Welcome to the Focusrite plc investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. 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 publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to play a short video on behalf of the company.
I'd now like to ha nd you over to Tim Carroll, CEO. Good morning, sir.
Good morning. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoyed that intro video. It's just a little snapshot of a lot of the amazing products and some of the big installations that we've done over this period of time. Sally and myself are here, and we're very excited to be sharing with you our results for this full 18 months. We know there's a lot to unpack on here, so we're going to jump right in on here. Here's a little bit about what we're going to be going over today on here. As we go through this, you're going to see some reoccurring themes that I want to take you through at the very top of this.
There's a lot of information, obviously, to go through on here. I'm hoping that if anything, if you walk away with sort of these three bullet points that we're going to talk about in just a moment here, and we have a lot to kind of back this up and talk about how these really relate to our performance and how we're going, if you will. Again, the big takeaways on here is resilient performance in line with expectations. I think this is a really important one for everybody to grasp a hold on. We use this word resilient on purpose on here. By definition, it is talking about basically when you've been up against challenges, opportunities, and things that could get in your way.
I think when we look at that's a great definition of what we've been through over this period of time, and I think the group has done a great job of taking every one of those head on and coming out with a very resilient performance. We're also going to talk a lot th rough here about the investment cycle that we've been through and some of the challenges over recent years. If you've been with us in the past, you know that we've had a number of challenges in terms of channel destocking and issues like this. We're through that. We're very happy to report that. We've come out the other side, and I think the numbers and what we've seen on demand and the revenue that we've done has really backs it up.
On top of that, there's a lot of investment that the Group has been through over the past number of years on here, and that's in the structure of supporting a much larger global Group. It's on what we've done in terms of our routes to market and the investments we've made there. It's the investments we've made in our people, in our different offices, but it's also investments that we've been making on the technology and the R&D side. There's been one big one that's been sort of under the hood for the past three or four years that we're now starting to talk about. We're going to give a bit of color on what that means for the business.
There'll be a lot more information about that in our capital markets day that'll be coming up towards the end of the year. The last one is just really on here is just hanging our hat on profitable growth and what we think the opportunity is. This is really us just having a really great bead on what our strengths are and where we still think we need to improve. There's so much that we've been through and that have really tested the power of the brands and tested our strategy on our different infrastructure and how we've done stuff, and we think we've done a great job on this. Okay. Kind of breaking down some of the highlights into two specific slides.
First, we're going to talk about the financial highlights on here. A really good story here. We've seen revenue growth, we've seen gross margin improvement, we've seen EBITDA growth on here. We kind of break these down. We'll look at the revenue growth. Again, really good result with the Content Creation business on here. If you pick that apart, if you remember in our previous financial reporting period, we had brought some inventory forward because of U.S. tariffs on there. If you actually look at that phasing and what we did there, the result from the Con tent Creation business was even better. On the Audio Reproduction business, again, coming out of a big bubble from a big pent-up demand.
All the post-COVID things and stuff, but very happy to see that in the scheme of things, that the U.S. has definitely grown, which has been a big investment area for us. Gross margin, again, a lot that's happened there, especially on the Content Creation business. A lot of that is through managing the price, obviously the tariffs as they've gone forward as well, and the routes to market thing has improved that as well. That has resulted in an improvement on the EBITDA. We had one number that has gone a little bit backwards and we just want to face up to it and bring it as our adjusted EPS.
That's a result of some tax stuff and amortization, and Sally's going to give a little bit more color about that as we go through. Overall, very pleased with the financial highlights. Operationally, there's a number of great things to talk about here. First off is a lot of new product introductions in the year. That is the lifeblood of our culture and our brands is to bring new products and refreshes of existing products to market. A number of those that have actually done quite well across the year. One thing, again, when I talked a minute ago about technology investment that we're starting to talk about is this platform that we've been investing in for a number of years and actually starting to get some color into what that is.
I have a slide on this a little bit further to talk about it, but we think this is incredibly exciting and it's going to be a bit of a game changer in terms of how the group brings products to market into the future on here. Talking about routes to market, as always, we're always looking at that, understanding that our channel, the way it historically functioned, is changing. There's consolidation out there. There's bigger continental players. As we look at our portfolio, we recognize that there are different markets where we should be taking a different approach on here. We've done this in the past in the U.K. and in Germany and Australia. One of the big stories this year is that we did this in Japan.
