Well, welcome to The Earnings Call of GUD's Results for the six months ended, 31st December 2022. I'm Graeme Whickman, GUD CEO and Managing Director, and I'm here with Martin Fraser, the company's Chief Financial Officer. As a matter of housekeeping, we'll have time at the end of the call for questions and discussion, please hold your questions until then. As per normal recording of this call, along with the presentation material, it will be available later on today, later today on GUD's website. We'll start the call by running through our key messages and financial overview, followed by commentary on our segments of Automotive, APG, and Water Business.
I'll then hand back over to Martin to cover the financial results in more detail, and then we'll conclude with a trading update and outlook for FY 2023 and beyond before the Q&A. Let's turn to slide three. We experienced a strong user and demand through H1, reflecting the resilience of the auto aftermarket. Obviously supported by our strong brands and the largely non-discretionary nature of our revenue profile. I'll talk about that a little later on. Our APG business performed in line with expectations, with improvement in Q1 over Q4 and actually Q2 over Q1. This was expected and is helped by the improving range of supply.
There are still massive back orders in the system, with demand not being satiated by supply, and that's leading to historic backorder levels. Now, we were very happy to keep margins stable, particularly in core Automotive, an accomplishment given so many moving pieces. Overall, our performance across all segments was in line with our expectations. In particular, APG's first and second half SKUs are in line with what we had previously communicated. Finally, I'd like to reaffirm what we communicated at our recent AGM and recent investor conferences that our leverage ratio target of circa 2 x by June 2023 remains. I'll ask Martin to cover that in the next slide in terms of the financial overview. Martin.
Thank you, Graeme, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's indeed a pleasure to engage with you this morning. Let's move on to page four, where I'll address the overview of the half's financial performance, where you can see the group delivered revenue growth of 56% over the PCP, with the majority of the increases coming from acquisitions, namely additional five months from Vision X and a full six months from APG. We'll get into that a little bit more when we get to the segment slides. The additional revenue pulled through to an EBIT uplift of 52%. While that growth lags the revenue growth, which at first pass might be puzzling as the organic Automotive margins remained robust, it reflects the fact that APG's underlying profitability ratio is below our Automotive business and therefore sees a different weighted margin outcome.
We also continue to reinvest to support the expanded size of the group as well as midterm growth initiatives. Cash conversion 75% was achieved in the half. A little behind our internal targets. We'll speak to that in greater detail later. The net debt to underlying EBITDA of 2.5 x is in line with expectations in our internal targets. We'll also speak to that in further depth. The underlying EPSA is up 30%, while our dividend is in line with the prior comparable period, given our flagged desire to reduce leverage following the APG acquisition.
Finally, I wanna highlight that our core Automotive businesses, being those we've been holding for quite some time, being Ryco, IMG, AA Gaskets, DBA, Wesfil, BWI, and Griffiths Equipment, quite a mouthful, continue to experience organic EBITDA growth, while our acquired Automotive businesses have seen a step up in EBITA, driven by the additional five months of Vision X. Back to you, Graeme.
Well, thanks, Martin. Taking a closer look on slide six at our Automotive ex- APG segment results. It shows the revenue was up just under 18%, reaching just over AUD 320 million, which is a record for GUD. Net of acquisitions, the organic revenue rose just a shed under 10%, which was an excellent outcome. Really quite pleased with that. Auto underlying EBIT was a record for GUD, whether you look at it total or just core Automotive levels. The growth came from across the respective business units. Again, we saw good contributions from newer channels and customers. The underlying EBIT margin dropped slightly, which was expected.
The important bellwether of what we have recently retitled to core Automotive, you'll see the footnote, and you just heard Martin mention how to recognize those apples to apples comps over time. That was a decent story. Essentially stable, with a slight drop of about 20 basis points in what was a challenging macro picture. We were able to price appropriately, this was able to overcome the numerous imported and domestic inflation costs. We are gonna have to balance other factors like FX in H2 an additional modest pricing will be in place to manage that margin and protect that margin. In the half, we experienced quite a change in the velocity of from factory floor to our warehouse inventory.
The velocity of that movement certainly quickened as some of the supply chain starts to normalize. Which along with the organic sales growth impacts, meant we increased our net working capital by about AUD 19 million all up versus FY 2022. I'll talk to our clear targets and inventory a little later on. Turning to slide seven. The size of the prize continues to be strong. The car park continues to steadily grow. It sits at just a smidgen under 19.5 million units in the car park, up 1.5%. That type of growth is forecast to continue. At the same time, we're seeing an aging of the car park and an acceleration, frankly. It's now actually just over 11 years old, naturally positive, clearly for our wear, tear, and replacement businesses.
On slide 8, a few more important car park facts. As that car park is growing, so does the complexity. I've said before, we love car park complexity. In fact, the segmentation conditions, the shift in the favor of SUV and pickups, again, very favorable for us. Now, this car park complexity is supported by our products and services, which we estimate circa about 80% of all that revenue is nondiscretionary products and services in nature. We've stated that for the first time in the full year 2022 results. Finally, an important reminder of our combined Automotive and APG revenue for FY 2022, just under 70% was non-ICE. That's only benefiting from the seven months of the new acquisitions, which are heavily non-ICE. Our trajectory on the non-ICE continues to meet our expectations. We're quite pleased with that.
On slide nine, we call out a new member of the Automotive segment. You've been introduced to Vision X before, but I wanted to give you a bit of a feel from a snapshot. We're really pleased with Vision X's performance in the half. A solid result that was, you know, able to keep margins stable in some might say, a very challenging U.S. macro environment. Of course, the beauty of Vision X is the balance of customer channels ranging from, you know, Automotive through to mining and to lighting. We were really excited at the introduction of the new products at SEMA and AAPEX to sort of the two seminal global shows for aftermarket. Those products were launched under the Vision X brand in November.
We started to deliver against the product synergy work, as an example in warning lights. We've also picked up a really nice global aftermarket brand, a program through Vision X. The manufacturing operations for Vision X is going really well. Good utilization. We're actively working through insourcing of select existing BWI products to start to get the vertical integration benefits that we'd eyed as the purchase was being considered. The last thing, as I talk about the U.S., was our launch of those two shows, the ones I just explained, SEMA and AAPEX, of the BWI USA entity, with the two brands of Ultima and Projecta. This is separate from Vision X. They're completely separate. This is a medium-term play and will build over time.
It's not a bet your farm approach, more organic in nature. George, who runs this part of the business, was very encouraged with the feedback and specifically the follow-up with the tier one and two customers from U.S., Mexico and Canada. More to see there, but I'm feeling quite energized by that. If I now move to APG, we'll put on slide 11, put very plainly, put very simply, APG's result was dead in line with our expectations at AUD 26.5 million pre overhead charges. As I said, I mentioned a little earlier, APG benefited from the prior half in this new half with the Ranger starting to improve in terms of volume terms.
