We're continuing to expand the breadth of our offering, particularly around our wire harnesses for domestic appliances, which is a further growth opportunity. Customer trends continue to be positive in the consumer electrical space, underpinning our confidence in this end market for the future. As we anticipated at the beginning of the year, medical was slightly down year on year by approximately 5%. This was really driven by the dynamics of the comparative period, where we saw a one-off catch-up as our medical customers recovered from challenges around availability of key components. Over a five-year period, we've delivered 10% compound annual growth in this market, although we expect demand in FY 2026 to be fairly static. In the longer term, there are strong structural growth drivers related to advances in medical technology and demographic considerations that will support the future growth outlook.
We have an excellent customer base, and we've onboarded new customers during the period, which will help support growth as we move forward in this market. In complex industrial technology, we had an excellent year, delivering organic growth of 14.5%. We were particularly strong in the data center space, with high growth demonstrated in the second half of the year. Our data center customers are supporting significant increased demand in relation to artificial intelligence and cloud technology, and our high-speed cables are critical to their infrastructure rollout. Approximately half the revenue in this end market now comes from data centers. Across the rest of complex industrial technology, we have a diverse book of business, including IT, telecoms, aerospace, and defense, as well as a variety of other commercial and industrial applications, where we provide complex cable assemblies, printed circuit board assemblies, and box build services to our customers.
Demand across these customers was variable, and organic growth on aggregate was 1.5%. This reflects similar dynamics to medical, when the prior year benefited from a recovery in components availability. Growth was also lowered by certain customer projects rolling on and off, which reflects the specialized nature of the end-use applications that we support. We see wins in HVAC as a source of growth in FY 2026 as production ramps up. Moving on to off-highway, this is the first financial year where we've had a full year of contribution from the off-highway business we purchased in Türkiye, Murat Ticaret. We've also delivered 3.6% organic growth, despite some softness in some of the end markets that we support, notably agricultural and construction. We've delivered this growth as a result of the diversification that we have in the off-highway space, combined with our relationships with customers and our strong commercial proposition.
This has allowed us to offer cost-competitive solutions into the marketplace. These are incredibly complex products, and as a result, the customer relationships are very sticky. We've also seen increased revenues coming out of North America, particularly from our facility in Tijuana, where we're supporting a major North American manufacturer on a specialist vehicle program that will last for multiple years. We see North America as a huge opportunity, building on our incredibly strong position in the European market and replicating this success in the region. As an organization, we put a huge amount of focus on cost control and continuous improvement. These activities had a beneficial impact on margin of 1.5% in the period, offsetting the impact of inflation, which was an adverse headwind of 1.6%. A significant element of the inflationary impact arose in Türkiye, where inflation is beginning to trend down following changes in economic policy.
Our cost optimization activities allow us to achieve stable operating margins while maintaining competitive pricing, which is a huge achievement in an inflationary environment. The margins were supported by product mix, with a greater contribution from higher-margin complex products, including those that we sell into the data center space. This has allowed us to deliver towards the top end of our guidance, even after incremental growth investments that support the continued development of our business and the successful delivery of our five-year plan targets. Turning now to cash flow, this year we delivered almost $135 million of underlying EBITDA, which is an increase of 21% on the previous year. As we explained a year ago, FY 2025 was a year of investment in increased capacity, and in total, we invested $45 million in capital expenditure.
Much of that was supporting new customer projects and building out centers of excellence in key locations, particularly Mexico, India, Indonesia, and Türkiye, to support our ongoing growth plans. CapEx represented 4.2% of revenue, slightly higher than normal levels of between 3% and 4% of revenue, and in FY 2026, investments are expected to revert back to normal levels. Growth CapEx represents the majority of our spend, with less than 1% of revenue required for maintenance. There was an adverse movement in working capital, which included additional inventory to support various customer growth programs. As the business grows, we need to put in additional working capital to support those customer programs. Interest and tax was broadly in line with the prior year, growing with the business. We delivered underlying free cash flow of $42 million for the year due to the excellent returns from our targeted CapEx investments.
