Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Capital Markets Day for Volex. I am Dave Webster, the Non-Executive Chairman of Volex. A little bit about my background. My background is very eclectic, but also very relevant. I'm a lawyer by profession. I was a partner at Weil Gotshal. Was also a partner at Hicks Muse, at the time, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. I was the CEO of ECI for over 20 years, and I'm currently the CEO of CPM Holdings. In the last 12 years, I've sold ECI three times at an average multiple of invested capital of 3.5x . I will sell CPM in the coming months with similar returns. In the six months since I've joined the board of Volex, I've been incredibly impressed by what I've seen.
First and foremost, Volex has an exceptional team, which you'll meet today. The team is highly engaged and focused. The team has great leaders, and they know what it takes to win. The winning culture is evidenced by the stellar performance over the last several years. This team puts their customers first. They understand the value of building partnerships with their customers. As a consequence of this commitment to customer intimacy, they work with some of the largest, most innovative, and complex organizations in the world. The success of those relationships is not an accident. It's driven by a multitude of talented, hardworking people with a singular focus to go the extra mile to satisfy their customers. This approach is how I've always worked. At Volex, it starts from the top with Nat.
I've had the opportunity to witness firsthand Nat's commitment to Volex's customers and the relationship that he and the management team has built. Secondly, what stands out to me is how the team thinks about strategy, how they've invested in the business to build world-class capabilities to support their growth ambition, and how they challenge the organization and drive accountability. The continuous improvement ambition that you'll hear about today is reflected in the medium-term plans being shared with you. In my career, I've been fortunate enough to run some extremely successful businesses. I know what good looks like. As I mentioned, I operated ECI for over 20 years. I know what world-class is, and Volex is truly a world-class business. In my career, I've had the exact same focus as Volex has in building a successful business.
It happens by building a great team that puts the customers first and understands the requirements. One of the things I respect about Volex is how customer-centric it is as an organization, and it is that customer centricity that drives growth, repeat business, and continuous improvement. Running a complex business like Volex is not easy. It's hard work. Customers have incredibly high standards, and their operating models and products are becoming more complex. With complexity increasing, customers' expectations grow as well. The team at Volex does a great job in exceeding those expectations. They do so because they understand their markets, they understand their customers, and they have a clear vision of what the market demands. By bringing these elements together, Volex works consistently and collectively to rise to the technical challenges their customers set.
I am grateful to the board of Volex for welcoming me and giving me the opportunity to contribute. Volex is one of the U.K.'s most successful industrial businesses, delivering incredible rates of growth while improving profitability and expanding into new markets. This is a business I chose to join because the opportunity ahead is genuinely compelling, and I believe I can make a difference by leveraging my knowledge and my relationships. I'm now honored to introduce the CEO of Volex, Nat Rothschild.
Thank you so much, Dave, for a great introduction. I am thrilled that we persuaded Dave to join our board because he is a true entrepreneur and someone who has demonstrated the capability to build highly successful industrial manufacturing businesses, including his time as the CEO of ECI, which he grew from $100 million in sales to $1.5 billion in sales, a story that is very, very similar to Volex. We are extremely fortunate to have someone with his level of knowledge, expertise, and deep relationships in our industry as part of the Volex team. Now, today is a very important day for Volex. This is our first Capital Markets Day.
It's an opportunity to share the new medium-term plan, but more than that, to show you how this business works and why it works, how we think about customers, how we think about investment, how we create value for our shareholders. Four years ago, we set out an ambitious strategy to double revenue. We talked about moving up the complexity curve. We talked about creating resilient positions with innovative customers. We talked about building an operating model we could scale globally. We committed to $1.2 billion of profitable revenue by March of 2027, and we delivered a year early. We present to you today a business that is completely different from the Volex I joined 10 years ago. We are deeply embedded now in five end markets where we are delivering strong growth and healthy margins.
Today is very much about explaining the future opportunity because I firmly believe, like Dave, that the best of Volex is still very much ahead of us. Now, none of these achievements would have been remotely possible without an incredibly talented and hardworking group of people. I take my hat off to the contribution they have made to this organization and the spirit in which they have embraced challenges and consistently delivered success. It is absolutely the people that differentiate an organization, and I am privileged to work with some of the very best people in our industry. I truly mean that, and I hope today each of you will have a chance to hear from them, meet them, and question them.
This is a day of celebration for my team, and I'm sure as a result, you will form your own view about what an exceptional team they are and what we have built here at Volex. I want to just introduce the individual team members in no particular order. They're all excellent, but if you could just stand up, Jessica. First of all, Jessica Yu, who runs our China business and is also our Vice President of Supply Chain. Fatih Koçman is responsible for our Türkiye or Turkey business. Paul Bullock is our COO for Europe and also has responsibility for India. Girish Gopinath is our COO for South East Asia and is responsible for power products. Mark Kray, our COO for North America. And last but not least, Hamsha Raman, if you could stand up. Hamsha Raman is our global head of engineering.
He has the distinction of having worked for Volex for more than three decades. I'm very grateful to him for not leaving. I really would encourage you to spend time with him. He's a very, very remarkable person. Paul, Mark, and Girish will talk to you about some of our customer success stories and how we have driven forward growth. You will also be able to speak with all our senior team, including Jessica and Fatih and Hamsha, who I just mentioned, at the end of the presentation, when we will be demonstrating some of the complex products we make across our operations. Now, you may not have noticed when you walked in here, but there is a gigantic harness on the left. That is one harness. It's not multiple harnesses. It's one single harness.
It has 6.5 km of wire, much of which we make ourselves in-house. It has hundreds of connectors. I can't even remember how many. How many hours does it take to make that?
13 hours.
13 hours to make that particular harness. We make that in Türkiye, as I said, for a major bus manufacturer. That's the kind of thing we do in Volex, and I'm very, very proud of that harness every time I look at it. Now, John Molloy, who I haven't mentioned yet, he's standing here. Just maybe just stand up for a sec, John. Really should take credit as the architect of a huge amount of the success delivered in our organization over the last 10 years. His operational knowledge and instinct are unparalleled within this industry, and he's going to talk to you about how we run this business and where this creates points of differentiation.
We are also going to hear from Jon Boaden, our CFO, and Jon has been instrumental in shaping the financial platform that has allowed us to invest, acquire, and grow with confidence, and he will set out the financial framework for our medium-term plan that will underpin the future success of our company. Now, agenda. Today is very much about introducing what makes Volex different, what makes Volex successful, and how we intend to be even more successful going forward. As well as the formal presentations, we will have a number of our complex products on display for you to see and handle. I'm sure some of you had a look already outside. I'm sure many of you will be surprised by the complexity of what we manufacture, and seeing these products will give you a real insight into why we play such an important role for our customers.
There will be time for questions and answers at the end, and I hope many of you will be able to stick around afterwards. There will be opportunities for informal conversations, the chance to ask individual questions of the individual team members. There's a lot we're going to cover today, and I make no apologies for that. This is a complicated business with a plethora of opportunities in front of us. However, please, if you only take away three things from today's session, I hope it will be these. First, increasing complexity makes system integrators like Volex critical. The products our customers build are becoming more sophisticated, more regulated, and more interconnected, and that complexity is not slowing down. In fact, it is accelerating at pace.
As it accelerates, the criticality of the role we play increases. There are very few businesses in the world that can support the complex requirements our customers have on a consistent basis. Secondly, I want you to understand the customers we work with. We partner with category leaders, not just good companies, the best companies in their markets, companies that are driving long-term structural demand, companies whose growth creates our growth. This underpins our confidence in the future success of our organization. Third, we have capabilities that few competitors can replicate, and we deliver them consistently around the world wherever our customers need us. Built for complexity, positioned for growth. This is not a slogan, although I like it. It is a description of what this business does every day. Everything you hear today will reinforce it.
Now, I would like to take this opportunity with some brief reflection. It's been about 10 years since I joined the board of Volex. I can't believe it's been this long. When I came into the organization, I found a business that was short on strategic thinking, caught up in short-term problem-solving, and lacking a roadmap to deliver success. There was a complete lack of clarity from the management team about how to progress. There were many talented individuals like Hamsha at multiple levels. They lacked the leadership they deserved. I came into a business with declining revenues, customers jumping ship, that was barely profitable. The products we made outside a few specialist customers in areas like Medical were much, much simpler than what we make today.
It's incredible to me to be standing here today to talk about how successful this organization is and the opportunities we have ahead. It's taken us 10 years to host our first Capital Markets Day. I resisted it because of the cost. I didn't like spending this money. 10 years of hard work, of incremental gain, it's what we have taken apart and rebuilt this business from the bottom up. I am rather humbled to say that we have created something incredibly strong. Investors ask me what has changed in 10 years, and the answer is almost everything. The revenue mix, the customer quality, the operating model, the team, the ambition. We manage this business responsibly with a long-term perspective. We think like owners, all of us in the front row, taking accountability for what we commit to.
A significant part of our success has been the care that we take allocating capital and making targeted investments. This is what 10 years of hard work looks like. An initial period of turnaround, fixing the basics, making sure we can keep the promises we made to the customers, and deliver on the commitment we made to the city, followed by five years of significant growth. The consistency of that growth is very important. This is a business that has delivered through some of the most challenging macroeconomic conditions in recent memory, a global pandemic, severe supply chain dislocation, volatility across end markets. At each point, the structural nature of our customer demand and the fact that we are embedded with category leaders in growing markets has provided resilience.
Top-line growth is only part of the story, and this is a business that has also transformed its profitability. When I joined Volex, operating margins were 2%, and we delivered about 10% underlying operating margin last year, and today we are setting out how we will take that to the next level. Now, this significant change is of course, down to multiple factors. It's targeting the right customers in attractive markets that suit our manufacturing expertise. It's about the people, as I've talked about repeatedly. We are creative and entrepreneurial. We push hard on growth. We push hard on execution. We push hard on each other to deliver more, and that hunger runs right through the organization. Strategy sets the direction, execution decides whether you get there, and our people are what closes the gap. These choices have not been accidents.