Margin was stable, again, with some cost and post rolling through from the prior half being dealt with the pricing that we put in the early part of the half, which has held nicely, and that was expected also. We're still experiencing though some pretty high inefficiencies, particularly in our Australian manufacturing operation. Now, we expect that to improve over time as the labor market and specifically ongoing COVID impacts perhaps have a lesser impact. Clearly, our vehicle supply is still really constrained, and I'm gonna speak to that in a second. But what we do know well is that our OEM customers specifically, and then if you look at dealer groups, and even as recently as yesterday, the lease companies like SG Fleet, they're all reporting massive backlogs of orders and demand is still building.
I mentioned vehicle supply a second ago, on slide 12, you can see the impact on wait times. The graph shows the volatility experienced in the average wait times. We showed this graph once before, and we just updated it. You can see a massive increase through the year, and it's continued to build through H1. Of course, the million-dollar question is: When do supply constraints and specifically semiconductor shortages start to abate? You can see a selection of industry commentators are sort of opining on the issue. The prevailing sense from them seems to suggest relief through FY 2024 onwards. The constraints are evidenced on the next slide, where we show you the calendar year industry outcomes. We saw a modest improvement in the overall industry in CY 2022 of 3%.
Pickups, slightly lower growth. What we don't show you here, but there were some pretty wild swings from month to month, essentially seesawing as units arrive in the country. Another example of what's happening in terms of a supply side driven industry. The harsh reality was the industry size was well off its peak and in fact over 6.5% off the pre-COVID five-year run rate. You can also see, we're introducing some more information here about APG's top 20 models, and that's by volume. They grew by 4.7%, but I'd suggest you study slide 35 in the appendix when you have a bit more time to get a granularity around the ups and downs of that top 20 to gain just that little bit more insight.
To help unpack one more level down, we should go to slide 14. Where we show the comps versus prior half. We're showing comps prior half, and we're showing comps Q- over- Q here. We sort of switch gears here back into the financial year, fiscal year approach. You can see the top 20 APG volume was down versus the prior half by 9%. Pickups were also flat, which indicates to you, I suggest, the impact of the Ranger was that's starting to come through. Interestingly, this was further amplified when you look at the Q2 over Q1 slice, where pickups were down 3%, but APG top 20 started to improve.
Ultimately, the story here is playing out largely as we expected, with a result improvement in the APG EBITDA half-over-half, still with a constrained base though. On pages 15-16, you'll see some further snapshots on the APG business performance. The team there won more new business since January and since acquisition, since June. Since the acquisition, over 86 new business wins, of which nearly 80% is incremental new revenue. Every time I update this data, it really is encouraging to see just how much this team knows how to win. The core towing part of the business has benefited in Q2 from the recently announced gain of the frontline competitor business as new orders started to actually arrive in Q2.
The functional accessory wins have been noteworthy with now Isuzu, Toyota and Hyundai delivering some important new functional accessory wins that can really introduce APG's functional accessory expertise and products for the first time to these OEMs. Of course, the higher share of wallet started to come through as the Ranger of volumes improved. I will tell you, in my view, there's still more to come in terms of that with models like the Ranger Sport and XLT will increase, I suspect. I think this trend certainly will continue into H2 and beyond. Across on slide 16, we also break out the trailering and the cargo management categories. Trailering primarily through the CruiseMaster business had a record result and was in line with our expectations.
The strategy we started to deploy with Thai manufacturing assisting with capacity bottlenecks and the careful conquesting of new caravan customers starting to pay off. The Rola brands, which is the cargo management, well, their sales, while off a low base, really delivered excellent growth. I think bodes well over the medium term as we start to now invest more PD energy into the product offering. I think that's important to note. Before I hand over back to Martin to cover off the financials in a little bit more detail, let me just advance to slide 19 to quickly cover off Davey. As mentioned earlier, Davey's underlying EBITDA was up over 30% from prior year.
The overall revenue was slightly down, but the ANZ domestic revenue grew strongly, and didn't reflect yet, in fact, the normal surge in fire sales. That should be a tonic that comes through. Export sales were down significantly, which was a reflection of destocking, specifically in Europe, as our distributors were leaning out inventory due to soft demand relative to the pretty volatile and uncertain macro environment. We do expect demand to improve as those inventories start to normalize. As the EBIT improved, so did the margin, assisted by pricing put into the market in H1, along with some tight cost control. The slightly softer overall sales outcome meant we had a bit of an elevated net working capital. We'd expect this to resolve as that export demand normalizes.
Okay, well, let's cover off the key financial information. Martin, over to you.
Thanks, Graeme, I'll start on page 21. I previously talked about revenue, I'm not gonna labor that any further. At the EBITDA and underlying EBITDA and EBITA lines, you see the growth lagging a little bit, the revenue growth, again, because of the mix influence of APG that I spoke to. I'm gonna focus my comments below the underlying EBITDA for the moment. Firstly, we see a step-up in amortization, which is really driven by the acquisitions of Vision X and APG. The next one along there is the acquisition inventory step-up. This was a non-cash item. When you go through the purchase price allocation, you need to do that. We saw some of that in FY 2022, this is the balance of the inventory step up for APG. We're now done on inventory step ups from acquisitions.
We won't see that in the second half. Want to be really clear with you on that. Lower down, we see the significant items, and they're outlined on page 22. On that page, they're pretty self-evident, so I'm not going to speak to that one in chapter and verse. We do see the net finance expense going up, and that's really a result of the acquisitions and the full six months of those. It speaks to well. The tax line managed well, well below the 30%. It starts to see the influence of building a broader portfolio in the U.S., where we have tax rate closer to 21, for example, and Thailand with a lower tax rate. That all brings you down to that statutory NPAT position.
Then we add back, for the benefit of the readers, the back to the underlying NPATA. As I quoted before, approaching 60%, and so we're quietly comfortable with that outcome and that we're getting the leverage at the NPATA level from the sales growth. Finally, the bottom of the table, just for those analysts that wanna run the numbers, we split out that amortization between the acquired businesses and those we've had in previous years. Moving forward, as I said, I'm not gonna labor on page 22, and I'll take us to page 23, where we talk to net working capital. Here we've provided some additional analysis to really avoid the distortion of acquisitions and avoid you having to do that math. It's all there.
We had really several moving parts in net working capital in the first half, excluding acquisitions. First of all, excluding those acquisitions, we saw inventory go up AUD 17 million. While that might seem alarming at first pass, I just wanna highlight that AUD 11 million of that was the impact from higher inputs from our suppliers of finished goods or raw materials for those that we make. As Graeme talked to, we have addressed those with things like price rises, but there's no avoiding that as you sell three-year-old stock and replace it. That leaves a relatively, you know, slim amount for organic growth and the product range expansion. Very happy with how that went overall. The balance was, sorry, moving on.