We ended the year with a covenant net debt ratio of one times, which is at the lower end of our one-to-two times guidance. This provides us with significant flexibility on the balance sheet to pursue further growth opportunities. We're incredibly proud of the industry-leading return on capital that we generate of approximately 20%, which has been consistent over the last three years. This is despite a huge amount of investment in our business. We achieve this because of our strong focus on returns and organic investments, where we qualify projects comprehensively. We focus on investment that we know will generate a cash payback within the two-year period, whether that's through new customer programs or whether it's through cost-out, such as the automation and digital transformation projects that we've been deploying across the group.
Our basic underlying earnings per share has increased 11% annualized since the launch of the five-year plan, and we're now at $0.363 per share, reflecting the additional value that we're delivering to shareholders through our strategy. Our capital allocation priorities remain consistent with previous years. Our primary focus is on organic growth, particularly given the strong return on capital that we deliver through organic investments, where we generally achieve a cash payback within a two-year period. We continue to originate acquisition opportunities that meet our strict criteria around valuation, bringing financial benefits and fitting our cultural environment. We've increased the dividend again this year, with a proposed final dividend of GBP 0.03 per share. We've consistently increased this every year since reinstatement in FY 2020. Finally, in terms of capital allocation, we would consider a share buyback if we're unable to deploy cash through organic investment or acquisition opportunities.
We've consistently been buying shares in the market to settle our obligations under management share incentive schemes, and over the last three years, we've spent a total of $28 million buying shares in the market, including $11 million this year. This is a decision that we've made to avoid issuing these shares and therefore limiting the dilution for existing shareholders. I'll now hand over to Nat to take you through an update on our strategy.
Thank you very much, Jon. The strong results that Jon presented demonstrate our strategy is working. I'd like to talk now through the five strategic pillars that underpin our performance. This is how we coordinate activity throughout our organization across 25 countries with 13,000 people and with some of the world's most demanding customers. We operate at the heart of global megatrends, including electrification, data centers, and medical technology. We've built strong market positions in our five end markets by staying close to our customers, delivering reliably, and investing ahead of the curve. By concentrating in specialist areas, we develop deep technical knowledge in each vertical. We invest based on our understanding of customer requirements and our knowledge of our business. We develop our own range of products in the key growth markets of EV and data centers.
Vertical integration allows us to control our own cable manufacturing, and automation initiatives support repeatability and speed at scale. We create deep long-term relationships with customers. We work side by side with engineers to solve problems early, flexing manufacturing schedules to meet urgent needs, and driving continuous improvement at every level. This builds trust and deepens customer relationships. We acquire businesses we understand in sectors we know, where we see opportunities to create long-term value. Our most recent acquisition in FY 2024 took us into the attractive off-highway space at scale. I will cover our approach in more detail shortly. Our sites are empowered to make decisions, solve problems, and lead customer relationships locally. This is all supported by the standards, tools, and oversight of the group. This is what allows us to move quickly to meet customer demand and to respond resiliently to macro challenges.
These five strategic pillars guide how we invest, how we lead, and how we grow. They are why we have more than doubled the business in five years, and we are confident in our future. Selecting the right markets is, of course, incredibly important for us. We've identified niche manufacturing areas where we can generate attractive returns and strong customer lock-in due to the complexity of the solutions required. In many cases, there are also stringent regulatory or similar barriers. More and more of our business is becoming highly complex, which supports our move into global and regional centers of excellence, where we can offer a range of solutions across multiple end markets. Our ability to share manufacturing skills, such as vertical integration or automation techniques across multiple end markets, creates efficiencies.