I'll be giving some more color on this in a while as well. Talking about routes to market, one of the things that we strive for is getting closer to our end users and to our customers, because when we do that, we obviously see an improvement in the visibility of the brands, which results in a visibility, an increase in the revenue as well. Our direct-to-customer channel has something that has been a big area of investment for us, both in the infrastructure for the websites and the brands, and this is something that continues to grow, that we're quite proud of because with all the channel consolidation and what's going on out there, this is probably our best hedge in terms of offsetting those things and actually getting closer to the customers.
Okay. Looking at our two different divisions, that we basically have two stakes in the ground here . A lot of our brands are focused on the Content Creation. What is that. That's all the brands that are really for all the technology and solutions that are about for people that are creating audio, primarily music. Very much aligned with that is in the Audio Reproduction side, which is about all the technology and solutions we have to create live events. This could be a festival, it could be an opera house, it could be the symphony, local theater, even the music you hear in your gym or your coffee house on there.
Those two have very much aligned in there because they play off each other, but they're very different channels, which is why we have the business done on here. You can see overall, we're very pleased with the growth that we've had across here, especially with the Audio Reproduction business, knowing that they've come off a pretty big bubble. Okay, I'm going to take a little bit of a pause and I'm going to let Sally take you through some of the financial highlights for this year. Sally.
Okay. Thank you, Tim, and good morning to everybody. We'll start off, we'll look at the income statement. First of all, my apologies for the large amount of numbers on here. As you'll appreciate, this is an 18-month period, and we're comparing against a 12-month period for statutory reporting because we changed our year end last year, and the reason we did that was basically to provide a bit more transparency and visibility when we come out and report our annual results. We have quite a big sales period, obviously, during the Christmas holidays and Thanksgiving, and we wanted to have our year end more closely aligned to that, and also just give us a bit more visibility when it comes down to planning and insight.
We've changed now to a February year end, and to give a bit more comparability to everyone, we've also provided for you pro forma unaudited numbers for the 12 months to February 2025 and the 12 months to February 2026. That's why you've got so many numbers on here. I'm going to focus primarily on the 12 months to February 2026, because that's what we'll be looking at going forward, and I think it's the best way of looking at performance at the most recent period. As Tim's talked about, we've seen revenue growth for that, and whilst the 1.2% reported may not look quite so significant, as Tim was talking about, what we did last year was to make sure we had stoc k in the U.S. and stock in our sales cha nnels in the U.S. to avoid tariffs.
We took some of the sales that would normally have been in the six months to August 2025 into the six months to February 2025. Effectively, they've moved out. In our August year end, it would have just been moving across a year. This has actually moved it out one year and into another. Gross margin, I've got a waterfall we're going to look at following this, I'll come onto that a bit later. Costs, although there's a slight increase there, that was over quite a significant period and actually took some actions during 2025 to reduce the costs, and you'll see a slight restructuring cost coming through. As a result, EBITDA is up. Depreciation and amortization, you can see ticking up slightly because of those 38 new products coming online.
Also we've started to amortize our chip as it's going into products. It's not on this slide, but you can see EPS is down slightly, largely because tax, we had a big benefit last year through some of our patent box reliefs that came through, and we're still getting them this year, but it's not to the same extent. Finally, there's a big adjusting item there, the Sequential impairment. Tim's going to talk to that a bit later on, but we took an impairment against one of our acquisitions, which Tim will talk to. Okay. I mentioned gross margin. Here's our waterfall, looking at how that's moved over those 12 months. Tariffs in the U.S. were a big headwind for us in the year. You see that, the 1.8% impact coming down.
Because we managed inventory and bought inventory in, and because we put prices up early in the market in May, we were one of the first ones to do that, we actually quite a benefit from tariffs in the year because we were effectively selling pre-tariff stock at post-tariff prices. You ca n see that benefiting Content Creation. Audio Reproduction has basically normalized to where it was as its historic level is around 43%, so that was relatively stable. Overall, we've got an increase of 1.7 percentage points in the year. Going forward, we think that is absolutely maintainable, because if we think of the tariff landscape, most of those tariffs have now been struck down, so we should be going forward with a lower tariff base.
However, I would caveat that we don't quite know what's going to happen with tariffs in the U.S. and indeed, if the market is going to react to the tariffs going away and pricing going down. We are confident we will manage and have plans for either scenario. We're now going to look forward at the cash flow and the balance sheet. One of the things that overall our net debt went down significantly, from GBP 17.9 down to GBP 8.6 at the year-end, and that's partly the profit dropping through, but also you'll see very positive working capital management there. What that basically related to was our stock improving, and those of you that have been with us for a while will remember when we brought our 4th Generation Scarlett in.