Now, what we did see in inventory was an acceleration of some of our customers delivering against us. You know, through the COVID period, the last thing you wanted to do is put an order on that said ship after November 31st, because when all the factories were overloaded, they would take that to mean I'm not even going to production schedule until that date, and you'd be caught short of stock. As we saw some of the supply chains unwind, and also Europe slow up, we saw some of our contract suppliers delivering ahead of what we'd assumed would be the time that inventory turned up in Australia. Some of that organic growth increase reflected that.
What it did mean is we had to pay our creditors early, and you really see a reduced creditor leverage compared to the usual December levels. You know, we're confident that the inventory, you know, the higher inventory we've taken will sell through. When you back out the step up because the supplier increases, you can already see quite a bit of that has already been done. You know, there's no stepping away from that lower creditor position, but we're confident that that will return. Just stepping on from that at the moment, we are resetting, in the process of resetting our safety stock levels and hence our reorder points and reorder quantities in response to the change in the logistics around supply capacity being far improved. We moved from a position of suppliers, lacking capacity now having capacity.
We've got port time, clearance times back to pre-COVID levels and freight and reliability and so forth are sailing through. We've reset, and we're in a good position for the second half.
Yeah, I think that's a good point, Martin. I mean, we have said now for a period of time that we'll watch very carefully how the supply chain continues to improve. I think we're at a point where we've got a higher level of confidence to do what we were suggesting in perhaps prior halves. So, you know, the full court press that you speak of in terms of inventory is now, I think, upon us, given the confidence level we do have in the supply chain. Sorry to butt in there, Martin.
Yeah, that's fine. That takes us onto slide 24 on cash conversion, where we can see cash conversion is 76% for the half. That's a little bit below what we were shooting for internally, driven by those inventory and payable variables noted earlier. Moving on to the balance sheet on slide 25. We can see both gross cash and debt levels held at the half year reflecting the Vision X and APG acquisitions. Also, the gross cash position reflected the fact that we were preparing to pay the vendors deferred payment on Vision X, which occurred in January. The net debt level represents 2.5 x lease adjusted underlying EBITDA, which is also within what we were trying to achieve in the half. That slide also outlines some of our other key banking covenants.
We retain healthy headroom against all our banking covenant ratios and have approximately AUD 135 million unused borrowing facility headroom and sufficient covenant borrowing limits to support that, although we don't anticipate drawing down that level of debt. I just want to be very clear on that. Reducing net debt to circa 2x underlying EBITDA remains a priority for the wider management team. The improved supply and logistic conditions mentioned earlier and the resets I mentioned earlier will drive a significant reduction in inventory and net working capital in the second half of the year. I'll now take you to slide 26, where we'll speak to the debt profile. To the right of this slide, we've mapped out the debt maturity profile of the drawn facilities, which has a mixture of tenants.
All the Projecta debt, which is in green, is both fully drawn and also fixed in duration and interest rate, representing 49% of our current gross debt. We have also 17% supported by interest swaps, and the remaining 34% drawn facilities involves floating interest rates. Our current all-in funding cost is approximately 4.5%. We also note we've not renewed an AUD 15 million short-term facility in January 2023, as we no longer need those facilities. That will allow us to reduce our unused line fees. You'll also see we've got AUD 127 million of debt in the 2024 bucket. That's due for renewal in January 2024.
Once we've finished the roadshow, we'll commence the renegotiation of those facilities, ideally with our current banks, although we've also received quite some interest from other financial institutions. I'll now hand you back to Graeme to finish with both the trading update and the outlook on pages 28 and 29.
Thanks, Martin. Well, we've split the trading update into three segments on slide 28. APG's January sales were strong relative to prior year, and February started well. In summary, tracking in line with our expectations. The Q3 OEM order book looks to be supportive of our plan, we think the Q2 trends will continue to be positive in terms of vehicle mix. We expected to see continued good demand from CruiseMaster customers, that's transpired through the first six weeks of the year, we're happy with the approach we're taking with utilizing the high volume Thai plant to support that. Turning to our core Automotive, sales in January were up versus prior, despite some resellers replenishing inventory at a slower rate.
The sales pace picked up in late January and certainly into February, as we can see, a very positive two-week plus booking level at the independent workshops. We're always looking at that as a barometer. As mentioned, we'll be implementing some modest price increases in Q4 to manage our margins as some of the things like FX roll through. Finally, Davey Jan sales were up versus prior, with ANZ continuing its pace from H1. We'll, we'll finish on the FY23 outlook, starting with APG, on slide 29. We remain very positive in APG's ability to deliver their business case targets as OEM supply normalizes and it gets back to its sort of historic levels. We know order backlogs are at record levels.
We expect ongoing favorable mix, and we regularly see the opportunity to capture market share as competitors struggle. We do expect APG to deliver circa 55% of the FY 2023 underlying EBITA in H2, and this is completely in line with what we communicated previously on a number of occasions. Automotive, ex-APG, should benefit from the resilience of the car park and its heightened aging, and therefore H2 should be robust. We do, however, have some growth investment planned in H2 to support the steady offshore opportunities. Across the group, we'll be keeping the same margin discipline you've seen over the last 3 - 4 years. Finally, I'd like to sort of finish by restating the leverage target of circa 2x by June 2023, which we communicated again at our AGM.
As part of this incoming half, we do expect to reduce inventory with specific targets for the first time that you'll note in the deck since COVID has struck with those comments I said earlier on around the supply chain having more stability. Okay. Well, that concludes the presentation of the results. I'll now hand you over to the moderator, who will coordinate any questions you may have.
All right. Thank you, Graeme. Folks, just a few pointers to remind you about the Q&A session. If you could use the Raise Hand icon in Zoom, please, to let me know that you'd like to ask a question. If you can't see it may be because you've got Zoom in full screen mode, so just wiggle your mouse and you should get it. Alternatively, depending on your version of Zoom, you may need to click the Reactions button. From that you'll see the Raise Hand icon. Finally, I notice we have a couple of callers on the phone. For you, caller, if you just press star nine on your phone, that will raise your hand to me, and then star six when I ask you to unmute and speak.
All right, well, with that housekeeping underway, we'll take our first question, which comes from Russell Gill of JP Morgan. Russell, please unmute yourself and go ahead. I think he just clicked himself out of the call or something. Never mind, he'll come back, I'm sure. Okay, let's go to James [Fiori]. James, unmute yourself and go ahead. You there, James? One second. Okay, there you go, James. Go ahead now. Just unmute yourself.
Okay. How's that? Is that better?
Yeah. All good. Thank you.
Great. Thanks. Morning, Martin. Graeme, thanks for your time. Can I start by asking about the margins in the core Automotive business? Broadly speaking, pretty stable there, but just looking sequentially, 24.9% first half 2022, up a bit, 25.1% second half 2022, and then a tick down a little bit in this first half. Again, broadly stable, but just directionally going down a bit. When we look ahead now, we've got FX on one hand, it's probably a headwind, but I'm just wondering on the other side of the ledger, to what extent raw materials and maybe freight, are providing a bit of a tailwind. If you can just maybe add a bit of color around that, on second half 2023 margins for core Automotive, please.