They have been consequences of identifying and executing a clear strategic plan. I referred to our customers several times already today, and there's a reason for that. Our customers are some of the biggest, most successful, most innovative organizations in the world. We do not just serve large customers, we serve category leaders. These are companies with a number one, two, or three position in their markets. In fact, 14 of our top 20 customers are leaders in their field. That is not a coincidence. It's a deliberate choice, and it matters because category leaders share three characteristics that are incredibly valuable to us. First, they are aligned to megatrends, the electrification of transport, data center expansion, and AI infrastructure, med tech, industrial automation, and robotics. These segments are supported by strong structural growth drivers that will enhance demand over years and even decades.
Secondly, they shape the markets they are in through disruptive technology and investing at the leading edge. They are continually developing new products, expanding their markets, and embracing increased complexity. Third, they occupy durable leading positions in their chosen markets, driving technology and customer reach to enhance engagement and future demand. This creates embedded positions and recurring revenue streams. These are not just good customers, they are the best customers for a business like Volex. We align to their design cycles. We embed in their manufacturing processes. We become part of how they build their products. Switching costs are high. The incentive to change is low. That translates directly into revenue predictability and margin resilience.
We embrace complexity at Volex, and it allows us to stand out and deliver against the most stringent requirements, and that is critical in a world where complexity is accelerating across our end markets. Products are becoming more integrated. The boundaries between mechanical systems, electronics, software, and connectivity are blurring. A modern agricultural vehicle contains significant computing power, integrating multiple systems and recording valuable data. Incremental functionality adds exponential complexity. Innovation cycles are compressing. To be first to market, you need more than the first idea. You need to be first into production, designs iterate, engineers need partners who can match the speed of their creativity with real-time responsiveness, and operating environments are shifting, so the ability to navigate complex global supply chains and manage the fallout from geopolitical disruption is not a nice-to-have, it is essential.
What we deliver every day is far from straightforward, but the prize of getting it right is the privilege of working with the best businesses in the world. Once you earn that position, it compounds, trust builds, relationships deepen, revenue grows. As complexity increases, system-level integrators like Volex become increasingly critical, and we sit at this unusual and unique intersection of design, manufacturing, and delivery. We take our customers' complex requirements and we translate them into reliable, scalable, high-quality assemblies. We integrate power and connectivity, bringing designs to reality. Our engineers work alongside customer design specialists, supporting iteration and integration and problem-solving. We tailor solutions for specific applications using in-depth knowledge of requirements specific to each industry.
The advantage of working on such complex solutions is that we become designed into long-term programs, often spanning five to 10 years, sometimes much longer, giving us a high degree of confidence in recurring demand and excellent predictability. It is the combination of these skills that creates our competitive advantage. The harder systems become, the more valuable system-level specialists like Volex become. Now, complicated slide. I would like to explain how our most successful relationships develop, because this is at the center of how we create value. Everything starts with the customer, the right customer for Volex, category leaders solving complex challenges. We identify opportunities to support them by understanding their requirements and committing to building tailored solutions. That deep knowledge supports the second phase, investing ahead of growth, having the right capabilities, production in the right locations, and the best people.
We deliver this capability early in the project life cycle, because that early commitment is how trust is built. Then the third phase is scaling with our customers. As their products succeed, as volumes grow, we scale alongside them. Each program becomes more profitable because our common platform and transferable systems mean we do not rebuild from scratch each time, and this creates a repeatable loop. Complexity feeds demand, trust earns a place on the program, scalability systems deliver it profitably, and returns compound not once, continuously, through deeper relationships and broader scope. Shortly, Paul, Mark, and Girish will take you through specific examples of this system. While the specifics differ across our customer segments, the model is the same. There is a significant advantage to working with category leaders.
When we solve a complex engineering challenge for one customer, that learning does not stay in isolation. We think about where else it applied, capture the insight, and deploy it across the portfolio. What starts as a solution for one customer becomes a group-wide capability. We respond quickly because we do not start from zero each time. We start from a position of proven expertise. This principle applies across markets as much as within them. For example, our deep experience in exceptional quality and enhanced traceability for highly regulated medical supply chains allows us to deliver enhanced tracking and testing regimes for our data center customers, and this is how we scale and enhance profitability. This transferability drives operating leverage and supports our path to higher margins.
New programs are more profitable than the last because we are building on what we have already learned. What does this all mean for Volex as a business? This is the slide I'm most proud of. We have averaged over the last five years, organic growth of 12%, outperforming almost every leading industrial business. In fact, if this slide is to be believed, we've outperformed every single one. We've achieved this through partnering with the right customers, embracing complexity and technological change, and investing in our operations to have the requisite scale and breadth. We have actively supported our customers as they evolve their supply chain requirements and rethink what resilience looks like in a fast-changing world.
Now, so I can have a glass of water, we have put together a short video that captures the role we play in delivering solutions from enabling everyday life to serving some of the most mission-critical applications.
[Presentation]
Now, there was a spaceship in there, and some of you might know that we built critical cable assemblies which were part of the propulsion system for the recent successful Artemis space launch. That's kind of incredible. What you see in the video is the breadth of applications that our solutions support from everyday essential technology in the home to life-saving mission critical applications. What is important is that we are in markets that play to our strengths. We succeed where the complexity of our customers' operations mean they demand long-term, deeply embedded relationships. We gravitate to end markets where performance matters, and this can mean the confidence that technology in the home will just work to supporting some of the most groundbreaking and innovative solutions available today.
To be clear, everyday essential in no way means that the role we play is simple, given we work with global businesses that operate complex international supply chains with incredibly stringent requirements. We frequently form a small but critical part of a much bigger application. What we do is integral to the operation of the equipment. There is simply no room for error, and often there are no second chances. Complexity is the common thread across everything we do. Whatever the end market, whatever the application, complexity is what brings our customers to us, and performance is what keeps them there. Now, allow me please to bring all of this together. Our success over the last decade is no accident. We have a clear strategy that informs each step we take and helps us prioritize.
We identify the right customers by understanding where and how we add value. We pursue opportunities where our capability set unlocks significant advantages for customers that define their markets. Having secured these relationships, we move up the complexity curve, seeking increasingly complex use cases for our engineering and manufacturing capabilities. The progression in transmission speeds in our high-speed data center cables is one such example. Another is how our relationships with domestic appliance manufacturers through power cords are enabling us to win more complex harness opportunities inside the appliance. As we invest in capability and demonstrate competence, we scale into adjacent opportunities. Successful steps rather than leaps of faith, gradually expanding in a measured, low-risk way. This is the flywheel that supports our significant organic growth. Then we enhance this through intelligent acquisitions that strengthen our capabilities and expand our relationship set.
This strategy underpins the medium-term financial targets for Volex. $500 million of additional organic revenue, $300 million from acquisitions. Alongside that growth, underlying operating margins rising to 12%, and Jon will take you through the detail market by market. Now, I have great pleasure in handing over to some of my colleagues to give you examples of what all this looks like in practice. Paul, Mark, and Girish, who I've already introduced you to, they will talk to you about their interactions with our customers and how we bring this strategy into operation on a daily basis. Paul, if you would like to come up here and get going. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening to me.
Thank you, Nat. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Paul Bullock, and I'm the Chief Operating Officer for Europe, and I'm the global account leader for one of our largest medical technology customers. I've spent my career in complex electronics manufacturing, and prior to Volex's acquisition of Silcotec in 2018, I was a director there, focused on growing a medical and high-tech business. When I joined Volex, two things struck me immediately, the quality of the customer relationships and the breadth of the operational capability. As a trusted manufacturing partner for components that sit inside the equipment used to diagnose and treat patients, the standard of execution required is exceptional, and there's no real room for error when you're impacting on patient outcomes. Today, I want to share a customer story with you, a partnership that we've built over the last 20 years with a leading global medical technology company.
It demonstrates exactly what Nat said. Working alongside a category leader, moving up the complexity curve, and scaling with the customer. The pattern's consistent, but the market is different. Thanks. Healthcare systems are becoming more integrated and regulated and more demanding. At the same time, patient expectations of the use of technology in healthcare is continuing to rise. Equipment that once performed a single function now integrates imaging, monitoring, and treatment into a single platform, and the technology is getting more sophisticated every year. The tolerance for failure is effectively zero. The customer I'm going to talk about today makes some of the most advanced healthcare equipment in the world. MRI scanners, patient monitoring systems, defibrillators, equipment that clinicians rely on every day to save lives. We supply both the cable assemblies and the electromechanical systems that sit inside those products.
Let me just be clear on what that means. These are not accessories. Volex products carry the power and the data that make the equipment function. Every signal, every instruction, every piece of diagnostic information passes through an assembly that we manufacture. Today, with this customer, we make over 2,200 different finished goods that contain 6,500 raw materials. We deliver to 18 customer locations from eight different Volex factories. These numbers really reflect both the breadth and the depth of that relationship built over 20 years. Populations are continuing to age, and diagnostics are becoming more sophisticated, and the treatment technologies are advancing. In this market, results matter in a way that is different from any other sector because you're contributing to the outcomes that affect people's lives, and our teams understand that. It's easy to see that supplier relationships and manufacturing could be seen as transactional.
You meet the specification, you win the contract, you deliver the parts. We see it differently. In a market that is this regulated and complex, the real value tends not to be in the individual cable assembly. It's in the customer trust, the ability to support across the entire portfolio, not cherry-picking the high margin or the high volume orders and being there for the full breadth of what they need. Volex's heritage and their credibility in medical manufacturing means that our teams deeply understand both the regulatory requirements and the real-world impact of the products that we build, and that sense of purpose really shapes our daily activities. We make a deliberate choice to put the relationship ahead of the individual transaction. We work closely with the customer's engineering teams to optimize design, improve manufacturability, resulting in reduced cost.
We actively look for ways to add value in the relationship because demonstrating value earns us the right to do more. By building trust, we become the first port of call when they need a complex solution. Every interaction is an opportunity to strengthen that trust. Now I'd like to just take you through some of the areas where we have added significant value for this customer. During the pandemic, when global supply chains fractured for the majority of Medical customers, where there is no substitutes, components are qualified, approved, you can't switch. At Volex, we flexed our production schedules, we reprioritized capacity across the global network. We used every supplier relationship that we had, and our objective was simple. Make sure that our customer's production for critical equipment does not stop. When our customer wanted to localize production in India, and we didn't have a presence there.