We also had 3rd Generation in the market quite deliberately, because following Apple, we wanted to sort of have both versions in the market to sell at a different price point. We've been gradually unwinding that 3rd Generation stock. We're back to pretty much normalized stock levels now across our warehouse, and that reduction is despite the fact we invested more stock in the U.S. to support our Audio Reproduction division. You can see that dropping through and investing slightly higher because those are new products coming through and the final elements of having our silicon chip ready to go and to be launched into new products.
It's not on here, because of this strong performance, we've increased our final dividend for this period slightly from GBP 4.5 up to GBP 4.64, so you'll see that coming through as well in the cash flows next year. Here's the balance sheet. I'm not going to go into this too much, but you can clearly see there the inventory's coming down from GBP 47.5 to GBP 44 this February, and similarly, debtors unwinding. We had a bit of help at year-end with debtors this year. Because of the Lunar New Year, we shipped a lot of our stuff out from China in January. As a result, we got it to customers, and we got cash in a bit earlier, so that was a bit of a help, and a bit of a tailwind towards the end.
Now I'm going to hand back to Tim, who's going to talk you through some of our operational activities.
Wonderful. Thank you, Sally. All right. Very good. Let's kind of break down and look at some information on bo th the different divisions. We'll start with Content Creation here. I think overall the theme is very strong underlying demand supporting growth. That's one great thing that we've seen across our brands through thick and thin is the overall demand has held up quite strong on here. We've seen this across on all the different channels on here. You can see sort of a breakdown. The one in terms of regionally for Content Creation that was a little down year-over-year was EMEA. That was really all about us seeing channel consolidation. As I mentioned earlier, our routes to market a thing is something that we continue to look at and refine, going direct in different markets.
In Europe, we've seen a number of sort of legacy brick-and-mortar music stores close up shop. Now, when that happens, typically, over a short period of time, we see those sales naturally gravitate to another reseller or so we're not seeing any drop in volume, but it does leave a bit of a phasing thing where we have to deal with whatever leftover inventory they have at that time. That's all there is. I think more importantly, as we've talked about in the RNS, that the trading year for this first quarter we just finished in this year has been quite strong and over year-over-year, and EMEA is very much on track with that. Great story with APAC. A lot of that is China sort of just getting back to a normal run rate.
It's not really growing per se, the big story there is Japan and what we've done direct there, and I've got a slide showing that in a little bit on here. Again, very diverse portfolio on here, very pleased with the results that we've had across the Content Creation group. When we look at Audio Reproduction, again, coming off a very significant bubble high, in the previous reporting period. It's not unusual to see that business down, especially in our home market in EMEA and especially in APAC, where China has softened up. I think what we're very proud of is that, in the Americas, where we've made an investment and where we know that we've got a lot of share to go after, that we've seen that business grow on there.
Overall, we're very pleased with the results, just looking at what the market is saying is going on underlying these regions. We're holding up quite well, performing quite well. I think, again, when we look at just the performance and what we've seen for this first period into this new year, Martin Audio and Audio Reproduction, their order book is very strong. A lot of that driven by some of their new product introductions, but also the fact that the immersive audio that we do with TiMax and that integration into our portfolio is really catching on across pretty much all the sectors, not just in the sort of theater market, but also in a lot of the installation part of the market.
We're very confident about that part of the business. Strategically, when we look at our growth opportunity here and how we kind of look across the brand and why would an investor look at us, I think these are sort of the things that we really want to call out and bring out. First is, we've got a very diverse portfolio. When you look at the segments that we're in the technology part for creating audio and for broadcasting, reproducing it live, we've got a very wide range of brands that service a large customer base on there. Second thing is really just looking at the structural growth drivers in our industry. I think if you followed us before, getting category information across the industry is very difficult.
We do know that the markets that we play in, for example, in the amount of music that's being created and streamed, how many people are going to live events, those are all going in the right direction. We also have a really great history of innovation and delivery. Our products continue to do well. Many of our are market leading, and we have other brands that have come from a smaller market position that are growing. Again, really that diversification on our routes to market, not only what we're doing, like going into Japan direct to our channel, but also what we're doing with our D2C business on there. Those are the real big things to draw out in terms of the growth opportunity.