Sure. Thanks for your question, James. Look, we were down 20 basis points. I think I've said previously that we would be up and down. As long as we're in the range of 24%-25%, that's what success looks like. I would actually say broadly stable. I'm actually pretty happy with that margin outcome because there's a lot of stuff moving around in that first half carrying in from the second half of the prior year. I've mentioned that we have already communicated we'll be taking some what I call modest pricing in the second half that's already in play. I expect that to stick.
That's part and parcel, of trying to balance, like we have over the last 4.5 years I've been here, balance the margin in a successful manner. FX, does move around a little bit for us. you know, we have a certain, %, hedged, and that rolls off, so we're looking at the spot and, watching it carefully. Although I'd suggest that Martin's done a very nice job of, working with the FX, challenges in the last 2-3 years. I think we'll work through that, but we do have to accommodate that, James. we will expect to see some moderation, in certain cost inputs, but they're not necessarily all working in tandem to suddenly become all a tailwind.
We still have some imposts that roll through domestically as well. It's a bit of a mixed bag. As I said earlier on, I think we proved ourselves to be very adept at managing margins, all through this very volatile period. I don't see that changing at all.
Yep. That's very helpful. Thank you, Graeme. Second question's around the export opportunity that you're sort of leveraging off Vision X and into Brown & Watson in particular, but maybe thinking more broadly into some of the four-wheel drive products and brands as well. You've mentioned SEMA a few times. For those that are less patient amongst us, can you sort of talk about some timeframes and quantums? I can see the opportunities there, and you're clearly enthused about it, but maybe how it translates to sales outcomes and earnings, et cetera.
Sure. Well, look, firstly, I think it sounds like we're more patient than perhaps some of the audience is in terms of what our expectations and aspirations are. I said right from the get-go that we weren't gonna bet the farm on this, that we were gonna slowly and steadily work towards an offshore revenue that would exceed 15%. That was one of the targets we set there. I've actually got a stronger view in the back of my mind. In terms of timeframe, I'm actually not willing to put a target on either Martin or myself's back. We have only just launched those brands. We've only just, in November, set up the entity. We've taken on some pretty capable employees there.
There's OpEx costs rolling through the P&L at the moment in support of that, we're burning a little bit there, not crazily. We will only just, as an example, in February, start line reviews with some potential customers. Look, I think it's gonna take some time, James. Consequently, we're trying to find the right balance of investment, including net working capital. There's sort of circa AUD 5 million-AUD 6 million in net working capital tied up in this current fiscal year budget to support the start of that. You know, if I were to suggest a timeframe, we're probably talking 2-3 years here. I think we'll see some small wins to start with, as we build that up, it'll turn into something just that little bit more meaningful.
What we're not gonna do is we're not gonna sort of thrust forward so aggressively that it sort of distracts us as well. That's separate, though, to Vision X. I'm talking about greenfielding BWI, the Projecta brands, the Ultima brand new in the U.S. If I think about Vision X, that's a different tempo. That's a different clock speed. We're expecting growth. You've seen in the past, and we've spoken about in the past, the type of earn out ranges of 10%-25% CAGRs, and we fully expect to be able to quite happily pay out the top end of that earn out over that three-year period. I think that probably gives you some level of insight as to what we expect out of the Vision X capability in the U.S.
The reason I say that they're two different customers, Vision X is serving a customer cohort that's very much specialized, engineered, whereas the Ultima and the Projecta side where we're aiming for is a more broader reseller that we are very familiar with in the Australian context, but in an American opportunity. In a roundabout way, I've tried to deflect part of your question, James, and give you a bit more detail on the other part of your question.
No, that's very helpful. Thank you, Graeme. This last one, and a quick one really. With AutoPacific Group, historically, I think it's been a business that has probably had a little bit more seasonality skewed to the December half. With respect to your FY 2023 guidance, you've reiterated that skew to the June half. Can you just tell us what the maybe the two or three key assumptions are that are driving that guidance around the skew?
I mean, I think the typical historic skew for APG is almost irrelevant at the moment because of the nature of the industry and the constraints that are being applied to it. As I mentioned a little earlier on, the volatility as an example of, say, pickups, month to month through the course of the year have been up, you know, up 15% one month, down 6% the next. That just simply is a representation of the vehicles arriving into the market and being sold. If I step into that, I think that's why I say the historic skew is not necessarily relevant as it stands today.
The assumptions in the back end of the year, so the second half, are built on a similar sort of constrained volume. Hard for us to forecast with exact science, but we are seeing some of the APG top 20 units start to arrive and earn a little bit more volume, and I called out Ranger as an example. The Ranger, as an example, in calendar year 2022 was down 6% for the full year. If you look at the half-over-halves and more specifically the quarter-over-quarter, and you can see that in the slide 35, I think is in the deck, you can start to see that the Ranger's starting to come in. That's one of the tailwinds, certainly, that will come through.
I think we'll see a little less volatility, which means that our inefficiencies, whilst pretty hard at the moment, they'll abate a tiny bit, but there's more to come there. It's really around stabilization of what is constrained volume and more specifically some of the top 20 units coming in with a bit more fury in terms of their volume through the second half.
That's great. Very helpful. Thanks, Graeme.
Okay. Our next question, gentlemen. Just on the point there, as you'll notice if you're asking questions that at the conclusion of your question with the guys, I will lower your hand, if another question occurs to you, please raise your hand again, and you'll rejoin the queue. Speaking of the queue, next up is Shane Bannan from PAC Partners. Shane, if you could unmute yourself and go ahead, please.
Thanks, Ben. Two quick things. One, Martin, if I could ask you, that AUD 3.5 Million inventory adjustment, presumably that's just effectively a capital adjustment against what you paid for the business in the first instance. I'm also assuming, therefore, given its nature, it doesn't attract any sort of tax relief.
Yeah. Thank you, Shane. There is no additional AUD 3.5 million paid to the vendor. I just want to be absolutely clear. Secondly, when you do the purchase price adjustment from an accounting perspective, you have to work back from the sell price back to what is a theoretical inventory carrying by value. If that's higher than the book value, you get that step up, you know, accordingly. You can get the tax relief is possible on that because you're following those principles. It's not like we're calling out a tax difference of that not being tax deductible. Again, a non-cash, driven by accounting standards. We can use that for tax, and we've used it for tax.
It's really just an internal adjustment, in which case there's no money that's going outside the group and so forth.
That's absolutely spot on, Shane.
Right. Thank you. Could I just ask you to chance your arm a little bit? I mean, from what I could see, I mean, you really got two forces going forward. This, well, for the rump of the group or the traditional part of the group, it's reasonably economically resilient, I would have thought, just by virtue of the nature of the market you service in. The more recent acquisitions seem to be riding two waves. One is just the new vehicle supply coming in. Countering that is just the economic environment we look to be moving into globally, really, over the next couple of years. Could I just understand through your eyes how you see those forces playing out across the business?