For example, with the deep knowledge of power products gained within the consumer electrical space, we built a significant engineering advantage with electric vehicles. Our complete vertical integration in power core production enables us to be a low-cost producer and market leader in consumer electricals. With low capital investment requirements, this sector is highly cash-generative. Across medical, off-highway, and complex industrial technology, we make extremely complicated harnesses for our customers. The knowledge that we have, both in terms of the sophisticated production and quality assurance processes for these products, is shared between our experts, allowing us to be regarded as leaders in our field. Our investment this year increased our production space by 21%, creating a platform for us to deliver our strategic goals. This positions us for the growth we expect to achieve as customers continue to optimize their supply chains.
In the face of changes to global trade patterns, we also closed one of our factories, moving from three Chinese factories to two, reflecting our focus on China as a manufacturing center for local sales opportunities. This all means that we now have 27 manufacturing sites. This includes regional centers of excellence, which are capable of delivering over $150 million of revenue at each. These sites deliver the broadest range of capabilities and achieve strong profitability by sharing overheads across a range of customer activity. These are the locations where we prioritize the rollout of automation and other technology investment. One of the projects I'm particularly proud of in the year is our support of Hypervolt. They are a market-leading manufacturer of smart EV charging solutions, cleverly designed to work with dynamic EV tariffs.
Hypervolt wanted a comprehensive manufacturing solution to support their ambitious global growth plans and allow them to focus on their core competencies around design and product development. We've harnessed expertise from across the Volex Group to bring together best-in-class manufacturing in a highly competitive package. Key components, such as the printed circuit board assembly, specialist EV cables, and complex wire harnesses, are made at specialist Volex production sites prior to the final integration at one of our leading European facilities. Excuse me. It's the investments we have made in vertical integration and the integration of acquired businesses that enables this seamless delivery to our customer. Across our organization, we're able to support high-growth, high-technology customers with a range of solutions, delivering truly end-to-end value and becoming a trusted manufacturing partner. Acquisitions continue to be an important area for us.
Although we did not complete any acquisitions in FY 2025, our focus was maintaining a disciplined approach to acquisition opportunities and on successfully continuing the integration of Murat Ticaret. As that integration heads towards conclusion, we continue to identify a pipeline of attractive acquisition opportunities that meet our requirements. We have a very strict criteria that we look for in a business to ensure that it aligns with our overall strategy to be manufacturing leaders in niche markets around the world. The financial parameters of any acquisition are incredibly important for us, and we are highly disciplined and deeply focused on value. We buy businesses that we understand and tailor the integration activity for the individual businesses, looking to augment the intrinsic qualities of the businesses that we acquire, as well as benefit from the opportunities across our global organization.
As we have touched upon earlier, we've continued our focus on the integration of Murat Ticaret this year. Particular prominence has been placed on productivity improvement through process re-engineering and embedding a continuous improvement mindset across the organization. This is critical due to the high labor inflation in Türkiye. We've also started the program of site rationalization and optimization, which we've achieved through expanding two factories in more cost-competitive locations within Türkiye. This allows us to close some of the sites that we inherited when we acquired the business and therefore to accelerate productivity enhancements. In North America, we now have a dedicated off-highway sales team. We have built out additional capacity, which is online and available in Tijuana, Mexico, and we have further capacity that will be coming on stream in FY 2026, supporting the significant opportunity that we believe there is in the North American off-highway market.
In combination, the investments we've made and the growth we've achieved firmly position us on track to reach our five-year goal of $1.2 billion in revenue by the end of FY 2027. Hitting our FY 2025 results represents a significant milestone on this journey. Since launching the five-year plan three years ago, we've delivered average organic growth of 10% per year. Looking ahead, only a further 5% annual organic growth over the next two years is required to meet our target. We've also consistently maintained our margin within the target range. Indeed, over the past two years, it's been at the upper end. With the momentum we've built and the opportunities on the horizon, we are highly confident in our ability to achieve this goal. In summary, this is an excellent set of results across our diversified business in a challenging environment.