We made a structured investment by acquiring a business to accelerate our ability to align with the customer's timeline. That decision sent a clear signal to our customer about our long-term commitment. As John will explain later, our ability to transfer operations and products between regions seamlessly is one of our operating model's most powerful capabilities. Furthermore, we partner on cost and design. Our engineers are embedded in the customer's design process, contributing ideas to optimize the manufacturability and simplify procurement. More recently, we've also been adapting our scheduling to support our customers' working capital objectives. This is just examples of what intelligent, agile execution looks like in practice outside of those table stakes of quality, cost, and delivery. The result is a deeply embedded relationship, a growing opportunity in India, and trust that is earned through consistent action over decades.
This customer story tells you three things about Volex. Firstly, we think long-term. The India investment was not driven by short-term returns. It was driven by conviction that structural support creates value that compounds over time, and this is how we allocate capital. Jon's going to touch on that later on when he discusses our capital allocation framework. Secondly, we develop value-creating partnerships. Genuine commitment, along with structural investment and consistent execution, where trust is earned. This is not about a single customer. This is a mindset that repeats across the entire business. Thirdly, this trust enables us to scale. 20 years of working hand-in-hand, supporting the customer through their most challenging periods, responding to emerging requirements. Our competitors cannot replicate that position, and this creates a genuine moat. One final point, this pattern that you've seen here is not unique to this Medical customer.
This is a Volex model of early commitment, investment, and execution resulting in trust. You'll hear the same pattern from Mark in EV and Girish in data centers. Different end markets, same model, same results. That's why our customer relationships are genuine, lasting, competitive advantages. Now I'm going to hand it over to Mark, who's going to take you through a customer in the EV segment. Thank you.
Thank you, Paul. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Mark Kray, Chief Operating Officer for North America. I joined Volex just over five years ago now to help expand our position in North America. Prior to joining Volex, I had the pleasure of working with some of the Volex executives when we were together at TT Electronics. Now, Paul just talked about a relationship that was built over 20 years. What I want to share is something a little bit different. Volex supports a broad range of customers across the region, including some of the largest names in EV and electrification. We built this EV business from zero to real scale in just under a decade. Different timeline, same principles. Honestly, the speed of this growth says a lot about where things are headed.
I'm going to walk you through how we entered the EV market, earned the trust of one of the industry's most demanding customers, and how that turned into a much larger growth platform, well beyond automotive. If you go back about nine years, we made the decision to enter the EV space, and at the time, it wasn't an obvious choice. There weren't many EVs on the road. The technology was still evolving. Most companies were sitting back, waiting, watching. We decided to lean in, and what really drew us in wasn't the size of the market, it was the customer. A customer pushing the boundaries of what EVs could be. Customers who were demanding, fast-moving, and expecting a lot from their partners. They needed someone who could keep up, and we wanted to rise to that challenge.
Fast-forward to today, EV and electrification account for over $180 million of our revenue, built from a standing start. Now we're supplying two-thirds of the U.S. and European EV manufacturers. This isn't just about cars. Electrification is reshaping transportation, energy systems, and industrial infrastructure. The companies leading that shift are exactly the kind of customers we want, innovative, fast-moving, and investing ahead of the curve. They need partners who can move just as fast, and that's where we come in. Just to reiterate an important point, this growth didn't come from chasing volume. It came from earning the trust of one customer, and then proving we could do it again and again across the industry. When we entered this space, standards were still evolving. Specifications were changing.
Flexibility was absolutely critical, and our customers set the bar high, not just technically, but in terms of quality, fit, and finish. The kind of expectations you don't always see written down, but you feel immediately. This is a space where things move fast. Customers want innovation, they want speed, and they want competitive pricing. They're not waiting for suppliers to catch up. You have to move with them. We had a strong foundation, years of experience in power products. This was a different application. What made the difference was how transferable our expertise was around safety, durability, and ruggedization. All things we knew very well, just applied in a new way. When our engineering teams got involved, they realized something very quickly. The application was new, but the core challenges weren't. That's really where we unlock value.
By investing early in the relationship, we got up to speed quickly and figured out where we could really make a difference. Our approach is pretty straightforward. Start with the customer, understand the problem, then solve it. By really listening, we adjusted how we manufactured to deliver what mattered most. In some cases, that meant going beyond functionality and focusing on finish and consistency, adding steps where needed to make sure we hit the mark every time. We also committed early to investing in infrastructure and scalability, and as the business grew, we reinvested, built more vertical integration, improved lead times, and created more value for our customer. We also designed our manufacturing systems from the start to be automated and optimized so we could scale efficiently. As we delivered, we were trusted with more. First external products, then components inside the vehicle. That's a big step up.
More complexity, more responsibility. The only way you get there is by delivering consistently. Let me walk you through how the product evolved, because I think it really helps tell the story. We started in 2017 with a simple grid cord, which is essentially a power cord that adapted to the vehicle. Simple idea, but critical functionality. In 2019, adapters became a major opportunity. As charging standards diversified, demand for compatibility took off. That opened doors to new customers as well. We moved on to wall chargers in 2020, and in 2022, supercharger cables. Higher power, more demanding environments. By 2023, we are inside the vehicle. Power distribution harnesses more integration, more complexity. Now the next wave, vehicle to load, vehicle to grid, turning vehicles into power sources that connect directly into energy storage and infrastructure. We're already engaged there.
Across all of this, vertical integration has been key. Owning more of the process means better cost, better margins, faster delivery, and stronger competitiveness. That's what drove our success and what will continue driving it. Where does this leave us? Well, we built credibility with one of the most demanding customers in the world, and that credibility has opened doors across the EV sector. Today, we're supplying OEMs covering about two-thirds of EV volumes in the U.S. and Europe. We've expanded our role in the vehicle from external systems to internal platforms, and now we're investing to accelerate. We've planned a $25 million investment in Mexico to expand our vertical integration capabilities, focusing on injection molding and cable extrusion. This isn't speculative. It's directly tied to customer demand. It supports nearshoring, adds flexibility, and improves margins.
Just as important, working closely with leading customers gives us visibility into what's coming next, often years ahead of the broader market. That insight provides real competitive advantage for us, and it's opening doors beyond EV into robotics, autonomous systems, and energy. If you take a step back for a second, there are four key takeaways. First, partnering with category leaders pays off. It established an industry-recognized pedigree for Volex. Second, our investments are backed by real demand, and it has been a key element of our margin progression. Third, this opportunity goes well beyond automotive. EVs are changing the energy sector. Fourth, this is our model. Understand the customer, invest early, and scale with them from GBP 0 to GBP 180 million. That same model is what Paul described to Medical and what you'll hear next in data centers. Different markets, same approach. Thank you very much.
With that, I'll hand it over to Girish.
Thank you, Mark. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Girish Gopinath. I lead our Asia Pacific operations and globally look after our power products business. I'm also involved in the data center and high-speed connectivity business, which is one of the most exciting opportunities within the group. Paul told you about a partnership built over 20 years. Mark told you about one which was built under a decade. I'm going to talk to you about one where the pace of the change is unlike anything I've witnessed in my career. In this market, the technology changes every two to three years. Our customers are some of the largest companies in the world. We compete head-to-head with the market's biggest manufacturers in the industry, and we're winning. There is no technology trend attracting more capital, attention, more urgency than artificial intelligence.
Behind every AI model, every cloud platform, every digital service, high-performance data centers must connect and coordinate with thousands of endpoints to get the required performance. Managing this complexity is a major infrastructure challenge, which is being addressed by major technological companies. Volex operates at the heart of this infrastructure. We design and manufacture high-speed cables that connect everything inside these facilities. Every server communication, every data flow, every processing cycle at the speed AI demands. Without these cables, nothing works. Our cables operate ranging from 200 Gbps to 1.6 Tbps . To put that into context, that's enough bandwidth to download the entire content of Wikipedia in less than a second. This is not commodity manufacturing. This is precision engineering at scale. Every cable tracked, every cable tested, no exceptions. The challenge in this market is driven by three things. First, sequencing.
In a data center build, cables go in last. By the time the customer gets our product, everything else is already in place, the building, power, cooling, racks, and the endpoint equipment. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been committed, and the entire project is waiting for one component. If we are late, the data center does not function or open on time. If our product fails, they don't function on time as well. Second, technical frontier. We support a range of speeds from 200 Gbps to 1.6 Tbps. The processing speed that AI models are getting more sophisticated requires greater bandwidth and the infrastructure to keep pace with every single signal interruption. AI training models has to go back and restart if in case anything in this fails. This is where there's a lost progress directly impacts cost and competitive advantage. Third, competitive intensity.
We compete directly with Amphenol, Molex, TE Connectivity. These are formidable businesses with enormous scale and long history. We win through capability, reliability, agile execution, disciplined delivery, and our pace of innovation. As Nat said earlier, the harder the systems become, specialists like Volex become more valuable. This is a perfect demonstration of that thinking. In this market, there's a temptation to focus entirely on the product. Product innovation is essential, and we prioritize it. When a new specification emerges, we're already working on it. Each generation shift, 200 Gb, 800 Gb, or 1.6 Tb demonstrates our capability and delivers significant return on investment. But product innovation alone does not create lasting advantage. It must be paired with speed, reliability, and the ability to execute at scale, importantly maintaining consistency across thousands of units. That's where many of our competitors fall short and exactly where we win.
Our manufacturing technology, testing protocols, and quality systems scale rapidly while achieving the highest standards. We have used our expertise in developing high-performance manufacturing systems to create processes that meet demand in fast-moving markets and ramp at unprecedented speed. The ability to manufacture at scale without compromising on quality is where lasting advantage is created. We invest in product and process innovation because that's where it takes to win. The speed at which demand has increased has been unprecedented. We respond by scaling capacity rapidly, expanding production at specialist factories in China and Indonesia. That expansion requires exceptional execution. We replicated advanced manufacturing process across both these sites. This is where operating model proves in itself the ability to transfer knowledge, process, quality standards from one facility to another at a speed is a capability that we built over years, many years.
On the product side, we have certified products across generations 200 Gbps, 400 Gbps, 800 Gbps, and now 1.6 Tbps . We prioritize our development to stay ahead. Scaling a precision manufacturing process without compromise is where most competitors stumble. We do not. As I mentioned earlier, every cable tracked, every cable tested, no exceptions. That is why we compete and win with the largest manufacturers in the world. Our investment in innovation, product, and process creates pricing resilience. Proprietary manufacturing process and manufacturing discipline protects margins. There's a natural next step, power distribution within the data center. Our expertise in power transmission gives us direct route into rack level distribution. Same customer, same environment, more revenue. This is a structural growth market with AI investments accelerating as use cases continue to develop. We are positioned for what comes next. This story tells you about four things about Volex.