Yeah, sure. Well, I'll start with the first part. Yes, the aftermarket we serve, the traditional part of our business, we've always said is, and I'll use the term very specifically, relatively recession-proof because I'm not sure there's anything other than death and taxes that's recession-proof. That hypothesis still stands. Even if I cast my mind back to the GFC type events, not that I was in this market, I was in some other markets in North America, we saw the parts and accessories element of our business pretty strong. There's some good McKinsey research out there that actually benchmark the relative performance at the time.
What you'll also find, in a really extreme or severe scenario where, you know, we're in a, in the midst of a terrible recession, you know, the worst for us is vehicles not being driven, and therefore not being required to service or repair or people extending out their service intervals. Sometimes that's equally offset by what are captive OEM service lane customers migrating from that service lane into the in-independence, looking to stretch their dollar further anyway, so that often can be offsetting. I think your hypothesis on the first part is very, very accurate. In terms of the new vehicles, the way we're looking at this and it's interesting, because the outcome is different by jurisdiction.
If you think about the U.S. at the moment, you're starting to see the sales at 14s and a halves when it should be around 16. There's a high retail content of that market, which is more prone or more exposed to the recession piece and more importantly, the interest rate rises. In the Australian context, the constraints now have been for a while. You're seeing it well below its peak and well below its pre-COVID level. The demand has been building because people cannot actually get the vehicles. That demand you can just sort of put into different cohorts, a fleet cohort and a retail cohort. A reasonable part of that retail cohort has been sort of satiated through COVID, but still remains quite high.
The structural part of the market, the rental, the government, the large fleet, the medium fleet, really has struggled to actually be provided, and that's upwards of 40%-45% of the market. That structural demand is still sort of sitting there. If you look at any of the other companies that are serving that, whether it be dealer groups, whether it be SG Fleet, they're all reporting still historic high demand profiles and still building. I don't see that necessarily fatiguing in a dramatic way. In addition to that, as you see net immigration coming in, that's going to be a multiplier effect.
The government, thinking through its immigration policy, if we get back to two, 250 type numbers of people coming in, that's also going to be driving car demand that hasn't been sitting there for the last 2-3 years. Again, it starts to accumulate into something quite meaningful. If I speak to some of our OEM customers, they have, you know, hundreds of thousands of orders sort of sitting there well in excess of 1.5 years worth of, in some cases, two years worth of demand. I think that will carry us through this period. Hope that answers your question.
No, great. Thanks very much.
Okay. Thank you very much. All right. Our next caller is Tim Piper. Tim, if you could unmute yourself and just let us know what company you're calling from. I don't see it on your entry. Go ahead, please.
Morning, Martin and Graeme. It's Tim Piper from UBS here. Just first question on the core auto business. I mean, 10% revenue growth year-on-year is a strong outcome. Can you give us a sense on the quantum of pricing in there? Then you talked about Q4 pricing coming through. Can you maybe put that in the context of what you've put through over the past 12 months?
Yeah. If I looked at my answer, my answer to this more on an EBIT, you know, growth point of view. If I were to identify and, you know, we comped at a core level circa 9% versus prior period. If I looked at that comp and looked at the influence, the positive influences or the positive factors that were driving that, about 50%-ish of that is volume. From that EBIT outcome, if I looked at an EBIT bridge. The other, primarily being pricing. We've seen organic volume growth, which is encouraging. The answer in terms of pricing, well, that's a difficult one to answer, Tim. It does vary by each of our business units. Even aggregating it doesn't really do its justice.
You know, as I said, we're putting out some modest pricing. Modest in my mind, sort of, you know, threes and fours depending on the competitive situation, the customer, the type of product, et cetera, et cetera. We've had over probably the 18 months, somewhere in the region of three or so pricing rounds, which have all stuck. That's how we've been able to hold the margins through this period. It would be probably irresponsible of me to suggest that there's a sort of an aggregated number across the group because that's something that, A, I don't have to hand, and B, is something we don't generally look at because it's very much by business unit.
Got it. Thanks for that. Just a second one on APG. You sort of answered this a little bit in a previous question, but just curious on the margin half to half. I mean, you've done 4% revenue growth. Margin's kind of flat. I think you put through 6% and 9% pricing in July, which would've kicked in. Even the DAR margin sort of hasn't gone up on the back of the price. Can you just talk through the moving parts in that margin half to half? You talked of some inefficiencies within, I think, the Australian manufacturing operations in particular. Timing wise around when you see those kind of resolving?
Yeah, sure. I mean, the pricing that we put in place was required to actually handle some cost impulses. That's kinda neutralized as the halves come through. That's the reason why we actually had to have price. In terms of the second part of your question, look, the inefficiencies in the manufacturing are a slight driver of the margin. I mean, the plants, particularly in Australia, the plants are not operating anywhere near at an optimum level. I would expect actually that should generate a decent improvement over time. What's really happening here, Tim, is that if you think about a typical plant loading, you know, we would have somewhere normally an absenteeism rate of, say, 2%-3%, something along those lines.
We'd have a vacancy rate of very low, sort of threes to fours. If I looked at the half for APG, the absenteeism rate was 5.9% on average across the half. On top of that, we had vacancies of between 5% and 10%. You've got absenteeism of 5.9%. You've got vacancy rates of between 5% and 10%. That cumes. They're not one of each other. You are backfilling your vacancies and, if you can, backfilling your absenteeism with casuals, which obviously have a higher labor rate and are much, much less efficient because you're having to retrain. You're lucky at the moment to hold onto a casual for one or two days, and then they're moving on to something else. That's if indeed they actually turn up.
I don't mean to be so critical. That's the kind of inefficiency that we're sort of seeing. As the labor market sort of improves a little bit and as we work through some of the COVID/health issues, I would expect us to return to something more normal in terms of the typical absenteeism and the typical vacancy. I mean, APG as an example, year to date has got a 20% turnover on the factory floor. That's, you know, 4-ish times the normal rate. That kind of hopefully gives you a flavor of what's going on in terms of the inefficiency.
Yeah, that's helpful. Thanks. Martin, can you just tell where are you at in terms of effective hedging on USD at the moment?
Yes, certainly Tim. Morning to you. Look, I think it's probably just worthwhile reflecting where we finished, you know, where we've come off in the last half. We did talk six months ago, the hedges we were taking into the half, which were favorable. Obviously exchange rate's been all over the shop in the last six months. That part that we had to take its spot was more expensive than the hedges we brought forward. Overall in the U.S. dollar, we probably finished the last six months around about $0.72. We've been having a hedging strategy. We've been pursuing it. Most of our core native businesses, instead of a typical 80% hedge, we've throttled that back to 70% because our desire to reduce inventory in the second half.