With strong organic growth of over 11% and delivering at the top end of our margin range, our business goes from strength to strength. We have a truly leading position in many of our key markets where we are recognized both for our competitiveness, for the quality that we deliver, and for the customer service that we are able to provide. We've expanded our manufacturing footprint during the year, optimizing our locations and taking opportunities to streamline our footprint where sensible to deliver continued improved efficiency across our manufacturing estate. Although tariffs may present some short-term challenges, we see a huge amount of opportunity through the changes that will happen in global supply chains as a result of changes in trade policy. Given our dynamic manufacturing capability and our global footprint, we are well positioned to benefit from those opportunities.
We've made a terrific start to FY 2026, and with our revenue ahead of our budget in the first two months and a healthy pipeline of attractive growth opportunities, these are an excellent set of results, giving us continued strong confidence in our ability to achieve our five-year plan objectives. We would now be extremely happy to receive your questions.
That's great, Nat and Jon. Thank you very much indeed for updating investors. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. While Nat and Jon take a couple of moments just to review your questions, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, will be available via your investment company dashboard.
Nat and Jon, you've received a number of questions from investors today. Thank you ever so much to everybody for your engagement, as well as a number ahead of today's event. Due to the significant number of attendees on today's call, it probably won't be possible to go through them all. Perhaps if I may, Jon, hand back to you to take us through the Q&A, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Yeah, brilliant. Thanks, Mark. Look, we've had some great questions. We've had lots of questions. What I'll try and do is sometimes there's questions we can answer quite quickly, so we'll cover those off. Where there's questions where a few people have asked similar questions, we'll try and group that together into a single question so that we just have the opportunity to go through as much as possible.
The first question is around the U.S. tariffs, and it's really as to whether we've seen any indications of customer order pull forward or customer stockpiling. I'm happy to take that first one. Look, obviously, we've been paying a lot of attention to our business, our customers, our orders with the tariffs that have come into play. As we explained in the presentation, the impact of the tariffs is manageable. In fact, we see tariffs as both a challenge and an opportunity, but we're very much focused on the opportunities from tariffs.
In terms of the close of FY 2025 and the first two months of trading in FY 2026, we haven't seen any significant impact of either customers changing their behavior, pulling things forward, moving things around, which I think is a great testament to the fact that we have this very deeply embedded position with our customers with a high degree of lock-in, and we're an important manufacturing partner for those customers. There's a question here for you, Nat, which is let me find the right one. There's a question here, Nat, that you have numerous other business interests. How much time do you allocate to Volex, and what areas of Volex are you particularly focused on?
I'm thrilled to answer that question. I devote a considerable amount of my time, and more and more, it seems, to the Volex business as it's grown.
It's incredible to think when I got involved in 2015, we were doing about $300 million a year and making no money, and we now do well over a billion and making $100 million a year. The business has got a lot more complex, and that's obviously meant that I'm more engaged than ever. I think that my role is I have multiple roles within the business, but I'm very involved in high-level customer engagements. I'm very involved in acquisitions. I'm very involved in strategy. I tend to deviate to areas of the business that need the most, really that need the most work. Where I spend most of my time at the moment is in the off-highway segment. That's because I know most of the customers. I'm very involved, almost without exception, with all of the major customers.
I'm also something of a Türkiye expert. Türkiye is a country that I know well. I obviously brought Sir Peter Westmacott onto the board to assist us a number of years ago when we bought Dekker. Those are sort of the main points. I mean, I would add that what really makes this a terrific business is the quality of the team around Jon and I. I'm regularly sort of pulled over in the street and congratulated for the success of Volex. I just think that my answer is always the same. It's just the quality of the people that we have brought into this business over the last 10 years. I think the biggest role I have of all is leading the team, and that's something I'm incredibly proud of.
It's something I enjoy and something that I want to continue doing for as long as possible.
Good. Thank you, Nat. There's a few questions here I'll go through quite quickly. There's a question about our long-term financial targets and what metrics that we use to run the business. As we said in the presentation, our focus is very much on delivering the $1.2 billion of revenue at 9%-10% operating margins by the end of FY 2027, so the delivery of our five-year plan. We feel that these results are an important milestone as we're three-fifths of the way through that five-year plan. In terms of the metrics that we use, we have a big focus on profitability, operating profitability, management of working capital. We have a whole suite of operational metrics that we use that covers everything around quality, on-time delivery, our customer service.