First, innovation protects margin quality. When you invest in the product and process, you create advantages that are difficult to replicate and hard to commoditize. That translates directly into pricing resilience. Second, we compete at the highest levels. Our customers see our product on par with the biggest specialist manufacturers in the market. We win on capability, reliability, and the pace of innovation. That is the proof that Volex can compete with anyone in the world. Third, adjacent opportunities deepen relationship. Our expertise within the data center environment opens up power distribution opportunities. As new standards emerge, we take expertise from other markets like EV, Consumer Electricals to support the next generation AI optimized processing technology. Finally, this shows you how we are positioned for long-term structural growth. AI and cloud computing is still accelerating. The data center built out continues to gain momentum.
This market captures one of the biggest changes in how we interact with technology for generations. You've now heard a story on EV, medical, data centers, different markets, different customers, same model. The model extends across the rest of the business, Consumer Electricals, Off-Highway, industrial technology, and even defense. We target the right customers. We move up the complexity curve. We invest in scaling with them. This consistency is what gives us confidence, and this is what should give you confidence, too. I would now like to hand over the mic to John Molloy, who will explain how we deliver all of this. Thank you.
Thank you, Girish. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm John Molloy, the Chief Operating Officer for Volex. I've been working in manufacturing for 40 years. This includes running and growing businesses in China for 15 years. Before I came to Volex, I worked at TT Electronics for 14 years. You've just heard three compelling customer stories. Each one highlights something important, the strength of our relationships, the depth of our commitment, and the value we create through complexity. There's a bigger question behind all those stories. How do we actually deliver? Today, I'm going to take you through our operating model. It's the least visible part of Volex, but it's what makes everything else possible. In my view, it's the most underappreciated part of the whole investment case. The way we execute is just as important as the products we make. Customers demand precision, reliability, and speed.
They want it nowadays across many geographies, across sectors, and across production lines. Our operating model is the glue that holds the whole thing together. The key elements are our common platform, our global footprint, our transfer capability, and most important, our culture. Culture is quite hard to put on a slide, but it's fundamental to how we operate. Culture is built on consistent behavior day in, day out. At Volex, it starts with the people. We make sure the right people are involved in every project. Customers get access to our best problem solvers wherever they are in the world, and we hire people who put the team before themselves and who care about outcomes. We promote from within, so knowledge stays in the business and gets passed on. Communication, this is at the center of everything. When communication is strong, the organization moves as one.
When it isn't, you get 23 separate businesses doing different things. Our culture is a true competitive advantage in the marketplace. You could give a competitor our factories, our locations, even our customers, and they still couldn't do what we do. Because culture isn't installed, it's built over years through people who care about what they do. We operate 23 manufacturing locations. Different countries, different teams, different customers. We operate as one organization. There's three elements that make this work. First, a common platform. In that common platform, we have shared standards. We have aligned KPIs, and we have very consistent processes. Wherever you go, China, Indonesia, Turkey, Mexico, you see the same management disciplines, and we have the same expectations for all our factories. Second, we have a short chain of command. We move quickly. Decisions are made close to the business by people who understand it.
Skilled local managers in regional teams who understand the business very well. Our regional teams are close to the customer, which means they intelligently solve problems when they arise. Then third, and nowadays very important, transferable systems. We're able to move products seamlessly from one site to another because of our consistent systems. One operating model across 23 locations. That's what makes this work. We occupy a sweet spot in the market. Smaller suppliers are agile, but they struggle with scale, and they have limited supply chains. Larger manufacturers have got scale, but they struggle with flexibility. Production schedules are rigid, complex, and they miss out on lower volume opportunities. Volex sits right in the middle. The responsiveness of a smaller company and the global reach and cost competitiveness of a larger one.
That combination is extremely rare in the market that we operate, and it's very hard to replicate from either direction. Customers today are balancing trade-offs, costs, risks, speed, resilience. We give them both global efficiency and local responsiveness, if you like, local. We reduce freight costs, we shorten supply chains, we lower working capital, and we stay close enough to our customers so that we can respond quickly. They focus on their markets, and we handle the complexity. In complex supply chains, removing the friction is where you really add value. Our global footprint gives customers options. When trade tariffs change, shift, or geopolitical things happen, and there's been a few of those, we already have alternatives in place. In Asia, we have sites in China, Indonesia, India, Vietnam. They offer deep manufacturing expertise, allowing us to rapidly scale up production. They're cost competitive.
They can handle high mix and low volumes, as well as higher volume requirements. Now in Europe and Turkey, we're close to our European customers, and they have deep specialisms in complex sectors. In North America, we have USMCA compliant production, which means we can ship without U.S. tariffs. We don't need to build options. They're already there. When we compete against businesses with a single site or restricted to a particular region, that's a massive competitive advantage for us. We offer an à la carte instead of a set menu. One customer probably is showing a more extreme requirement. They assemble wall chargers, or they want to assemble wall chargers in Europe. They came to us for a solution, but they have to keep competing globally against a lot of manufacturers in the Far East.
We purchased the PCBA from India, the plastic from Europe, the couplers, which is the bit that goes into the car, from China, and then the harnesses from Batam. We assemble the whole thing robotically in Poland. Having multiple locations really means nothing unless you can transfer production seamlessly. Our transfer capability has become so reliable that now it's considered as a service in its own right. What we've been doing in EV is a great example of this, supporting customers who want to relocate, want to avoid tariffs, require less carbon. Every successful transfer becomes a credential, and credentials win us new business. Every transfer follows a proven process. We assess risk, plan with the customer, execute in phases, validate the quality, and optimize continuously. Most importantly, it cannot disrupt the customer. This is not just relocating existing Volex projects. It wins new business.
Customers come to us because they know that they can trust us, and we can take the hassle out of their complex transfers. We have 23 factories around the world, but our emphasis is pivoting to our designated five centers of excellence. Suzhou was the original one. Batam followed. Both are now proven, both are working very, very well, and both are running at levels of vertical integration and capability that we want across the rest of the group. Sivas is a consolidation story. We inherited a business with multiple smaller sites across the country, and then we created a purpose-built site in Sivas, and that's where we're bringing many of the smaller sites together. It's not finished, the direction is very clear. Further inbound transfers are already in progress. Tijuana has evolved from a Medical harness site into a multi-use facility.
Complex assemblies, PCBA assembly, prototyping, EV, and Off-Highway production. We're investing in vertical integration for complex plastic connectors there. Prodamex is a purpose-built harness facility in Mexico. We're extending cable extrusion into that facility to serve our EV and Off-Highway customers. They'll have the same vertical integration as we run out of our Suzhou and Batam plants now. Jon will come back to the Mexico investment when he walks you through our medium-term plan. Not everything we do suits being part of a center of excellence. Certain parts of our business suit specific customer locations, but the majority of what we do in the future, and the direction that we're traveling, will be larger capable sites that we can scale. This matters for two reasons. The first is margin.
Consolidation and improved fixed cost recoveries are one of the levers that help us bridge from the 10% operating profit to the 12% that's been mentioned. The second is scale. Going from GBP 1.2 billion to GBP 2 billion is far faster through bigger factories with the same competencies than it is through a fragmented footprint. You scale what you've already built, and you don't rebuild it five times over. Vertical integration runs through every one of these sites. Take a look at our power cord production. The most expensive part of a power cord is the cable itself, and for years we outsourced it. Think about that. We designed great power cords, but we couldn't make them cost-effectively because the most valuable piece was sitting on someone else's P&L. We set out to change that. We acquired Ta Hsing specifically to learn cable extrusion.
Because the problem when you outsource is you forget. That was the starting point. Over the following three to four years, we turned Suzhou into one of the best cable manufacturing facilities in the world. Well, actually, Jessica did that. That single capability unlocked two things. It allowed us to win a number of major EV contracts, because in EV charging, the cable is again the biggest part of the bill of materials, and it made us competitive again in our power cord business. Strange. Once we proved the model, we kept going. What else were we buying outside? Plastics, connectors, metal stamp parts. Every one of those was a supplier earning a margin on the top of our cost base. We brought them all in-house. Today, we outsource very little. We're vertically integrated right through the product.
No margin on margin, better cost position, more competitive for our customers. We replicated the whole thing in Batam. Batam is now capable of doing exactly what Suzhou does. We're now investing significantly in North America to move that same capability into our Mexico plants. Now, that also helps us with the USMCA compliance and the tariff exposure that our customers have. When we bought Murat Ticaret and DE-KA for Off-Highway, they already had vertical integration. It just wasn't at the level that we expect at Volex. We're bringing that up to speed now. This is where the customer piece fits in. Since COVID, our customers have globalized, tariffs, sustainability, supply chain disruption. It's been quite a few years. All of this has made single region supplies a very risky business, and our customers realize that, and our model takes that away for them.
We don't really care where they want to manufacture. It's an à la carte menu. They pick the geography, we deliver the product. Same standard, same quality. Because the capability is transferable, we can move the work between sites as their needs change. We've done that for many customers, and that's what this model gives us. When we buy businesses, we think how it can fit strategically for us. Ta Hsing, as just described, gave us cable extrusion technology. That opened up everything else. Now look at what we did with Consumer Electricals. We were already one of the largest power cord businesses in the world. Wherever we sold a cord, we could have been selling a harness. The harness inside a domestic appliance is worth about five to 10 times that of a power cord. We didn't make consumer harnesses. Someone else did.
We acquired DE-KA in Turkey, and Prodamex in Mexico. DE-KA gave us a European white goods exposure and harness capability, and then Prodamex, although subscale, made harnesses in North America. We then added harness capacity into Batam, and we invested heavily. We grew it. Then we went back to one of our existing category leaders that we supplied power cords to. We said, "Well, we can do harnesses too, and we can do it for you now in Europe, North America and Asia." One of those customers, at the time was about $15 million as an account when we started this journey, will now hit $60 million by the end of this year. Now that's the playbook working, and we're now running exactly the same model in Off-Highway. We acquired Murat Ticaret for the European position and market leader in Europe.