We started hedging that with a number of forward orders, starting at 68%. The last lot jagged at 71.5%. We just managed to get the peak of the market and there's still more to come at 73% and final top-ups above 70%. If we see the currency going to 74%, I'd certainly grab some more. We're going into the second half with about just on 50% hedged at a smidgen, you know, in the 70 range. I'm not gonna call you whether it's 70.1% or high 70s of it. Certainly in the better side of that range. As I said, we'll top up more when we see that.
You know, our strategy's been reflecting the fact that there has been quite a bit of short-term movements or volatility, if you like, in the Aussie dollar swinging, you know, upwards of AUD 0.03-AUD 0.04 in a week or two. When we put those hedges out, including 71, everyone laughed at us. That's what we've done. We're sticking to the strategy and we'll continue to do so.
Thanks. One last quick one if I can. I sort of caught your comments around that the drivers of the Inventory uplift half on half. I think you said AUD 11 million effectively was organic. Can you just talk to the AUD 20 million that you expect to sort of roll off in the second half? I missed this commentary, sorry, but what's sort of demand driven and what sort of supply chain normalization in the second half that would drive that AUD 20 million?
Look, that's a very easy question. We're just trying to lean out some of inventory. We've said last announcement in the previous one, so the full year and the half year before that we were watching really closely around the supply chain. Actually, Martin and I felt that in the previous half that we were looking to actually reduce some of inventory. We then saw some concerns in what was happening in China, of course, the lockdowns in that previous half. We sort of put our foot off the accelerator. We've always had a view that we would be reducing our inventory on the back of what is a normalized supply chain, getting back to a normalized net working capital ratio.
It shouldn't be a surprise to our investors that that's coming forward. We've just got more confidence that our supply base is in a more stable position, and that's kind of part of the approach.
Just to be clear, so therefore zero is demand driven.
Yep, got it. Thanks for that.
Okay, thank you. All right, well, Russell Gill from JP Morgan has returned. Russell, please, unmute your microphone and go ahead, please.
Guys, can you hear me this time?
Yes, indeed.
Okay, great. I just wanted to talk around that margin. I know you've been focusing a lot and you answered the FX dynamic now, you also called out and a lot of other companies are calling out some of the headwinds for the last couple of years are starting to turn around into tailwinds, particularly around freight, manufacturing capacity, offset with, I guess, some domestic headwinds around, you know, labor pressures and inflation. Can you talk around some of those tailwinds? I know you enter, you know, freight contracts and things like that, but when do some of those pressures in the last couple of years start becoming tailwinds for you from a margin standpoint?
Thanks, Russell, I can promise you I didn't cut you off on purpose the first time around. Thanks for the question. Yeah, you're right. You know, there's a balancing act to be done here and has been for the last number of years. You know, if you think about the FX, you probably kinda have that explanation. We're having to accommodate that for sure. We've got some pricing coming in to be able to support that. You're also right, I think there's a point well made. We still face some headwinds. We've still got domestic cost inflation that's rolling through. In some cases, we're having to contemplate, you know, bringing forward certain things like wage negotiations and other such things to make sure that we are retaining the talent.
We, in some cases, we're even looking at EBAs to bring them forward. That's something that's gonna be sitting in front of us and won't go away. There's some other cost inflation at a domestic level that continues. The swing factor is how do we balance some of the freight improvements? We're certainly starting to see that. We haven't really seen it in total, but we're starting to see some, which is useful, and we're seeing some raw material improvement. Again, it's balancing that with a domestic cost piece on top of the FX piece as well. You know, at the name of the game for us very simply is to manage margin. We've said that ad infinitum over the last four years, we're not stepping away from that.
We think we've got the right pricing power, and we've got the right brand strength to be able to do that. We've also got, you know, supply, suppliers out there that in some cases are also looking for some cost increases as well. It's not plain sailing at the moment, and that's why some of that, pricing is going in the second half and, a margin protection strategy, margin management strategy at the end of the day is the name of the game.
Yeah. I mean, I appreciate those dynamics, but, I guess the currency hedging you've got, I know, pretty close to where it was in the first half, 72 versus 71, you'll end up. I guess a lot of your competitors, and particularly in some of the, I guess, private label categories, probably don't have that benefit to the same degree in the second half. You've been running pricing pretty hard, as everyone has in the industry. It doesn't sound like you need to push pricing as hard, I guess, in the second half and then into 2024, I guess, from a relative standpoint. Is that a fair comment, or do you still need to be running pretty hard in pricing, given those domestic inflation challenges?
I think the term I used earlier, Russell, was modest. I think that probably summarizes it nicely. You know, and I'm not sure we've run pricing hard. We've been responsible in our pricing because we've been basically trying to manage margin. In the second half, we're expecting, as an example in our core auto to put in place, and we've already communicated modest pricing. That modest pricing, you know, might be 2, 3, 4 depending on the scenario. It's not to the same countenance we've had to put in place in prior pricing rounds relative to the moving pieces. You know, the 72 cents, we were about seventy-two and a half cents, and we'll be around the 70 cents. You got two and a half cents. That rolls into the P&L with a little bit of fury.
It's not insignificant given the size of the organization. Martin, did you wanna cover that perhaps?
Yeah. Look, I think you've spoken to currency, but I just wanna speak to one other thing. In the working capital bridge, we call out the impact of higher input costs on our standard costs, whether they're, you know, labor or materials or so forth. The last six months, you know, across a number of sectors, we've seen substantial supplier price rises. We have not been immune from that, and that's absolutely evidenced in that inventory step up, Russell. We, during the half, we actually negotiated to step largely out of our freight contract and start to access some of the spot markets to offset that. We're still got a little bit to go in the second half in terms of a full six-month run rate improvement.
You know, there were those substantial supplier cost ups in the first half. You know, what we've taken is really in terms of price increases, really to, as Graeme said, to defend the margin through the second half. Where costs go after that, it's probably too early to say. Certainly I'm not expecting a pot of gold from freight because we've already leaned into that to offset some of those supplier increases and take forward a very modest price rise to the market and recently.
Great. Thanks, Martin. Look, just a question on APG. You know, the six months to December was pretty wild in terms of mix. You know, the Ranger is up 40, but the HiLux was flat, but the Triton, D-MAX and Land Cruiser and all like were down 25s, on the six months to June. Did the half play out? I guess, did you have visibility and understanding that that dynamic would occur, firstly? Then secondly, given that dynamic, what gives you that confidence to keep that 55% skew guidance, for the second half? You know, is it things have changed that you now have more visibility on that dynamic?
Well, you're right, it was pretty wild. That was a comment I made earlier on. We had expected and planned for some volatility, remembering that, you know, we get two to three months insight in terms of purchase orders for the OEMs. We, as we started our way into the half, we kind of had a point of view. We also knew on the basis of the forward planning forecast from, you know, one or two of our major customers that perhaps some of the launch volumes of one of those customers was gonna start to actually improve. We could plan for that also. We had expected, as an example, the vehicle mix of our top 20 to see an improvement from, you know, the likes of a Ranger.