As we kind of cascade into that a little bit more, if you followed us in the past, you've seen this slide here about our core, what we really are setting our mind to internally and what we look at. There's growing our core customer base, and the KPIs that we use for things, the metrics, our sales growth, our NPS scores, our market position. There's our expansion into new markets in here. Again, another big thing that we look at. The one that's changed on here recently is really this idea of delivering operational excellence, which is really about leveraging the fact that we've gone through this big investment in the platform and the chip, and with our R&D teams, and really focusing on gross margin, operating margin, and cash conversion on here.
That's something that is always we've been following, but we felt that we're at a turning point in terms of the investment, that it was now right to actually have that part of our core growth strategy. Obviously being a great place to work, something that's critical for us. We need to make sure we not only obtain but retain the top talent out here of passionate people that really have great skill sets, across all parts of the business on here to help us drive those. Let's drive into a couple of these. When we talk about grow the core, what are some of the proof points that we're doing a good job at that? Well, over and beyond just the fact that we know where we sit in terms of share.
There's a couple ways that you can actually go in real time and see how we're performing. This is a slide that we've shown in the past, but we have a number of big continental players that actively publish their top sellers in any different category. This is obviously a moment in time, but it's very indicative of what you would see if you went to Thomann, who's the biggest EU online retailer, or Sweetwater, one of the biggest ones in the U.S., and then, of course, Amazon as well. All these are resellers of ours, and you can see, and this is very indicative of what you'll see in terms of our product rankings on here, something that we watch and monitor very carefully.
I mentioned earlier that the markets that we're in are still quite sound and growing. What we've provided here is the top one is just showing the outlook for global recorded music and publishing revenues. You can see going up and to the right, same thing on the bottom, global live sound revenue. These categories, very traditionally, if you take out all the mess and sort of the COVID bubble and all that stuff, have been sectors that have been performing basically at sort of GDP plus. That's something that we're happy to be involved in, and our goal is always to do better than that. Structurally sound markets where there's good opportunity for us to go after here. When we talk about the markets and just where we are in terms of share, we have a portfolio of brands.
Some of them are very mature in their market share, others that are growing, and others where there's more opportunity. This is showing where we are on the Content Creation side and with Audio Reproduction. I guess the one I'd point out on here is on the right-hand side. If you look at that global market size, for Audio Reproduction, you can see that Americas, EMEA, and APAC, they're roughly about a third, a third, and a third. You can see our current footprint. You can see there's a lot for us to continue to go after in both the U.S. and in APAC. The investment we've made in the U.S. specifically has driven growth, so that continues to be an area of focus for us. Talking about our new platform and chip.
Let's spend a little time talking about this. First off is what does this mean and why did we do it? If you go back and you look at historically at how the group delivered and created products, very sort of serial and binary. We would start a product, it would end, we'd move on to another one. Very little reuse on the products on what was done on a previous one on there. A lot because of the capability of the chips that we were using, but also of just what the hardware needed to do at that point in time. As time has marched on, one thing that is very clear and evident is that our customers expect more and more out of our hardware.
We are at a point now, and we see this increasing, where we don't just view our hardware basically as a hardware box. It's basically software, a bunch of IP that happens to be wrapped around a physical piece of hardware, whether that's an aluminum box for our audio interfaces or our keyboards for our controllers. When you think of it that way, and that's where it's going, it drove us to an intent that we need to actually be in a position where we're not doing these one-off things every time, that we're actually developing a whole portfolio of IP that we can reuse in new products and across the whole portfolio. So that's something the group has been investing in.
As we went through that and looked at that, how do we do that, one thing that was clear is that if you do that, you really need to focus and zero in on what kind of hardware platform are you going to actually go with. One of our big challenges in this was that we are using off-the-shelf components, which are not really designed for our industry. Yes, they work and they function fine, and they do the job, but they're not really pinpointed for us. What we end up with is, we end up with components that we can use, but there's a lot of things on those chips that we may not need. For example, vast amounts of memory or video connectivity and this type of thing.
The idea with this platform was, well, if we're doing this, is it a viable thing for us to go out and think about designing our own chip and our own silicon to base this on, that is really just laser-focused on the type of features and functionalities that we need now and into the future? The final assessment from that work is, yes, we can actually do that, and we're quite pleased with what we've seen from this investment and this ROI, because it's leading us down a path that we're going to get several things long term from this. We'll get a cost savings on here from the chip. We'll have a chip that actually scales for us that not only will probably last for the next three to four years of product investment.
