly basis. We want to fill our factories. We can fill those more with the more commoditized business and, over time, develop new products to change the product mix in our business and ultimately change the value proposition. I think James Cropper has some machinery which is quite old, which more people would be negative about. I'm not particularly negative about that.
I see that as giving us real flexibility because machines that were made a while ago were designed to do a large number of different things, and we can take those and create new products from them in a way that cannot be done with more modern paper machines that are designed to make one or two things very, very efficiently. I think that is a journey we are on. It is a very interesting time in James Cropper, and we are, I think, doing—we have made a good start. Six months under our belt, made a good start. I am going to hand over to Andy Goody, who is our CFO, to talk through the financial highlights.
Thank you, David. First thing I want to highlight on this slide is the second row, adjusted EBITDA, key measure of profitability for us for the reasons David has mentioned before.
In the first half of FY26, that is the six months to September 2025, in that period, our adjusted EBITDA was just over GBP 4 million, which was GBP 1.4 million up on the same period in the previous year. We have made strong progress. That growth in EBITDA was driven by two things primarily. One was the revenue growth that David talked about in the Advanced Materials business, and the other was the improvements that we have made to the operational structure of the Paper and Packaging business, which has seen the EBITDA loss in that business narrow over the last six months. Adjusted profit before tax, the third line in the table, has improved by GBP 2.3 million against the same period last year. Part of that was the EBITDA growth I have just talked about.
Adjusted profit before tax also benefited from a significant drop in our depreciation charge that was driven by the asset impairment that we booked at the end of the previous financial year, and that just washes through in terms of a lower depreciation charge moving forward. The other thing I want to highlight on this table is the bottom row, net debt to adjusted EBITDA over the last 12 months, a key measure of the sustainability of our debt levels and the health of our balance sheet. If you go back to September 2024, that ratio of net debt to the last 12 months' EBITDA was 3.3. That is a high figure. It was flashing red on our dashboard. It needed to be attended to. We've made strong progress on that.
I'll touch in a little bit more detail on what we've done, but that ratio dropped to 1.3x at September 2025. A much stronger, more sustainable position for us. David's touched on some of the key revenue trends in the businesses. The chart on the left-hand side shows you the revenue in our Advanced Materials business by half-year for the last five half-years. I think the key thing that I want to highlight on here is you can see in this chart that in the second half of our financial year 2024, so that's the six months to March 2024, we saw a drop in revenue. That's the second bar in the chart. There was a notable drop in revenue in the Advanced Materials business, driven primarily by the timing of what was going on in some of the nascent sectors.
David referred earlier to the fact that we do expect to see some volatility in the trajectory of those kind of sectors. We did see a drop in that period. What the graph shows is that we have since then returned to revenue growth in the Advanced Materials business. There's positive momentum in terms of the top line, more to do for the reasons David talked about, but we have seen growth over the last three or four half-years there. If you look at the chart on the right-hand side, the Paper and Packaging business, again, we saw a drop in revenue in the six months to March 2024. You can see that in the second bar on the chart. What's happened since then is that revenue has stabilized, and that obviously is important for us. It provides a more stable backdrop for the operational improvements that we're driving.
In the half-year that we are reporting on now, so the six months to September 2025, we did see a notable drop in revenue with one of our merchant customers, and that has largely been replaced in the period with revenue growth elsewhere, which has been particularly encouraging to see the way that we've offset that with some new customer wins and some stronger revenue with existing customers as well. In terms of our net debt, the gray line on here is showing you that net debt to last 12 months, EBITDA ratio that peaked at 3.3x in September 2025. You can see a significant drop since then, and that's, as David mentioned, been one of our key three strategic objectives: to manage our cash and reduce the net debt.
The things we've done to deliver that, we've improved disciplines in terms of cash management, both capital expenditure and working capital. That's been important and helpful. We have reprofiled our debt repayments on our U.K. facility to reduce the amount of debt repayments that we make over the 18 months that run out to next September. That has not affected this particular metric, but what it does mean is that the level of debt that we have on the balance sheet is more sustainable in terms of the repayment profile. We've done that. In the first half of this year, we sold some intellectual property rights that we developed internally around decarbonisation within manufacturing facilities like ours. That generated some one-off income that was very helpful to reduce our debt levels. We've got the business into a much more sustainable place.