The short answer is we didn't plan for the extreme volatility, but we had enough forward view to suggest that we could say confidently, you know, six months ago that we felt that Q1 will be better than Q4 slightly, and Q2 will be better than Q1, and that's transpired. When I think about the skew, I mean, of course, all these comments, whether it's aftermarket or whether it's APG, are built or predicated on the current business conditions continuing, right? Our view again, of the next two to three months of purchase orders we have from the OEMs would give us confidence that the second half should play out in line with our expectations and achieve that kind of skew. What happens in month four and five of those purchase orders? We'll see.
What we're seeing is a little bit more stability in some of the key top 20, not all. And we've taken a view of what we think the industry size might be in the second half.
Thanks, Graeme. Just a follow-up, I guess, on that is that it would appear that APG is the most difficult business, I guess, to forecast, yet you provided a, you know, implicit EBITA guidance for that business. What variables are you concerned about to not give, I guess, an explicit earnings guidance for the group for FY 2023?
What I'd say first is in a normal year, in a typical business environment, APG actually will be the business that's the easiest to forecast. That's the first thing I'd say. We're not in a normal world. We're in this crazy, volatile, semiconductor-constrained world, with geopolitics and other health issues rolling through it. Having said that though, the other part of our business is probably, in I guess, in your eyes, more metronomic. You know, there's one and a half system growth that sort of sits there. We've been pretty reliable on our way through. What we're keeping in the back of our minds at the moment is in terms of Auto Aftermarket, is the state of the economy.
You know, we're cognizant around, you know, the mortgage concerns and whether that has an impact on consumer spending. Having said that, earlier on, I talked about the fact that 80% of our business in terms of revenue is non-discretionary. There are a number of things rolling through there. We also have to accommodate the FX that Martin's spoken of, excuse me, where we're sort of only 50% hedged on the way through. You know, the variance of spot there and a few other factors that are sort of swinging there. What I've said in the trading update, and more specifically the outlook, I ventured or opined a point of view that we feel it should be robust, but there are a few things rolling through there that we're just cognizant of.
That's why we've taken the position we have, Russell.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Okay. Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Mitchell Sonogan, I believe from Macquarie. Mitchell, go ahead. Unmute yourself and ask your question.
Yeah. Thank you. Good morning, Graeme and Martin. Thanks for taking the questions. Just checking if you can hear me.
Yeah. All good, Mitchell. Go ahead.
All good. Perfect. Apologies, I've just jumped on the call, so I might have missed this, but just on the APG, just in terms of the second half guidance there, to a circa 55% of underlying EBITDA, just keen to get a bit of an insight as to what potential benefit, you're seeing from a reduction in materials costs that I think from the presentation at the time of acquisition was around 50% of the cost base for APG. Just keen to understand how, that's looking over the next six months and just any sort of reduction you're seeing in forward pricing and how far out you'd purchase that. Thank you.
Yeah, sure. Excuse me. We mentioned earlier on, Mitch, in terms of the skew. In fact, let me take the top line first. The skew we felt confident in on the basis of what we're seeing in OEM orders. You know, the first half was very much in line what we expected. The second half in terms of what we thought is again, in line, particularly when we've got sight of the OEM purchase orders 2 - 3 months out. That's why we feel the way we do. Implicit in that is business conditions staying relatively similar and industry at a certain level accepting the constraints.
Perhaps a couple of our top 20 models which we've put in for the first time, Mitch, in the pack, continuing the trend that they've already seen, and specifically around a Ranger and the mix coming through there. In terms of the costs rolling through, I said earlier on we saw some cost impulses that started the end of the prior half and they rolled through, obviously all through this half. We had to take some pricing at that time. We priced in July to offset that. At the same time, we've still got inefficiencies rolling through the plant and they haven't gone away. In fact, in some cases, they've exacerbated a tiny bit. I mentioned earlier, we've got some high turnover rates and some high vacancy and some absenteeism.
There's room for improvement, certainly in the medium to long term, but that's a little bit of a drag. At the same time, we've got some exchange positions we need to think through APG. There's a lot of offsetting factors that sort of drive. We are expecting a little bit of steel improvement. APG have a different freight route, so they don't necessarily benefit. If you're looking at perhaps, say, the China to AU Australian routes, it's a little bit different. It's a Thai route and has a far less serviced route, so it's a little less competitive. You can't potentially project perhaps what you're seeing in those more populated freight routes to actually roll through to Thailand.
we're having to balance a number of those factors on the way through. We don't have any additional price rises in H2 for APG anticipated. We took that pricing in the early part of H1. That's sort of how the factors start to roll together, Mitch.
Yeah. Great. Thanks for coloring that, Graeme. Just a quick one. Just in terms of you've called out the potential or planned AUD 20 million inventory reduction. I guess I'm just asking in terms of how your customers are seeing things, obviously there's a few different companies looking to unwind inventory over the next six to twelve months, just seeing a bit more of a normalization in supply chains. Are you having any conversations or seeing any signs that some of your customers or the big ones out there might look to do a similar thing in, over the second half, I guess now we've gone through Christmas and Chinese New Year? Thank you.
The AUD 20 million that we've put in the deck is AUD 20 million that we want to take out. It's not a representative of any conversations we've had with anybody. There was a question earlier on, Mitch, around whether this is supply or demand related. Supply related, plain and simple. Martin and I have for the last two announcements, said to the market that we were wanting to take out between sort of AUD 20 and AUD 30. We felt that was the sort of number that we were carrying on a normalized basis we wouldn't normally carry. Really this is just a reflection. We feel like now we felt actually more confident in the last half, the Chinese lockdowns started to happen again.
We feel more confident with the supply chain now that we would like to take that out. It's part and parcel of, you know, the whole balance sheet equation and where we wanna get to in terms of our leverage position. In terms of our customers, obviously we never comment directly on our customers. What we do watch very closely is the sales in and sales out. There's not been any, what I would call abnormal disconnect between sales in and sales out. You know, in January, we saw a bit of a slow replenishment on one or two customers. January was a kind of a strange month in general.
What we saw, and I don't know if the market's seeing this, but we saw the return to work far later in January. We even saw it within our own businesses. Workshops were a little quieter in January. Well, I think for the first time people were taking a proper holiday. Then we saw it accelerate really rapidly in late January and then February's off on a run again and we're seeing the bookings push out. It's really, I'm thinking more about end user demand. The other thing I'd add, Mitch, is that, you know, and I've said this before, we have always been a high DIFOT provider to our customers. Therefore they really haven't had to push our stocks up materially.
In fact, right from the beginning of COVID, we actually sent letters out to our customers reminding them that we weren't gonna let any customer capture the market. Consequently, I don't think that our customers should be sitting on, you know, crazily high volumes of our inventory. Whereas they may have had to take on more house brand items as an example. Maybe that's where they might need to concentrate. Look, you never say never. You know, we have in some cases, very low mid digit stock cleanse provisions in our contracts. By the way, those stock cleanse provisions which have just ticked over weren't fully utilized and maybe that's an indicator also. We'll be nimble. Not all customers are in the same situation often we find.