We invested heavily in North America, and we're building harness capacity right now in Batam. We're talking to our customers who were previously European, and we're supplying them now in America, winning contracts. We're winning contracts in Asia. That's the playbook playing out. There's a desperate need in our space for global providers. Most of our competitors are regional. They supply Europe, maybe North America only, or China only. Some customers want to be out of China. We have other customers who want to be in. They want USMCA compliance to avoid tariffs in North America. They want a lower carbon footprint for Europe supply. They want resilience. Very few suppliers can give them all three. That's what makes our platform unique. That's why these acquisitions were the right ones, and that's a significant growth driver for Volex.
Deep partnerships with our customers matter for a lot of reasons. They create long-term relationships that we've just heard about today. They generate repeat business. They give us the chance to keep expanding our wallet share with the customer. On top of all of that, they give us visibility and predictability of future revenues. We're deliberate about who we go after. We target customers where these kinds of relationships are possible, category leaders, customers who value our engineering partnership, not just a transactional supplier, customers in growth markets. Once we're in, we get involved at the design stage, we work with them on what's coming next, not just what we're building today. That's what locks us in, very often as an exclusive provider. Because these platforms typically run from five to eight years, we get multi-year visibility of the revenues that's coming our way.
When you bring it all together, our operating model, our global footprint, and our customer relationships, you get something that's very, very hard to replicate. I've been doing this for a long time, and I've never been more confident about this business than I am today. With all that said, I'll hand over to Jon, who will take you through the financials. Thank you.
That was good. Cool. Thank you, John, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm Jon Boaden, the CFO of Volex, and it's genuinely great to see so many familiar faces. You've heard about our customers, you've heard about our markets and our operating model. Now let me show you what that means in financial terms. We see a path to $2 billion of revenue. We see margins reaching 12%, and we see an opportunity to create substantial shareholder value over the medium term. My job is to connect the stories you've heard today to the numbers, to show you the evidence behind our confidence, and to set out a financial framework that you can hold us to. Let me start with three themes. First, we delivered. Four years ago, we stood up in front of many of you and set out an ambitious plan to double the size of this business.
We hit that target a year early. We said we would do it, and we delivered on that promise. Second, the quality of this business has fundamentally changed. Deep defensible relationships with leading technology businesses, access to structurally growing markets, an operating model that allows us to grow consistently and profitably. Everything you've heard today is a proof point for what comes next. Third, a financial framework you can trust. We build our plans from the bottom up. Every target is constructed across the organization, from factory floor to the boardroom, and challenged at every level. That is why when we commit to a plan, we deliver it. Today, I'll take you through how we reach $2 billion of revenue, 12% operating margins, and 20% return on capital employed, and I will show you why each and every one of those numbers is credible. Let me start with the evidence.
We've delivered consistent organic growth through the cycle, ahead of many other industrial manufacturers, through supply chain dislocation, through end market volatility and destocking, through a pandemic and changes in tariffs. At each point, the structural nature of our customer demand provided resilience. This is not cyclical recovery. This is structural growth. The shift towards higher complexity, longer duration programs, is improving our mix. Embedded positions with category leaders. We grow because they grow. As we've grown, we've improved profitability alongside it. Underlying operating margins are now above 10%. We've scaled this business without diluting returns. These embedded positions across multi-year programs create predictability. You heard about regulatory lock-in in medical, engineering differentiation in EV, proprietary product sets in data centers. Each one reinforces durability over time. Before I set out the new targets, I want to show you something.
The best predictor of whether we will deliver the next plan is whether we deliver the last one. Four years ago, we made four commitments to double revenue to $1.2 billion, underlying operating margins of 9%-10%, organic growth around 9%, and to deliver $200 million of incremental revenue through acquisitions. The results speak for themselves, ahead against every metric. Our achievement is the product of targets anchored in a deep understanding of our customers, our markets, and where we add value. The targets I'm about to present were built using the same methodology, the same rigor, and the same accountability. Let me break down where the growth comes from across each end market, starting with EV and electrification. The core EV market is expected to grow at 10% per year, and we expect to outpace this by 300 basis points.
The credentials earned with our category leading customer have opened up doors across the sector. We now supply OEMs that represent 2/3 of the EV market across North America and Europe. The breadth of what we offer is increasing as we support power delivery inside the vehicle, giving us higher content per platform. The opportunity in adjacent markets is compelling. Our expertise in connecting power critical systems in the vehicle translates to the use cases for battery energy storage solutions and solar installation. Autonomous vehicles will bring their own set of requirements. Our investment in vertical integration in Mexico responds directly to customer demand by reducing exposure to tariffs. Home charging solutions bring together our harnessing, extrusion, PCBA, and box build expertise into a market which is growing rapidly.
Moving to Off-Highway, we expect to grow ahead of the market by 300 basis points, and the difference is primarily geographic opportunity given the white space in North America. We entered this market three years ago through our acquisition in Turkey and built a strong European position. Now we're replicating that in North America, where we've already secured some significant initial customer wins. Beyond that, our low-cost manufacturing in Indonesia is also well suited to specific sections of the market, providing further optionality for customers. As vehicles get smarter with GPS cameras and advanced operator interfaces, the harness content per vehicle keeps growing. Part of the reason why our European business has grown ahead of the market. Complexity plays directly to our strengths, and the systems are transferable, so as we scale, we deliver greater efficiency.
In Consumer Electricals, the market is expected to grow around 4% per year, and we're targeting 100 basis points over this. We're well known in this space with deeply embedded positions with household name manufacturers. The growth story here is about moving up the value chain. Inside every domestic appliance is a harness connecting key components, and that harness is worth five to 10 times the power cord. Same customer, same factory, significantly more revenue per unit. With our global capabilities, reputation, and flexible approach, we're winning new logos. Our offer across cords and harnesses is attuned to what customers want, great service, exceptional quality, and competitive pricing. Consumer trends are in our favor. Appliances are getting smarter, more sensors, more connectivity, more complexity. That complexity increases the manufacturing challenge, and it increases our relevance.
We deliver this across three continents seamlessly for category leading customers who need a solution, not a commodity product. In medical, the market grows around 6% per annum, and we expect to match that. Paul gave you a compelling illustration of what a 20-year embedded relationship looks like in this space, and that story is not unique. We have multiple longstanding relationships with the largest medical OEMs in the world. This is important given the regulatory lock-in and significant switching costs in this space. The growth drivers here are structural. By 2030, one in six people worldwide will be over 65, and the largest OEMs are actively consolidating their supply chains, reducing the number of vendors, and concentrating volume with globally certified partners. That trend favors Volex directly. Diagnostic and treatment technologies are becoming more sophisticated every year.
Some of these technologies offer remarkable benefits for both patients and healthcare providers, delivering above-market opportunities for our customers at the leading edge of technology. What is more, we expect to emerge from a period of destocking in FY 2026 and return to sustained growth underpinned by these structural drivers. Complex Industrial Technology is the broadest of our five end markets, so I've split it into two areas. First, data centers and AI infrastructure. Girish took you through this in detail. Each technology generation requires entirely new cables, 400Gb to 800Gb to 1.6 Tbps . That is not an evolution. It is a replacement cycle that compounds our revenue base with every generation deployed. Worldwide data center CapEx is forecast to exceed $1 trillion in 2026, and the trajectory is still accelerating. This is an area where the market is expecting continued momentum in data center demand.
We are investing in automation to reduce production costs and simplify how we ramp capacity. We see an opportunity to displace incumbents and win new relationships. In addition, we see a natural adjacency into power distribution at the rack level, extending our relevance in the same customer environment. The second area is industrial and defense. We support the electrification of industrial systems, clean technology applications, and specialist defense requirements. The growth drivers are structural, reshoring labor economics, and the electrification of industrial processes, creating demand for complex application-specific assemblies. The capabilities we built in EV and Medical transfer directly to industrial programs, giving us a fast path to revenue. In defense, our specialist printed circuit board assembly operation at Irvine has deep relationships with leading U.S. contractors. The market's buoyant, and we've invested in capacity to support further growth. Remember, this is not a single market bet.
It is diversified across five structurally growing end markets, each with embedded customer positions and identifiable growth drivers. All of this adds approximately $500 million of organic revenue over the medium term, which forms the majority of our path to $2 billion. We delivered above 10% margins in FY 2026, and now we're committing to 12%. This is not an aspiration. It is built on four specific levers, each one already in motion. First, revenue mix. We're moving up the complexity curve across every end market. Higher complexity means more value, better pricing, and stronger margins. This is not about charging more for the same thing. It's about earning more by solving harder problems. Second, vertical integration and automation. We're investing $25 million in Mexico alone, bringing cable extrusion and injection molding in-house. When we control more of the process, we control more of the margin.
We're rolling out automation across our operations, removing cost, and enhancing quality. Third, operating leverage. John described centers of excellence, fewer, larger, more capable sites. As we grow, fixed costs spread over a bigger base. Each new program is more profitable than the last because we learn once and apply many times. Fourth, acquisitions. We target businesses which are margin accretive from year one. I want to be clear about something. This is not a cost-cutting story. It is a growth story. We are earning the right to higher margins by moving up the complexity curve. The building blocks are in place. The investments are committed. The programs are won. We are on a clear path to 12%. Before I move on to capital allocation, a word on sustainability, because it connects directly to how we win business. ESG is important to all of us.
As a global manufacturer, we recognize the impact that we have on the environment and the communities in which we operate, and we strive to act responsibly. We've improved across a range of key sustainability metrics, and I'm really proud of what the team has achieved. I'd like to focus on why this matters commercially. Our customers are global technology leaders. They face increasing scrutiny on Scope 3 emissions, which covers everything in their supply chain. For many of our customers, Scope 3 is the biggest element of their overall carbon footprint. Sustainability has moved from a reporting exercise to a critical question that shapes procurement decisions. Our track record creates a measurable competitive advantage. In short, the investment we've made in sustainability helps us win business. Our customers need a lower impact supply chain, and we are building one.