The growth that we've seen in our underlying trading performance and EBITDA also, of course, has helped as one of the key parts of this metric. In terms of the balance sheet, the most important thing on the balance sheet is the fact that the net debt has dropped. I think there's a number of ways in which you can see that our balance sheet is more resilient now than it has been over the last couple of years. During the six months that we're looking at to September 2025, we've seen a drop in net debt, as I mentioned, because of the actions that we've taken. We've reprofiled the repayments of our main U.K. debt facility. We've seen a drop of just under GBP 3 million in our pension fund deficit, largely due to movements in market interest rates and inflation.
have benefited as well from strong equity markets over that period. It is helpful to see that deficit coming down slightly. Because of the growth of our profit during the six-month period, as well as the exceptional income, we have seen net assets increase by just under GBP 4 million. If we look at our debt levels relative to our net assets, that metric as well has improved. There is more to do in terms of balance sheet health, balance sheet resilience, but we have made significant progress over the last six months. In terms of cash flow, I mean, we have touched on most of this already by talking about the profit and loss account and the balance sheet. We have repaid GBP 1.6 million of debt over the first six months of this year, which we have fully funded by the cash that we have generated within the business.
We've benefited as well from the exceptional intellectual property sale that I mentioned from some tax receipts, research and development tax credits. That's helped there as well. Finally, for me, on the pension schemes, if we just move the—there we go. Yeah. On the pension scheme, this is an ongoing challenge for us, the deficit in our pension schemes. As I mentioned before, the deficit has dropped. You've seen the black bars in this chart showing that the deficit has dropped over the last couple of half-years, a notable decline over the last six months, which is very helpful. The green line is showing you the funding level within the scheme. That has ticked up to around about 83%-84% funded at the moment. It's going to take probably, if we're honest, about 10 years to get these schemes back to fully balanced.
I suspect that the three-yearly evaluation that is going on at the moment is probably going to come up at a similar level to where it was three years ago. We are going to have to continue as a business to make deficit reduction payments into the scheme, but probably similar levels to what we have been doing over the last three or four years at a little bit more than GBP 1 million a year. That is manageable. It is clearly important that we, on our obligations to this scheme, that is manageable in terms of the cash flows that we see in the business. The investment strategy for the scheme that is set by the trustee with some input from us, that is being reviewed at the moment. It is not going to be changed fundamentally.
There's one or two things I think we can do to make sure that the scheme continues to improve as we move forward. I think David will take you through the current trading and outlook for the business.
Yeah, I will. Before I start that, if I could just encourage all listeners, we have the ability to ask questions. If you have any questions, please put them in the chat box. Very happy to run through and answer as many of those as we can. Where are we right now? We have got a plan. We are executing the plan. You heard what the main elements are: growth in Advanced Materials, that is happening. A return to profitability in Paper and Packaging, that is happening. An improvement in the balance sheet and financial cash situation and debt profile, that has already happened. Very good progress within a six-month period. As we look forward, the business is trading well since the end of the half-year. It has been about seven or eight weeks or so. Very good progress in trading in both divisions during that period.
If we look slightly further ahead, we see continued growth in Advanced Materials, maybe not at the rate we've seen in the first half. That is fine. Certainly, exiting the year with a growth consistent with our medium-term guidance. Paper and Packaging, we do expect revenues to be slightly down on where they are or where we are in the first half. With the benefit of the operational restructuring and other efficiency savings, we should be much more profitable than we were last year and on the road to a consistent profitability within the paper business. I am very pleased to be doing that on lower volumes because if you can do it on lower volumes, you can definitely do it on higher volumes. We expect to see a return to growth in the paper business coming out of the end of this year.
Finally, our expectations for profit growth are unchanged. The stock broker's forecast, market forecast, are for an increase in EBITDA of around 20% to GBP 8 million, which is a much improved position on the previous year. It feels like we're doing what we said we'd do, and we're just getting on with it. Thank you for listening to this part. I'm now going to move to cover some of the questions. If we can just leave the slides up because I think some of the slides might be beneficial in covering some of the questions. The first question I have is around about customer concentration. How concentrated are revenues within aerospace, defense, and energy transition? Are there any single customers above 10% of revenue? In both our divisions, our top five customers in each account for around about 50% of divisional revenue.