Probably for the next eight or 10 years of investment, and gives us that platform again. It's a real turning point for the group where our R&D teams, instead of spending 80% of their time on just the product they're working on in hand, what they're going to be working on mostly is all the technical pieces of that, all the different building blocks that we think we need for that product, but other ones in the future, so that we have a library of things that we can pull from on there, which should accelerate our NPI going into the future as well. A big area. That's just to give you a bit of an overview. We're going to have a capital markets day in November where we'll be talking a lot more about this as well.
Okay. Talking about just expanding. I mentioned Japan earlier, but this just gives you an idea of what we've done here and why it's important: removing a distributor, putting our own people on the ground, developing those relationships, developing our own demand gen stuff that relates to the Japanese market. You can see where we've launched this and what the impact is. We've had a bigger year in Japan than we had during the COVID period of time, which was unprecedented. That's a great proof point of when you have a market that has this kind of construct of Japan being the second-largest market in the world for recorded music and instruments. You go in there with good brands and actually do it in a way that actually relates with the market on here.
With people that understand and have the relationships, you get a great result. We're very, very pleased about that. Falling into that is our D2C business, which has been growing year-over-year. Another big investment area for the group, having those integrated brand and e-com websites on here and really leaning into this. A lot of the marketing that we do that drives demand for our products is very cyclical. It comes through social media. It goes right to our brand sites, and we see more and more people that actually are quite comfortable and want to develop a relationship with the manufacturer. We're very happy with that. It does not mean that we're exiting our channel or looking for this to be 100%.
There's a lot of value that we get out from our channel partners on here, but there's a balance to be struck here, and we think that this is well underway in doing that. I'm going to turn it over to Sally to talk about two other slides in our growth strategy.
Okay, great. Thank you, Tim. Yes, as Tim said, this is one of the slight evolution of our strategy to focus on operational excellence here. To make sure we're focusing not just on the growth, but on the profitability of that growth coming through. There's two real levers to doing that. There's maximizing our gross profit, but obviously managing our overheads and our cost base as well. In terms of gross profit, these are all initiatives that we have put in place and are actioning, but we have further steps to go. Pricing, we now have annual pricing increases in place across both divisions. We've always monitored pricing very closely, but it's more been about market reaction and looking at where we can price new ranges as they come in.
I think increasingly, as Tim's talked about with D2C and online, people just don't expect that anymore, and they will look across different platforms. We'll put in inflationary price increases in. They'll be coming in basically September for Content Creation, and similar sort of timings for Audio Reproduction, too. We always work with our contract manufacturers to look for cost downs. As an example, Scarlett, we recently changed the packaging on that box to be more environmentally friendly, but it was also cheaper as well, which has given us benefits in margin. The other item we can use in gross margin is about that logistics and freight and cost fulfillment. Again, that speaks to our routes to market.
It's about making sure we've got the most efficient routes to market to deliver products to customers wherever they are in the world. That's going to be an increasing focus as we look forward into this year. For overheads, we are constantly looking at our overheads and seeing what we can do to help bring efficiencies. AI is increasingly becoming something we look at just to help with, for example, analyzing all the customer feedback and reviews we get through, or whether it's looking at coding or whether it's looking at how we can drive efficiencies in our transactional processing areas. We're at the start of that journey, but absolutely it's something we're looking at.
When we do invest, as you will see certain investments going through for this year, for example, in Audio Reproduction for the U.S. sales market, we're very targeted at looking at where we think we will get the best bang for the buck, and we will see that growth come through. That's where we spend our sales and marketing GBP, whether it's in, for example, social media influencers to help with D2C or whether it's in targeted markets where we can get the growth. Across the back office, we already have centralized teams for IT, finance, and HR, and we will continue to work on that to drive both efficiencies and to improve our controls in that area as we go forward.
The final area, which Tim talked about, creating a great place to work. It's about making sure we can get the best people in, and we make this a great place to work, so they want to stay with us, develop their careers, and help us add value across the group. The measure we use for this is our Employee Net Promoter Score. Do people recommend working for us? We've been doing this annually for quite a few years now. In line with the year-end change, we've changed the timing of the survey, which is why it's February now, not October. As you can see, it's been increasing year on year. Basically, the scores can go from -100 to +100. From the external benchmarking we've done, we've been told, if you get above 40, you're in outstanding.
We are right on the cusp of that with 40. We're very pleased with that, and our goal is to remain around that level going forward. A huge part of making sure we get those passionate people in that can help deliver on all the other things we've been talking about. I'm going to hand back to Tim for a summary.