Now let me explain how we allocate capital, because in a business with this many growth opportunities, discipline matters. Return on capital employed is around 20%, and we've maintained that through a period of significant growth, multiple acquisitions. That number matters because it's the lens through which we make every capital allocation decision. The framework is straightforward. We reinvest in the business first because many of our CapEx programs pay back within two years and often faster. We acquire selectively, and I'll take you through the criteria shortly. We pay a dividend that reflects financial discipline. We buy back shares when circumstances warrant it, including the buyback that we announced earlier this month to support our move to the Main Market. As part of our approach to capital deployment, we aim to keep our leverage between one and two times.
One of the reasons we've been so successful is how we think about reinvesting in our business to deliver growth. We think long term, we focus on returns, and we listen to what customers need. Over the last five years, our average cash conversion before CapEx, which is the ratio of free cash flow before CapEx to underlying operating profit, was 97%. This demonstrates the efficiency of our approach and the close management of working capital as the business expands. Every year, we put together a CapEx investment plan, working out where we can deliver higher rates of growth, operating efficiencies, and improvements that enhance the capability and capacity of our global operations through the cycle. On average, we spent between 3%-4% of revenue on CapEx. This is targeted investment, which has allowed us to boost our margins and deliver top-line growth.
As we deliver the next medium-term plan, we will maintain this proven investment approach. Let me show you what this looks like in practice. Major CapEx decisions connected to customer opportunities. We do not invest speculatively. We invest because it delivers a capability enhancement that we can monetize. Cable extrusion, over $15 million invested, creating a differentiated EV offering with a lower cost to serve than the competition. Printed circuit board assembly, now around 10% of group revenues. Specialist capacity in North America for defense customers, low cost, high volume capacity in India across a range of end markets. Batam, Indonesia, where strong customer growth has delivered continuous expansion. We opened the third building on the campus last year, and we have further incremental capacity coming online next month.
The majority of our investments pay back within two years, and each one strengthens our position with the customers who drive our growth. What is more, they generate significant returns over multiple years, enhancing our returns profile. Now let me turn to acquisitions. M&A has been important part of our growth, but we are selective. Every acquisition is capability led. We look at what the business offers and its customers and understand whether that creates the sort of deep embedded relationships we have across the rest of the group. Valuations are important, and we look to acquire businesses that can deliver return on capital employed of at least 15% within a two-year period. This represents the optimal balance between the return profile and the quality of the underlying business. We know what works for Volex, complex manufacturing in competitive locations.
We will only buy businesses we understand well in markets where we have deep expertise. Given our margin aspirations, we look for businesses that are either achieving approximately 15% operating margins or with a clear path to that level. We tailor integration to get the maximum benefit from the common platforms and align to Volex standards. This enhances the acquired business, and we open up the Volex platform to the incoming management team. Let me bring this to life with three examples. Murat Ticaret was our entry point into Off-Highway. This is a complex business with multiple locations, and we've undertaken significant integration and further investment. It gave us a leading position in the European Off-Highway market. In addition, it opened up the North American Off-Highway market, bringing significant incremental opportunities with new customers.
inYantra was important strategically, giving us a low cost alternative to China and high volume printed circuit board assembly manufacturing, as well as complex cable assembly and box build for industrial technology and Medical customers. We've continued to invest in this business, which has exceptionally high levels of growth. Irvine Electronics is a specialist printed circuit board assembly business with deep relationships in the U.S. defense market. We've grown it significantly since acquisition, delivering great returns with further opportunities given the buoyancy of the defense market. Three acquisitions, three different strategic rationales, each one generating value inside the Volex platform. Let me bring this together. Organic growth adds $500 million of revenue over the medium term. Acquisitions contribute a further $300 million. That takes us to $2 billion. At 12% underlying operating margins, that translates to $240 million of underlying operating profit, roughly twice where we are today.
We've shown you the track record. We've shown you the customer relationships. We've shown you the operating model and the market positions that underpin every one of these numbers. We know how to grow this business. We know how to improve margins, and we know how to deploy capital for high returns. We said we would double this business, and we did, and now we're setting out on a path to do it again. I'd like to welcome Nat back to summarize what we've discussed.
Thank you, Jon, and thank you for all your patience today. It's been a very long presentation, so I appreciate your staying focused. You've heard a lot today from Paul about what 20 years of trust looks like in medical, from Mark about what conviction looks like in EV, and from Girish about what engineering excellence looks like in data centers, and from John Molloy about the operating model that holds all of it together, and of course, from Jon Boaden just now about the financial framework that turns all of this into shareholder value. Let me tell you what I see. I see a business that has been transformed, not through a single deal or a single decision, but through a decade of disciplined, consistent execution and hard work.
We took a business, as I said before, that was barely profitable, and we rebuilt it from the bottom up, customer by customer, factory by factory, hire by hire. Four years ago, we told you we would double this business, and we did a year early. Today, we are telling you humbly that we will do it again. $2 billion of revenue, 12% operating margins, returns of 20% on capital employed. Now, these are not aspirations, they are targets. Built the same way as the last ones from the factory floor up, challenged at every level, backed by the customer relationships, the operating model and the team you have met today. This industry is changing. Complexity is increasing. The products our customers build are becoming more sophisticated, more regulated, more interconnected, and as that happens, the role we play becomes more critical. We're not a component supplier.
We are a critical manufacturing partner designed into our customers' products, embedded in their supply chains, integral to their success. The opportunity ahead of us is substantial, and we have the strategy, the capability, and the people to capture it. Built for complexity, positioned for growth. Now, we will open up for questions. I'm going to chair the questions and answer section. I'm going to bring in the members of our team to support with specific examples as required. I would like, John with an H, and Jon to step up onto the podium and sit with me. Thank you again, everyone, for listening. It's been a very long one hour and 50 minutes, so I appreciate it. Right. Your hand was up first.
Oh, sorry. I'll go. It's a quick one. Henry Carver from Singer. Just interested in the sweet spot of responsiveness that you're in and you talked about, and just wondering how you sort of approach that as you scale up. Does it get more difficult? Or I didn't understand if that was something that you are confident that you can maintain as you grow, or if it's something that gets progressively more difficult as you grow. In the same sort of context, how do you bring that in with new acquisitions? How do you ensure that they are doing the same thing?
Well, I think, first of all, I might even bring in some of the team to talk about some kind of real examples of responsiveness if anyone wants to raise their hand. Of course, it gets harder, and we have to try and maintain the culture of being this more nimble sort of business which sort of, I like to say we are the smallest of the big guys, is the way I kind of, when I talk to customers, I always say that's the kind of the soundbite that I use. Starting with John, why don't you sort of give, not to sort of put you on the spot, but what are the examples of our kind of recent responsiveness?
I think it's about the people, which makes it. I don't think it actually does make it harder. I slightly disagree there maybe because it's maintaining the people, that's the hard bit. You see, most of the people here now, the COOs who help us manage the business, they're next to the customers, they're in region. It's about having people that care about those customers and create solutions for them, and it's just within the culture of the business now after 10 years, and we all operate in the same way. Examples of that are that every single one of the COOs that you see here are every week in with customers. They're very close to the customer. At the same time, they're all professional operations people.
Anything to do with laying out factories and operational sort of sequencing and things like that, they've been doing this most of their lives. I think it's about the challenge for us is as we grow bigger, is finding people within the existing business, which is our preferred route, or recruiting well from outside. That's the difficulty. It's getting people and then hopefully retaining them.
Could I take the second part of Henry's question about the acquisitions?
Yeah.
Look, I think it's a good question on acquisitions, and we tailor the integration that we do to every single acquisition. It's not a one size fits all, and we've always agreed that there's no point buying a business because it's really flexible to its customers, it's really entrepreneurial, and then sticking a load of red tape into that and bureaucracy and taking away what made that business so successful in the first place. In terms of maintaining that sweet spot, as you acquire businesses, it's understanding what makes that business good and then magnifying that within Volex and the access to our broader platform and our scale rather than detracting it. Actually see it as a positive. As we buy the right businesses with the right people in those businesses, you naturally find that that's additive to this idea of sitting in the sweet spot.
Vanessa Jeffriess from Jefferies. Obviously, you've reached your 2027 target a year early. I guess people might be inclined to now think that you'll do the same here. Maybe if you could just talk about the phasing over the next few years, especially given this year will be dealing with raw material headwinds and whatever else, and a lot of that growth is maybe coming from newer areas.
Jon, please.
Yeah, no, look, I'm happy to take that. Look, we've positioned this as a medium-term target, so it is across the medium term. I think you're right to highlight the fact that we achieved the last plan early, and that is because we've got a business which is very much firing on all cylinders. The thing that gives me a lot of confidence, gives us all confidence in the face of various challenges, turbulence, there's a lot going on in the world right now, is the fact that we've delivered over the last five years, on average 12% organic growth. We've done that through COVID, through tariffs, through all sorts of problems, wars happening. A big part of that is the diversification we have across the five end markets. As I said, this is not a single market bet.
We're not a management team who sort of looks at one golden child as the answer to all our problems. We've got five incredibly strong businesses within Volex that each have some incredible opportunities. There's some real opportunities there around the adjacencies that we talked about, some real opportunities with new customers, with existing customers. When you put all of that together, we feel that we've done a good job of navigating headwinds, and actually, we see some really good structural tailwinds over the medium term against this plan.
Interesting to see Complex Industrial Technology with still a healthy growth rate, but one of the lower growth rates, given what you've seen in data centers the last few years. Maybe, I guess that's because of lower visibility in that sector. You've talked about investing in capacity in response to key customer demand. How do you manage the risk against investing in that additional capacity with those key customers?
First of all, look, with data centers, trees don't grow to the sky. We've had extraordinary growth over the last few years, and we want to underpromise and overdeliver. I think we've deliberately sort of been ultra-conservative at this end of the market. We don't want this to be a data center story. There are so many other kind of interesting things about our business, which is one of the reasons we've brought you all here today to listen to us. I think what is so good, if you look, people say it's a complex business and it is, and it's difficult to manage as Dave said. What is so interesting about this business is the maneuverability inside the sites and the ability to reuse CapEx, the ability to sort of redeploy Komax machines to other customers.
Although we're investing a lot, this is CapEx that has an incredible amount of sort of maneuverability within it. A lot of the investment, for example, we made in cable extrusion when we were making a bet, for want of a better description. We don't make bets. The point is that we knew that if we got it wrong in EV, we could reuse that in other parts of the kind of power products division. I think that's what's kind of, again, I take my hat off, as I said earlier on, to John, because John is a wily businessman as well as being an operational expert. There's a lot of very clear decisions made. If you take, for example, automation in high speed, the customers ask us to put in automation in high speed.