Now, they're not always single applications. Certainly in the paper business, we have merchant customers that supply a number of different areas in there. That's roughly the concentration. If we look at—here we go. Let me just find the right page on this. You can see here in advanced materials, there is a breakdown in a bit more detail. That was the end of last year. It's in our annual report. If you want to look there, you can see the breakdown in a bit more detail of the energy transition, defence, etc., customers within advanced materials. Thank you for that. I have a related question. I've had a series, two or three questions with the same theme around defence and our position there. In particular, in relation to what's going on in Israel-Gaza.
This has been a recurring theme from a number of people that was brought by the AGM. We made a fairly detailed statement at the AGM not long ago. That statement is on our website and available for everyone. Essentially, what it says is we see defence as a core part of the business that we are in. We are very happy to see that used as a deterrent. Like everyone else in the world, I think we feel that if conflicts can be avoided, then that or ended, that would be great. Our thoughts are with all those people involved in actual conflicts. We see defence as a key deterrent in the difficult modern world. That statement makes that clear on the website. Next question is, would we ever consider divesting the Paper and Packaging division to focus on Advanced Materials?
The answer to that is we are paid to run a business. To do that, you have to consider a whole range of strategic options. Certainly, the future of the paper business is something that has been and continues to be a topic of conversation. I think it's very clear to me that there is the opportunity and clearly within our control to vastly improve the paper business operating and financial performance. I think if we can do that, then that question becomes a lot less relevant because we are making money. I think when I came here, that was one of my personal thoughts is, look, if we can't have a business that's constantly draining money from the rest of the business. One of the things perhaps that's not visible to shareholders is the fact of the synergies between the businesses.
We have things like Energy Plants, Effluent Plants, IT systems, etc., which the costs of which are shared across divisions. When we report the divisional performance, Paper and Packaging takes a larger share of all of these costs because we do it on activity. There is more activity in Paper and Packaging. It is a bigger division. If Paper ceased to exist, those costs would fall on Advanced Materials. I think the best outcome here is a profitable Paper business and covering some of the overhead costs in the business and both of the Advanced Materials and Paper growing and contributing to the business. That is something that is our plan. There is no current plan to close down Paper or sell Paper. However, it is something like all of these things that we keep under a reasonably regular review.
We have annual strategy processes that ask these types of questions as well as how do we get the best growth out of the businesses and are we in the right types of markets, those sorts of things. Next question. Let's just pick one at random. What's happened to your investments in green energy sources? Is this going to have a significant impact on your energy costs? If I understand that correctly, it's about previously announced plans for a different way to effectively decarbonize. That would have been a significantly higher cost if we proceeded with it, as well as requiring significant capital investment. It is something that we are not giving up on a decarbonization strategy. That particular approach we felt was not going to deliver what we wanted. Our energy costs will move in line with U.K. energy prices.
However, we also expect to use less energy going forward, partly because of the way that we are structuring the business to use the power plant and partly because we have energy-saving activities going on. A bit of both. We've got a—it's a complicated situation within energy. I don't see, other than an unclear position from the government on which way carbon taxes are going, because in some cases they say carbon taxes are going to rise to pay for energy transition and improving the electrical grid. In some cases, they say we recognize that this is harming potentially large industrial energy users, and we are going to give discounts or relief from some of those taxes. I'm not sure where the balance of that's going to land. Certainly, we feel that we are doing a lot to control and reduce our underlying energy utilization.
I've got another question here about how we think about our resilient coating technology. That's used primarily in hydrogen electrolyzers and a few other areas. The question is, have we ever thought about using it in other places? Let me take that question and expand it out because the principle behind that is, look, James Cropper, what technology do you have? And where can that be used? I think that's a very valid question that can be asked about the coatings technology, about the non-woven technologies across both carbon fiber as well as some of the glass and polymeric fibers. We are looking at that sort of application, replication, or moving into the markets with adjacent needs or adjacent markets with similar needs. It'd be better if we were saying that. That is a fundamental part of the growth plan for advanced materials.