Also, we look at things around staff engagement and turnover. There is a whole suite of things that we are really using to manage the business. There is a question here. How would you define Volex's edge compared to its other competitors? I think very much as we try and say in the presentation that our focus is around being engaged with customers at an engineering level, being cost-competitive, having extremely good quality, and having excellent customer service. When those things come together, we end up with these deep customer relationships, which are obviously very important within our market. There is a question here for you, Nat, about what other larger companies do you admire and believe that Volex can follow a similar trajectory? I would sort of link that in with another question. There are a couple of questions about what do you think Volex can achieve over the longer term?
I know sometimes we talk about if you sort of wind back other companies 10, 20 years and look at where they were.
Yeah. I think I see ourselves as a compounder in our space. I would encourage people to look at companies like Jabil and Flextronics in the contract manufacturing space. I would also look at companies like discoverIE, similar business that started out really as a cash shell 15 years ago. I think Nick Jefferies has done an absolutely extraordinary job building that business organically and inorganically. I think the greatest example of companies in our direct space is Amphenol, where I think now Amphenol has a $75 billion market cap. It's run by a guy who's the same age as me.
He was actually a lawyer at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in 1996 and has learned the business and has taken it from a company roughly the same size as Volex and grown it over the last 25 years. I think that Volex is now an extremely, extremely, not only an extremely valuable business, but a very, very good example of a company that has grown not just organically, it has grown inorganically as well. We have made 12 acquisitions, and we are trying to be like those larger businesses. When I got involved, certainly in early 2016, the market cap was $30 million. Now, at one point anyway, on a sort of intra-day basis. Today, we are up at almost GBP 700 million. We should be proud of that, and we should be able to sort of take our place next to some of the companies that I have mentioned.
Excellent. Thank you, Nat. There is a question here about cash conversion and why the cash conversion is lower than the previous year. That is all to do with working capital. If you wind back to FY 2024, like many other companies faced with a supply chain crisis, we were building up buffer stock, and we had additional stock on hand to cover some of the disruptions that we were facing in supply chain. During FY 2024, as supply chains improved, we were able to reduce that buffer stock. That gave us a favorable working capital unwind, a working capital inflow on the realization of that inventory. We went back to just a more normal year in FY 2025, where, as the business grows, we need to put in additional working capital, particularly inventory, to support customer growth. That explains the cash piece.
There's a question about EV growth, and did this include adding new customers during the year? We are very pleased with the EV growth that we've delivered. It's around 40% organic growth. Of that, our largest customer represented 35% of that growth. The growth from other customers was around 70%. You can see that we're growing very strongly with other customers as well. There's a question on how has Murat Ticaret been affected by the economic turbulence in Türkiye? We've certainly found that the measures that the government are taking in Türkiye to reduce inflation are having a short-term adverse effect on labor costs. We are addressing that through delivering an efficiency program that's seen us reduce headcount in the Murat Ticaret organization by 500 people already as part of our integration program. We're not stopped there.
are further activities that we are doing to look at how we can run that business in the most efficient way, and that will help us manage the inflationary impact of higher labor costs in Türkiye. There are a few questions on acquisitions, Nat, and particularly sort of our reflections on the acquisition approach that we made in relation to TT Electronics, but I think also just more broadly in how we are feeling in general about acquisitions.
Great. Look, I am not going to talk about TT. That is for another day. I think, generally, what we are seeing is we are seeing very high valuations in businesses that are, quite frankly, inferior to ours. We are very, very valuation conscious when we look at deals. Also, we like to try and buy businesses with high customer concentration because, actually, that tends to reduce the acquisition multiples.
Then when they're absorbed into our company on a look-through basis, the customer concentration goes away. I think that's an effective formula. Right now, we have a couple of interesting deals at the very early stages in the pipeline. We've also been very unsuccessful because we're simply not prepared to pay the prices that people are demanding of their businesses.