That's a requirement for working with some of these category leaders. We will not put in that automation, we will not spend that money if we don't know that there is business coming down the pipe from these customers. Do you want to add anything to that?
There's nothing to add really. I suppose the only thing I'd talk about is people don't often recognize our R&D investment, which is very much driven by Hamsha, who's sat next to you. What we've done so well on R&D, and our R&D is really in EV products, and it's in high speed cables for data centers. What Hamsha's done so well and effectively is taking a limited pot of spend and then targeting it to exactly the right areas. We're not trying to do everything for all people. We're very concentrated about where we get the most bang for our buck. I think it's another reason why we invest modestly and sensibly, but it gives us really great returns.
Thank you.
Great. Thank you. It's Andrew Humphrey at Peel Hunt. I've got a couple. I want to come back to the chart that you presented on the sort of virtuous circle of complexity and getting embedded with customers. That strikes me as key to kind of understanding what drives the outperformance on growth. Where do you see most headroom for that to develop over the next several years, either in terms of customers or in terms of product groups? I guess a related question, you've talked about consolidating the manufacturing footprint, about growth being focused on the larger facilities that you've developed best practice in. Where do you think the future investment will be needed most to support that growth?
Do you want to talk about the virtuous circle, and then we can lead on to the. Did you understand the question?
Yes.
You were really asking him where do we see the growth using that, in which particular-
I don't see in one particular area, though. That's the thing. Every single one of our divisions follows the same model. We've got Girish and Mark, and Paul told you about the different sectors. Really, we find solutions for customers. We work with their engineering teams, and if you find a solution for them, that's really then you're in. Then you've just got to make sure that you can provide it in the right location that the customer wants. We're global, so we can make it anywhere they want it. Putting that together, we now find ourselves in quite a nice, unique position because we've got that put together. We have very, very good engineering teams that find solutions, and then we deliver that for the customer. If you look at the growth drivers, defense is an area that we're in that's driving.
We're in the AI side of the business, and that's driving EV. We're moving over into electrification and storage we've said about because that takes skills that we've got in EV. The grids in North America and around the world can't support the AI requirements, and so we're heavily engaged in businesses in energy now, using those same skills. We've been conservative with the AI side of the business. We all agreed that that's the way we should because it's less obvious about how long that will carry on going. We're there, developing state-of-the-art products for our customers. Off-road, there's a massive opportunity there for us because we have a good position in Europe, and then we're driving scale to North America. We talk about the scalable sites.
It's not that the other sites are not growing, it's just that it is easier to grow it through a larger site where you can afford to have better people and better machines and you can cover your CapEx across different things. The opportunity in North America is massive for off-road. You look at the consumer business. We're a global power cord supplier, but there's a harness with every one of those, and it's worth between five and 10 times what the power cords we already do. We are winning business monthly in that space.
Yeah.
To sum it up, this is how I think about it. Number one, our Batam site, we've expanded it, I think, five times in the last four years. It's on a run rate to do probably over $300 million of revenue next year. That business is in the sweet spot of the virtuous circle. We have got a tremendous amount of capability for consumer electrical, for industrial HVAC, for consumer HVAC. We are very, very cost competitive in Batam, for example, compared to Mexico. That's an example. In EV, we've nailed it. We're in 2/3 of the major EV manufacturers. We did that because of our relationship with this large company whose name we're not allowed to mention. We are producing for all of the major EVs. Now, we have just one business.
It's not a big piece of business, but Jessica Yu and I spent the best part of two years trying to break into the Chinese EV market with certain very large, well-known, extremely aggressive Chinese EV makers. We've just won our first piece of business. That's something we can say today. We just won a piece of business. It's a small piece of business, but we've won it. We're now going through the kind of sampling, the PPAPs and the sampling process. It's very, very exciting. Anyway, I can go on. It's the whole point about this CMD. We're definitely using that capability, and I think it's a great example of the fact that we've been able to, with this particular Chinese company, we were way too expensive at the beginning. They came back to us and said, "You use too much copper. You use too much PVC.
We don't want such a high-quality grid cord. We want something cheaper. We'll show you how to make it. We had workshops with them where they actually came in and showed us how to effectively make cheap knock-offs of our own products. I probably shouldn't say that. It's true. We were able to do it. You don't mind me saying that, do? We were able to do it and make very good margins out of it as well. That's kind of the example, I think, of what we're talking about.
Yeah. Andrew, just picking up on that last point around the centers of excellence. As John said when he was talking about it, we're not saying everything goes into a center of excellence. We don't end up going 23 to five sites. There are some sites, we both talked about Irvine Electronics. It does super specialist stuff into U.S. defense. That was the site that made the complex cable assembly that went into the space mission, so it's really niche stuff. Customers like it because it's in California. That's important to them for a variety of reasons, and we wouldn't look to move that. We would look to develop that where that is. If you like, it's differential investment. You've got the big investment going into the bigger sites because that's really what's going to scale the business.
We've got some really nice, repeatable, long-term business with customers that have been there for over a decade, will most likely be there for another decade in these specialist sites. There's nothing that would ever persuade us to disrupt that.
Many of those sites were, by the way that we acquired them, they were sort of retirement and things like that. All they needed was investment. They're very capable people. They just needed investment, and obviously we bring with that scalable systems that they get the benefit of. We're a bigger company. We have better qualified quality people that can go into the sites and guide them and mentor with them through that transition into being part of Volex. It really has just been an investment case with many of those.
Yeah. I keep picking sell-side analysts. No disrespect to sell side analysts, but is anyone from any sort of fund managers who want to ask? Sorry. Yep. Yeah.
Yes. It's Graham Ashby from Schroders. I'm just intrigued on the operating margin target. You're obviously going for 12%, but your acquisitions, you were saying minimum 15%. I'm just trying to understand sort of the difference in capabilities that the businesses you're acquiring compared with what you've got already.
Can I answer?
Yeah.
I think that on an underlying base, if you look at our individual, our 23 sites, you would be amazed at how profitable some of those sites are, first of all. It's not that we have a sort of big overhead on top, but it's just very interesting to see the kind of individual. I don't want to disclose because I don't care about what our customers are sort of maybe watching this. I think that what is important now, what we've learnt through the acquisition process, is there is no point buying businesses unless they are really, really accretive to our own operating margin. We haven't done a deal since 2023. We've looked at probably 30 or 40 businesses or so since then. We've come very, very close on a number of ones.
What's always stopped us at the kind of very last minute is that these are kind of standalone businesses which have got lower operating margins than what we do at the factory level ground. What we're really trying to do is to try and find stuff that is, I don't want to say it's better than what we do, but is on a par with what we do. That's how I think about it. Maybe it's too simplistic. Do you want to add something to that?
No, it's a good answer.
Yeah. Part of what it is is technology.
Yeah
That can later help us with margin improvement.
Yeah. Please.
Sorry. Pass it behind you.
Thank you. Hi. Is this on? Yeah. Hi. Matt Ford, Baillie Gifford. You mentioned there was the possibility of taking some share specifically within data center. When you're up against someone like Amphenol there, what specifically would lead a customer to say, "We're going to go with Volex. You're both good companies"? What specifically do you win on there?
Again, John can obviously answer that as well. Truly, a lot of the big guys don't like dealing with Amphenol because they are so big now and they are so aggressive, and the big guys don't like being pushed around by other big guys. That's the first thing. I hear that all the time when I talk to the big guys. I can't add anything to what Hamsha does with the data center customers except kind of go and see them and break bread with them. That's something you hear. They like our nimbleness. This responsiveness point is truly kind of critical. Secondly, we are cheaper than them. Sorry to be blunt about it, but we are definitely more cost-competitive than they are. Part of that is the Indonesian angle.
We're making these cables in Indonesia, and that has, for example, some of Amphenol's production is in, I think in Central Europe. I can't remember where exactly. It's definitely not in Indonesia. What else am I missing?
I think the main thing is agility. We're faster. In a situation where if you're building a similar product and you need to get your servers up and running, our lead times are much, much less.
I think you can talk a little bit about your rather clever activities last year, if you want, just as an example. I think it is a good example. Do you mind if we talk about that?
Go for it.
Yeah.
I can.
It's a very good example, right?
Obviously we know the customers, but in terms of we put in place inventory to allow us to be able to turn around even faster than what we normally do. We saw the curve coming up and we know that with the customers that we're working with, it comes down to who can get the product. They're desperate for the product, and we can get it quicker than anybody else, and we just did. We put inventories in place to make sure that we could be even quicker, and we benefited significantly from that last year.
Yeah.
It's about understanding the customer, understanding the competition, and filling the gap.
Yeah. We really got ahead of the problem. We anticipated it. We were under no risk because we obviously have supplier agreements, and they have to take our raw materials. We're not risking our balance sheet for doing it.
No.
John gets a bit upset because he suddenly sees. You have to do it, right?
It's watching the market. If you look, everybody saw the silicon situation. Lead times are going back out again, and obviously we keep very close to the market, so we're aware of all those things, and we act quickly. It's a phone call between myself to Nat or one of the COOs and get a blessing from Jon on the inventory, and off we go.
Yeah.
Tom Fraine from Shore Capital, if you don't mind going back to the sell side.
Sorry.
Could you cover the key risks that you see in the business? Obviously, the example many years ago of losing volumes in phone chargers-
Yeah
-that may be less relevant today given how much you've changed, increased complexity.
Yeah
Vertical integration. You've talked about the transformation overall of the business. What do you see as the key risks today, and how would you describe your customer retention and ability to win customers?
Look, our customer retention is really good. We do lose customers, but we lose very few customers. I think, obviously customer concentration is a risk. It's a risk with any business. I think the extraordinary difference with the last time around in 2000, when I got involved, when I came into the business, I bought my shares first in 2008, but had obviously no role, and the shares performed very well on the back of having the contract to make power cords for Apple. Volex designed the power cords. We had no vertical integration. They didn't make one penny from the Apple relationship over a decade. After they had designed the power cord, these beautiful halogen-free power cords, which cost $5 each, they then gave half the business to a competitor of ours, Longwell, which was vertically integrated, was making halogen-free power cords.