Great. All right. We've hit you all with a lot of information on here, so let's just go back to a couple things. First in, I just want to sort of talk about what current trading and outlook, if you didn't see this in the RNS. I said this earlier, just want to say one time again, on your current trading, which is always important, especially when you come off a period where you've got good results. People want to know, is it continuing? The answer is yes, it is. Trading in the first quarter is ahead of where we were for the prior year. The underlying demand for the products across both Content Creation and Audio Reproduction is very healthy, so we're very confident about that.
On our outlook, again, we have to be mindful that we're still dealing with a pretty crazy world out here. I think when we look at all the challenges and how we've actually fared in terms of meeting those, we've done a pretty good job. There's no change in our expectations for the year on here. We're just watching things carefully. If more global macroeconomic stuff hits us, we will react and do the right thing for the business on here. Which brings us to this last slide, again, which is just to reiterate these three points, if you walk away with anything. A very good, resilient performance in line with expectations. We're seeing global sales growth, gross margin expansion, and EBITDA on here. Good, strong cash generation. The net debt is down.
A lot of the changes that the group has gone through structurally to set up the right structure for sales, and for all of our back end stuff for IT and all that, we're through a lot of that now on here. Again, this big technology platform, the silicon that we are bringing to market, that you'll start to really see in some products. The first one will be a smaller product coming out end of this year. You'll see a lot of this coming out in future years on some of the big Run Rate products. A lot of that investment in that silicon, we're through that now on there. Obviously, the platform is something we'll continue to invest on in perpetuity on there, because that's the reason for doing this.
Again, really just talking about this profitable growth thing. You can see a bigger focus on this operational excellence and looking at how we leverage our brands and our strengths and the architecture and everything we've put in place on here to really deliver on that. We've mentioned this a few times, but please look forward in the next upcoming month or so for an invitation to join a capital markets day, which will be towards the end of the year on here, that we'll be very excited to go into more depth and talk about more of this. That's it for us. Really appreciate you hanging on here. I think we're going to jump in and look at our Q&A now.
Okay.
Cool? All right.
Yep. Right, there are a lot of questions here, we will do our best to get through as many as we can. If not, those we don't, we will answer, and it will be up on Investor Meet, it will be there.
There's a couple questions on FASIC here. I think these popped at the very beginning, and I think I hopefully answered on this. Yeah, on FASIC, it's really more talking about having something that's optimized for the DSP, the digital signal processing that we need, that our hardware going forward over time can do more and more functions internally versus what people would have in old workflows, sort of just offshore to a computer or a laptop.
I think this is another question about FASIC, and it is about helping understand the timeline and magnitude of the gross margin expansion as it rolls out over the next three years. To answer that, the big benefits will come when we start getting the higher volume products in, which will not be for a couple of years yet. If you think about it, basically what this chip will enable, we will get a saving of about $1 or so a chip. That is $1 or so off the product. Also for some products, where they use two or three chips, we can use less chips, so we will get a saving of that. We are looking at sort of $1 to $2 potentially per product sold.
If you think of our Scarlett, we sell approximately half a million a year. That should hopefully give you some sort of idea around the quantum we are talking about. Again, as Tim said, we are aiming to give you a bit more clarity on that later in the year.
Yeah. The next question is on the Sequential impairment, and I have to apologize. Sally said I was going to touch on that, and I think I skipped over it. It was not intentional. Let us talk about that for a minute on here. Sequential, if you are familiar with this brand, very legacy, high-end synthesizers. Probably the closest thing we have in the electronic music world to a Fender Stratocaster or a Gibson Les Paul out there. Very well-known, but traditionally very high-priced instruments. As things like cost of living became tough, probably one of the areas that was impacted the most. Not something that we just reacted to. Part of the strategy when we bought Sequential was to actually continue to bring those kind of products to market at that upper end of the market.
Also to complement that with products that come in at a much lower price point. The teams have been very well underway on that. We have had a number of products come out that have done very well in the market on there. I think what drove this was that we not only have a very ambitious roadmap for this, but our contract manufacturer in the U.S., who made the lion's share of the more expensive products, the ones that were sort of over the $2,000 mark, gave us notice about a month and a half ago. They were closing up, and they just could not compete anymore with overseas contract manufacturers. They didn't give us a lot of runway. They said they were going to basically close the doors by the end of November of this year.