Good. Thank you. There's a question here. It says, "Historically, customers like Apple bullied Volex over price. Are you now able to tell them the price?" Do you think that the sort of the—
I don't think it's like—I think it's different. I think the difference is that Volex was a business that was losing customers because it was not cost-competitive. It was a high-cost producer. It was incredibly exposed to Apple.
When I got involved in the business, very briefly, Apple was $130 million out of $300 million of revenue. And we made no money. We lost money with Apple. That is why we were, it's not a question of being bullied. It was just a question that we were uncompetitive. Now, we are hyper-competitive. We get, to a far higher degree, we're able to pick and choose our customers. There are lots of customers out there, and we are able to try to sort of be more selective with who we work with.
Good. Thank you. There are some questions about our forecasts and, I suppose, partly numbers in the market with the sell side and the deliverability of the five-year plan. The tone of the questions is that it looks fairly straightforward for us to be able to deliver that five-year plan.
I certainly feel that this is a great step on the road to that five-year plan. We're being sensible and cautious as we go into the FY 2026 financial year. It's a difficult economic environment. Lots of things are changing or have changed. As a result of that, we've positioned our external guidance in a sensible way so that we sort of balance deliverability but ensure that we have stretching internal targets as well. There's a question, Nat, about there's a recent announcement about our manufacturing partnership with AFC. Did you want to talk about how we can support that business?
Yeah. One way to win a big piece of business is to be supportive of customers that are small at the beginning and can grow into much, much bigger accounts later on. One example of that is Hypervolt, where Hypervolt is a startup.
It's an offshoot of Octopus Energy. The business has some quite extraordinary growth characteristics. We're already doing over $10 million a year of business with them. I took the same view with AFC. AFC is a company with great potential. The ability to manufacture portable hydrogen generators is exactly the type of thing that we are able to do. That's why we've offered our support to AFC in the way that we have.
Excellent. We'll take one final question, which is a bit of a combination of things that a few people have asked, but it's really around, in terms of one of the questions, do you see other sectors for Volex to move into? There's a question about whether we see the defense market as attractive.
The sort of final piece on focus is around, do we see the Indian market as a major growth driver for the future?
Okay. I mean, I think that defense is very interesting. We're already in the defense industry. We make complicated printed circuit board assemblies in Irvine, California for mission-critical applications. We work with some of the most well-known defense companies. We also have a small, it's now a joint venture in Canada, making military wire harnesses that go into armored vehicles, tanks, etc., gun turrets. That business obviously has a high degree of applicability in Europe. There are a number of huge defense companies in Europe who we're starting to engage with. We also do the same thing, actually, in Türkiye with the largest domestic manufacturer of military vehicles. We're already in the defense business, and we see that as an opportunity.
We're starting, as I say, to kind of engage very seriously with some of the massive European defense players. Funnily enough, defense in India is an equally big opportunity. It is another area where we're starting to look. The Indian market is slightly lower margin than what we would like, but it is one of the fastest-growing sectors. We have a good management team there and a very, very well-managed and hyper-competitive PCB and box build business in India that we acquired a couple of years ago at a very attractive valuation. We also, with it, acquired 13 acres of land that we're in the process of building out with factory space. I think that's a good time to stop. This is obviously a happy day for all of the people who have invested in Volex.
We've seen a tremendous re-rating of the share price along with many other AIM companies. I'm pleased that we've made some of you some money. For those of you who haven't made any money, we hope you'll invest with us. We're grateful for everyone's support. This is a committed management team. We've got huge insider ownership in the business, not just me, but everyone else. We want to continue to grow. We appreciate your support. Just a quick shout-out to the excellent Investor Meet platform as well. Thanks.
That's great. Nat, Jon, thank you very much indeed for updating investors. If I could please ask investors not to close this session as you'll automatically be redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback. Thank you very much for your time today.