We did this whole thing. We made no money. I think the difference is we have nothing like the level of customer concentration that we had in the early part of the sort of 2010s. We do have a couple of big customers, and I think that's for sure something that it doesn't keep me up at night, but it certainly is something that I'm very aware of. I think that's the thing that I'm most concerned about. What else is there? That's really the only thing that kind of slightly worries me at the moment. I also think that there are... I had lunch with our main competitor last month, which is a company called BizLink. I have very good relations with them, so I had lunch with them. We were talking about customer concentration, and customer concentration is just normal in our industry.
In order to grow, you've got to find big customers. What we need to do and what we are doing, and which again is what I do, and I do it with Dave now, and I do it with the two of you, we look for other big customers because we want to grow, we want to get to our GBP 2 billion in revenue, and there are tremendous opportunities out there. I think that the idea that we should sort of go slow with our largest customers is obviously a nonsense. We've got to keep on with them, and we've got to find more of them.
Our biggest risk is what's the next tariff? It's not about making cables. It's about political risks around the world, and we're very good at transferring things very quickly, and we have factories there that as things change, we can pivot very quickly. We've proved that over and over again in the EV business. We've moved tens of millions out of China into Batam. We've moved things from Batam into China, different customers, different thing. We're moving a lot of business to Mexico. We're moving things from Turkey to Indonesia. We're just constantly pivoting for our customers. We just do a lot better business. I came into that business before, and this business would never have lost that contract. This business would've been vertically integrated, and we just.
Yeah
The business was nearly losing money. They didn't know what they were doing. That's the simple fact.
Sorry to jump in. The other thing is that the relationship before was extremely adversarial with the customers. We have no adversarial relationships with any customers. I can't think of any customer that we're not on very, very good terms with. It's like the example I gave with the Chinese EV. These are very, very collaborative relationships that we have. Again, I point to Dave. Dave taught me that. I've known Dave for... I can say Dave tried to buy Volex in 2019 or 2018 or 2019. He called me up and he said, "Would you sell?" I thought, "No, I need a job. I'm enjoying myself." John and I talked about it, and we said no, but what we learned about, we've discussed this industry at great length. We've discussed it every day, every week.
It's a very, very customer-centric business today, without big fights. We have disagreements, we have fallings out, we make up. I think this point is very, very important. Even with our big customers, we have incredibly good relationships with them. Touch wood. Yeah.
We develop solutions for them, so they need us.
Yeah.
We should get-
In the back there.
We should make sure we cover all of the south side.
Yes. I'm sorry. Yeah. I didn't mean to be rude.
Now the south side.
Okay.
Joel Spungen from Investec. I was just wondering, can you talk about the extent to which the 12% operating margin target is dependent on the revenue growth? Can you hit the 12% if you don't get to GBP 2 billion or vice versa? More broadly, is the major impediment to Volex having a margin consistent with, say, did I mention at ECI, a matter of scale?
We could talk for a long time about that. I'll let Jon talk.
Look, I talked about there's four building blocks to the progression to 12%. They're not all exactly the same, but they're relatively balanced between the four different elements. Operating leverage is a part of that, but equally so is deploying automation, so is site consolidation, so is a number of other things, moving up the value chain by increased level of complexity. The operating leverage definitely helps. It helps in all businesses, as you know. It's not the only reason that we progress. It's part of the recipe, but it's not the only ingredient.
Sorry, Jon, is your expectation that the margin improvement should be delivered relatively progressively over the next few years?
It's slightly back-end loaded just because of the fact that if you think about the benefit you get from site consolidation, you often have a cost to begin with. There's investment going into those five super sites with centers of excellence, however you want to think about them. When you initially do that, you have the cost, you have the depreciation, you perhaps have rent to pay, you have more people. Then as you start to fill those sites, they become more profitable. It's not all at the back end, but there is a back-end element to it.
Look, the other thing is the relationship with our supply base. It's obvious, but the bigger we get, the more powerful we become, the better deals that we are able to negotiate with our suppliers. One of the things, for example, that I've been doing over the last few months is going around meeting the big guys. I'm not going to say who or when or where, but that is something that we have been focused on. Again, I think I can say Dave has been incredibly helpful in that regard. They want to do business with us. They can see our growth. They can see that they can make money with us. If you break down Volex, we weren't in the five parts. We weren't in the Off-Highway business three years ago. We had barely no Off-Highway.
We weren't making consumer electrical appliances harnesses five years ago. We didn't get as good a pricing as ECI. As we get bigger, it stands to reason that we have a right to improve our connector pricing. That's a significant opportunity that we see and something that we're very focused on at the moment. Obviously, we don't take all of that. We pass some of that on to our customers. I think it's important to be, as I said already, to be customer-centric. I think that one of the skills in this business is not overcharging the customer. If you start to really overcharge the customer, the customer gets angry. The customer looks around. The customer's willing to move. We've won a lot of business from competitors through the organic growth that you've seen already.
We've won business from competitors, and we've done it in a measured way. What we don't then do is the moment we've won it, jack the prices up. It's a very, very customer-centric approach.
Thanks.
Thank you. Rob Byde from Zeus Capital. Just going back to acquisitions and the pipeline, and perhaps a bit more strategically. Where are the gaps in the map, perhaps in terms of verticals or geographies or capabilities? Going a bit beyond immediate acquisition criteria. Thank you.
Well, I don't know if there are particular gaps, but equally, there's some very good quality businesses out there. Stuff that we've been looking at recently has been in Europe. It's been in North America. I wouldn't say that there's a deficiency that we're looking to fill, I think, but there's always, like anything, there's opportunities to enhance the overall operations. We're very attracted to businesses that have deep, defensible relationships with their customers like we have, because although it's brilliant that we've got such sticky business and we don't lose customers, those relationships take a very long time to build up.
If you can buy a business that is perhaps maxed out where they can get to with a particular customer, but we can take that to the next level through putting it onto the Volex platform, through some of the things Nat was talking about, supply chain scale, for example, more efficient production. That's the type of thing that we're interested in. That's the lens that we apply when we're assessing acquisitions.
That sounds like sorry.
Sorry.
Thank you. Camilla Ayling from Legal & General. I thought the story was really clear today about the improving mix, sorry. Increasing complexity, longer duration of contracts with clients. I was just a little bit surprised to see that you haven't forecast to grow ahead of the market for Medical and CIT. Just a little bit more clarity on that would be really good.
Yeah. No, of course. I think, first of all, the market growth in Medical is 6%, and 6% growth rate is pretty decent. Similarly, in CIT, it's 5%. We said we'd grow in line with that. As we've said, look, we're naturally conservative people, and we've set these plans out over the medium term. If you look at what we did last time, we beat the plan. We want to set up something that's ambitious but is also deliverable. I think there's some huge opportunities in Medical, in Complex Industrial Technology, but we don't take any of that for granted. We've put together a plan. It's bottom up. It's where we've got visibility around customers, around what we can deliver to create something that when we commit to it, is deliverable.
Obviously we commit to all of you in this room, and then we go away and talk as a team and work out how we're going to deliver even better than that.
Hello. We've got one from the webcast, from J.O. Hambro. In your M&A program, how does the increase in cost of debt and changes to private equity market impact the valuations sellers are willing to accept?
I can answer that. There's no doubt that it's become more difficult to find acquisitions. That's why we haven't done one since September 2023. I think I talked about margin, but we're very valuation driven. Look, we can't talk about this. I always say this, but it's the truth. We have a number of acquisitions that I think will fit the kind of criteria where we won't be able to kind of bump up against PE. I often joke, and it's the truth, we're an expert in retirement sales. I personally spend a lot of time with the owners of businesses, sometimes for years and years. Some people I've been talking to for five, six, seven years, and something always sort of pops out of the woodwork. We don't compete in auctions. We're uncompetitive.
We don't like being forced to sort of blind bid, and that's our strategy. We haven't done a deal since September 2023, and part of that as well is the organic growth opportunities that we see. We're not kind of desperate to do deals, although, does John's GBP 300 million acquisitions target worry me a little bit? Yeah. It does. Yeah.
We have one more, which is, does Volex have any business exposure, either now or in the future, to the rapidly growing robotics market, either through existing or new customers?
Well, we absolutely do, actually. Hamsha, I don't think you're going to get away with not saying anything. Without mentioning names, why don't you talk about what you've been doing in robotics?
It's early involvement. Pretty much practically all businesses that we have started from ground zero is early involvement. Fundamentally, the content is the same. What's challenging is it's still an evolving technology. There's one particular customer who goes unnamed. They're in their third generation in six months. The content is changing rapidly. When the content changes, we just have to adapt. Risk is unknown. We're going to have to continue to keep evolving with them. There's lots of complex problems to solve because the articulation arms cannot necessarily coordinate the speed at which you're sending a signal. Power lifting, sitting down, falling down, there's so many challenges. We are actually in sync with them. We get an opportunity to really work side by side with them. I wouldn't say there's a clear roadmap for it. It is still evolving.
Yeah. Also, we have won some business, and it has potential to be quite significant. Yeah.
We're dealing with.
More than one player in that particular bucket.
Yeah.
Brilliant. Thank you. I'll pass back for some closing remarks.
Any more questions? No. Okay. Well, look, I'm going to do my closing remarks, I think, from here. This is supposed to be a celebration, as I said. It's been important for all of you to see the people who actually run this business, the senior people who run this business. John and Jon and I, all of you, I've worked with you for, I think, Mark, you're the youngest of the group. You've been with us now for five years.
I don't remember age.
Yes. I should say as well, Girish has been at Volex for 16 years. He was one of the first people I met in 2015 when I came to Singapore. Jessica and John have worked together before at TT. There's a lot of TT alumni here, which you can make your own judgment about that. This is a business that we're all very committed to. We're all big shareholders in it, no exceptions. We're passionate about the business. We've been reluctant to make the move up to the FTSE 250. Because we're cautious people, we were worried that it might have a negative effect on our share price. We now want to go up to the next level and try and become a company that can sit at the top table with the likes of Amphenol and Molex.
That will be many years after I have left the building, but we're on the right track to do that. We're grateful for the support of the investors and the other stakeholders in the business who may be watching us on the webcast. Thank you all very much for this very long presentation, and we hope to see you. You'll hang around afterwards and talk to us and mingle with us, see the products, learn more about the business. Thank you.