Next question is, how's Colourform performing? What is the future for this part of the business? Colourform is the molded fiber business. It's something which is interesting technology, but is not something that is necessarily cost-effective for larger volume customers. It has sort of found its way into a smaller volume niche. As a result, what we've done is we have structured that business to be part of the Paper business and therefore reduce the overhead and costs, etc. It is something that we still believe in, that we can get volume going through there. We're looking at how we make it more responsive, how we make it lower cost, how we make it able to pick up some of the larger volume pieces of business, and how we think about that as a technology growth platform.
Because even though people have tried to copy it, they've tried to copy it in a way that perhaps is less flexible. They've made it more efficient with molded fiber technologies, but it's not quite as flexible as what we have. There may be opportunities there to leverage that technology into slightly different areas. It is something to watch, but it's not going to be something I'd expect we would be talking about as a main growth driver for the business in the next six months. When we look at 12 months and beyond, I might have a different view on that. It is certainly something that's still part of our portfolio for now. Next question. How would you describe current customer demand conditions compared to last year? I wasn't here last year. As far as I know, they seem to be similar.
As I said earlier, we've got about 50% of each business concentrated in the top five customers. Sometimes we see those customers doing very well or increasing their inventory levels or decreasing their inventory levels. There's a bit of noise that's very customer-centric. I think the markets generally are pretty similar. I don't expect much help from the markets in the businesses we are in. Other than the nascent technologies for energy transition, which might do very well and might do nothing or might do very well with other people's technology, the markets in general are not something which are super high growth for the areas we are in. A sort of similar question, I guess, is how much of the improved performance is from structural cost actions versus short-term demand tailwinds.
There's been a little bit of demand improvement because of some of the specific customers that are doing well. We have also had the situation we announced in July of a merchant customer in the paper business deciding to use another mill to source the product. We have explained that very clearly that like for like, that dropped revenues in the paper business in the first half by GBP 3.8 million. The fact of revenues in the paper business being very similar to last year means that we gained GBP 3.4 million elsewhere. I think that is testament to the strength of some of our other businesses. Certainly, as we look in the second half, we are not serving that merchant customer with those products. We have signed an exclusive deal with a company called Winter & Co.
We're an existing customer, very, very professional in this marketplace to act as a partner, exclusive partner, and take those papers to market. That is something that we are expecting to start making inroads in, certainly from November onwards when the products were launched. If we think about the cost side, certainly the cost side has been a big factor in the Paper and Packaging group to a certain extent, taking some costs out of the group structure as well. More of the improvement in paper in the first half and pretty much all of the improvement in Paper and Packaging in the second half will be coming from those internal cost-focused actions and efficiency drivers such as reduction of scrap, etc. As we move into next financial year, we should see some, over the course of the year, benefit from sales growth there.
I think this could be the final question. Let's see. With a manufacturing site in Schenectady, USA, how important is the U.S. market to the three to five-year plan? We have Paper customers in the US and North America in general. We have a decent amount of advanced materials going over to North America. The Schenectady facility is more about coatings technology. It is an integrated part of what we are doing. Sometimes they're sending us products that we are then making into non-woven and sending them out. Sometimes we are sending from the UK products to Schenectady, which then go out. Schenectady is part of a global integrated supply chain more than a kind of market bridgehead into North America. The North American market is reasonably active for us. It's about somewhere between 25% and 30% of revenue, something like that. Is that right?
Yeah. Yeah. Between 30%.
Yeah. That answers all the questions. Thank you very much for participating in this. The recording will be available. There is a lot more information on our website. We did a capital markets day back in June. Presentations for that are on the website. We talk a lot more about some of the strategic positioning, etc. Overall, I think six months, good progress towards what we said we'd do. That is what we need to be about over the next 6-18 months, delivering on these three core objectives of growth, profitability, and capital management. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Perfect. David, Andrew, if I may just jump back in there. Thank you very much indeed for updating investors this morning.
Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order that the management team can really better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team with James Cropper, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all.