That put a lot of uncertainty in terms of just start moving those products over to China and how fast we can do it. That work is underway, as these things are, when you're going through a year-end and audit, it's a moment in time where you have to look at all the risk, and that was definitely a bigger risk, and we felt like this impairment was the right thing to do. It does not really take away from our excitement or our confidence in what the brand is going to do and these products they're coming out with. Okay. How fast do you expect your direct-to-consumer channel to scale from its current 12%? We expect it to continue to grow. We don't have a specific number in mind.
We've asked it, do we want it to be 100%? The answer is absolutely no. Our channel, they provide a lot of benefit and bring a lot of customers that would not just naturally come for us. If you think about a place that sells guitars or woodwinds or whatever instruments and stuff, those people may be coming in there. They've never seen music technology or understand how to record. That's a great conduit into there. I think that we expect that business to continue to grow. We're going to continue to invest in it because we do see it becoming more and more a really big material part of our platform in terms of getting our wares into end users' hands.
There's a question now around, despite the acquisitions over the recent years, the fact our net income has, question says, sideways at best. Does this mean acquisitions are masking a decline in Focusrite? I think it's an interesting question when we get asked a lot, and I think it's very easy to look at the group and sort of see us before COVID, see a lot of COVID noise, and see us coming out of it and think, "Well, why haven't you gone back to where you were?" I think what we need to be cognizant here is we are a very different group to when we went in before COVID. We have had a lot of acquisitions. We're operating in a very different environment. Regulations have changed. A lot more reporting required about sustainability.
Cyber risk has increased. AI has come on board. There's a lot of changes going on that we need to factor into the regulatory landscape. I think as well, if we look at Focusrite in 2021 absolutely has come down from those levels. That was very much a sort of COVID peak. Again, pointing to Tim's slide that we looked at around where we are, look at the Thomann rankings, look at Sweetwater rankings. We think we've maintained, if not increased, our market share. Very much a story about market coming down. Yes, we have had to invest to bring a lot of the brands on board to support that, and some of the challenges we've talked about. Yeah, it's a good question, and it's interesting to understand the mix across acquisitions and our existing base.
No, it is absolutely not masking a decline in Focusrite. I think there is another one around how we're expecting the new Chair to change the business. Ian's very excited. It's great to have him on board. He's got an amazing history at Oxford Instruments and has also been on the board of startups and Melrose Industries, and we're very much looking forward to working with him and for him bringing his expertise across. Phil, rightly so, with all he's done for the business, his age, he's just taking a bit of a chance to step back. He became very supportive of helping us drive this strategy we've been talking about today. A question, why do we have the market share we have? Why have we not been displaced by cheaper competitors?
I think that has a lot to do with the legacy and the story, there's a very emotional attachment for a lot of our products when people, as a beginner, they want to partner themselves up with somebody that has a success record, a track record that, not only at the very high end, the big superstars, but they go and they look at the reviews of people that are pretty much like them. "Hey, I've always wanted to try this, but it looks really challenging." The reviews for our product is, "Hey, Focusrite does a great job," or Novation, of getting you up and running very quickly in there and having a very satisfactory experience. I think that's part of it.
I think also it's just that over time, we have really refined our contract manufacturing shops and how we can build a very superior product on there. Because of that scale, that allows us to reuse components that may not be really available or ar e palatable for our competitors on there because we have such a large scale on our Scarlett business and some of the other pieces as well.
Okay.
Okay.
What's the product lifespan? What's the replacement cycle for users?
Typically, the product life cycle for most of our sort of home recording products is about four to five years. That's about the amount of time where the workflows have changed. There's new functionality that customers are demanding. We have a backlog of features. With any product, you come out with a product, you release it has a bunch of new features, there's probably a whole bunch of things that you just weren't able to actually get into it on time. Those carry over into the new one on there. That feels about right in terms of that type. Even if a product is selling well, you want to have something new and kind of a story to tell on that. That feels like about the right time.
Okay. Are you looking for further M&A, and if so, what segments and sizing?
Yes, we're always looking, I wouldn't say we're super proactive right now, simply we feel like the job number one right now is taking everything that we have acquired and really maximizing that and refining that the best we can. There's stuff that's coming at us every month, where people want us to take a look at it and acquire it's been a pretty troubling and difficult time. The problem is that the majority of these things that come to us are in a bit of a mess, we just don't feel like we're in a place where we should be considering a cleanup job. If something did come that we just looked at and said, "Man, we can turn that around immediately and it'd be accretive to the business."
I think we'd go for it, but that's a bit of a unicorn right now.
Yeah, exactly. Our recent acquisitions, Sonnox and TiMax, very much about a piece of technology that it's a buy or build conversation. We bought that in, and we would be interested, as Tim said, if there's something we thought would be a great bolt-on we could put through our channels, that would be great. If not, we're not going to take on any challenges. We want something that's immediately accretive to the business.
Yeah. There's a question about seasonality here. Is there in the business? Yes, especially for the Content Creation business. We see a big uplift during the holiday season on there. It's a big season. It is gifting, as you ask here on here. I think not only for other people, but I think as a gift people give each other as well on there. We do see a big uptake. From how that season plays out, it's a really good leading indicator of sort of what's going to be happening across the rest of the year. Which is one of the reasons Sally talked about earlier, where we changed our year end.
It's a lot better to actually be thinking about building a budget and a forecast when you have that in your rear view mirror and you've seen how that period's gone versus how we did it before, where we're actually doing it at the end of August, trying to predict what's going to happen through the holiday season. As everybody knows, predictions on how holiday seasons or sales periods with all the other factors that have been going on, has been very difficult. Yeah, it's something we use. It is a big season for us on there, across not only the Black Fridays and stuff like that, but all the way through that period on there.
It's also great to be able to actually see that and actually use that information just coming currently off of it when we're building on next year's budget.
There's a question about capital allocation. What are our priorities going forward? As a board, we're very focused on getting back to net cash, which we think gives us a lot of optionality and think about what we want to do. For that, it's very much we think, as Tim's talked about, investing and leveraging that platform we've got now. We will continue to invest in our new products. We will continue to look elsewhere if there's something we think makes sense and will add to the value of the group. Then, there are always options around buybacks, but I think we only want to do that. We don't want to take down debt to do buybacks. It's very much around focusing when we get back to cash first.
There's a question, another question about FASIC, and this is talking about what's going on in terms of just a converter supply, and I think it's more maybe in general, talking about just what we're seeing for component availability, especially things with memory. This kind of goes back to the point I made earlier, is that when you're dealing with off-the-shelf components that may have a lot more memory than we need and stuff, those are going on big allocation because of what's going on with AI, because of memory and things like that.
One of the things that we're expecting with FASIC is if we're building a chip that doesn't really have those kind of supply constraints and those needs for things like that on there, and it's in our own destiny to order what we want in line with our contract manufacturer, we think that'll give us a little bit of a natural hedge against what's going on in the greater supply chain.
There's a question about pricing changes in the 12 months. Can we talk a bit about the revenue growth between price mix and volume? Basically, there was a lot of price changes, particularly in the U.S., and basically what we kind of saw there was our sales line hold up. Our elasticity assumptions were pretty much in line with where we're expecting. Yes, we did see volumes drop a bit. What we saw was people tend to buy down into our range, so we held up our sales, and actually at that level, we're doing less logistics costs, so gross profit improves. Across the rest outside the U.S., basically it's pretty much sort of a volume increase around that. It's a bit difficult to unpick it. We talked about the tariffs.
If we look at Content Creation with that 9% tariffs adjustment, then you're looking at about half and half volume and price for that.
Cool. I think we've got one last one here about a breakdown of the staff numbers and the roles that they're in.
That is one of the notes in the annual report accounts, which are available on our website. We've got about 550 average employees across this 12-month period, which broadly splits down, as does our cost base, into a third is Research and Development, engineering, product management. We've got another third that are in Sales Marketing, and another third that sort of back up in the back office functions across Business Development, Legal, Finance, IT, HR. That's very rough, but a pretty good split.
Cool.
Okay.
All right. Great. Thank you for all the questions.
Those we can get round to, we will absolutely pick up and answer on the website.
If there's more that come through. All right.
That's great. Thank you for answering all those questions you have from investors. Of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important for the company, Tim, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
Sure. I just want to thank everybody for your time and patience today. I know it was a lot to go through, especially with being in an elongated period. Again, I hope that you walk away with those kind of big points that we talked about, that we've had a really good performance, very resilient with all the things that is going on in the world on here. A lot of the investments we've made that we think are structurally sound are going to really pay off and benefit us in the future on here. We've got very strong brands, and we have a lot of proof points to show the strength of the company and the group that gives us a lot of confidence to go forward. Thank you again for your time. Appreciate it.
That's great. Thank you for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session, as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good afternoon to you all.