Where some might be a little bit low, some might be a bit high. That's the kind of the run of the course that we've experienced over the last two or three years.
Yeah. Perfect. Just a final one from me, Graeme. I think you sort of touched on it there. It sounds like the overall activity in the trade aftermarket's still pretty strong after that slightly longer shutdown over Christmas into January. Can you maybe just give any color, I guess, from a regional perspective? Is there much difference around Australia? Probably the bigger question is on that sort of 9.8% growth in the auto business there, ex-APG. Was New Zealand a bit of a drag or what are you seeing over in that part of your business as well? Thanks, guys.
No, that's a good question. NZ definitely is clipping at a lower rate. There's no hiding from that. We're seeing in NZ a culmination of some pretty bloody horrific natural disasters. We're seeing the economy a bit softer, a bit more muted. January was, I think from memory, just a slight better, a bit better than the prior January, so it didn't go backwards. What we saw was muted demand. Having said that, though, interestingly, our Davey business over there actually grew. In fact, grew at a faster rate than Australia through the month of January, and obviously pumps and other such things going on there. Similar to the full-year result, NZ hasn't performed at the same sort of growth rate that we're seeing in Australia.
I think that's quite accurate in your, in your assessment. Across Australia, it's been more universal. We're not seeing any, you know, significant spikes from any of the particular jurisdictions. If anything, frankly, the jurisdictional sort of impact that I would call out is actually more about the labor force. Where we have some manufacturing businesses in Queensland, and that seems to be the epicenter, frankly, of absenteeism and turnover rates. I mentioned APG as an example at 5.9% absenteeism. The Queensland businesses are just a smidgen under 10. The vacancies down in our Melbourne-based plant for APG are sort of, you know, between 5 and 10. If you look at the Queensland operations, whether it's, you know, CSM, whether it's ECB and the like, that's generally between 10 and 15.
That's something we've been having to really wrangle. In fact, we're currently looking at whether we can ramp up our visa workforce to get skilled trade in because we're just struggling significantly up in Queensland. Hopefully that gives you a bit more flavor of a question you didn't ask, Mitch.
Okay. Folks, we're about to go to our final question. If you do have any follow-ups, please raise your hand. Otherwise, this will be it. With that, I'm pleased to introduce Sam Teeger, I believe, from Citi. Sam, please unmute yourself and go ahead. I can see you there, Sam. Just unmute. If you've dialed in on the phone, just you can unmute yourself by pressing star nine on your phone, that will unmute you. There we go. No? Your hand's down. Sorry, star six. I beg your pardon. Star six, Sam, will unmute you. There you go.
Star six.
That's it.
Yeah. Hi, Graeme. Hi, Martin.
Morning.
When you mention about lower ordering levels from some of your customers in January, are you seeing that across all products or is that skewed to more discretionary products or retail products?
No, no rhyme or reason on that, Sam. you know, really the profile didn't suggest anything. It was just a lower level of demand in the first part. I mean, warehouses weren't necessarily operating. In fact, some of our own warehouse staff weren't necessarily getting stuff out quickly in the first part of January as well. It was more a general comment than anything specific. Certainly, you know, with our high percentage of nondiscretionary, we're not really exposed to that so much. Certainly the 20%, which would we consider to be discretionary, didn't seem to over-index at all.
All right. Excellent. Appreciate, the staffing issues have led to inefficiencies at APG, and you've given us some good color on that. To what extent have the lower car volumes that have been coming through also contribute? If so, just any color around that?
Thanks. Thanks, Sam. I mean, look, clearly with lower car volumes, you're not getting the overhead leverage out of the business. We didn't get that in the first half either, Sam. As that, you know, the forward production orders that Graeme was talking about, which is where the OEMs say, "This is my best guess of what I'm making in the next three months." Then they give us a call-out sheet a week or so out, and then we invoice against that. You know, clearly, without that kick-up in volume, we're gonna continue to have facilities underutilized and not achieve the leverage we want to achieve.
When those forward orders kick up and they come through to purchases, then that leverage will start to come back into play and will take us back to the profit levels as volumes return that we had in the equity raise. We're very confident in that. We've spent, you know, we've gone back and revisited that several times in the last six months to be absolutely confident that this is just a volume issue and when the volume rights itself, you know, these other things will play their way out, Sam. I hope that answers your question.
Yeah, that's good. Is the volumes actually the bigger issue on the margin for APG than the staffing, which we've talked a lot about on the call?
Yes, to a degree, because you've got to remember that, you know, the top 20 models are critical for us. Well over half those models are made 100% in Thailand factory, where we probably have a, you know, greater degree of variability in our labor costs and also ability to add labor capacity far better than Australia. As that comes on. Graeme will probably add to that.
A former OEM guy, he'll probably be able to even say it better than me.
Well, I think it's very clear that the business is volume sensitive and the big benefit is gonna come through volume. The point I made earlier on was just to suggest that even at a 19.5% or so margin as it is now, even if the volume stayed static for one second, there's still margin expansion available to us through a much more efficient manufacturing outcome. Park that for one second. It's all about the volume. I mean, the volume at the moment, Sam, as you know, on a 12-month rolling is, you know, 6.6% below that pre-COVID. It's 10% below peak.
You know, when we bought the business, we modeled the industry with three different independent analysts with a view of what the five and 10-year market looked like. Those volumes are nowhere near what's being achieved at the moment, and it's all about supply constraints. As that comes back in, we expect that volume sensitivity to drop through to the bottom line. Plus, we'll get the benefit of a more efficient operation. At the same time, we'll look to continue to win and add to the plant load, particularly in Thailand. That's why we have confidence when we look at that business going forward.
Thanks. That's helpful. Lastly, when we think about the year ahead, is there any reason why organic auto growth, auto revenue growth in a legacy business shouldn't be at least mid-single digits, you know, when you consider price rises?
Well, look, we've said consistently that success looks like we outcome system growth for a start. That's like, you know, it's a fail for us if we don't do that. I know that'll probably come back to haunt me one day, but that's a fail for us. You know, I'm never gonna call out a specific number, but you know system growth 1.5%. You could probably add a bit of pricing, and we've been doubling down on PD investment and domestically, you know, really securing some new customers. You know, as an example, BWI now has, you know, an RV channel that is like the equivalent of its biggest channel in historic terms. They've been able to build that out.
I don't think it's a absurd idea to suggest the sort of the area speaking about. Generally, we've said in the past, you know, organic business is anywhere between 3%-5%, 4%-6%, that sort of thing. Our growth corridors, which is the auto elect, power management and lighting, and then the four-wheel drive, we see a different growth corridor. That's the 6%-9%, 7%-10% sort of space. I'm never gonna be pegged down on a specific number. I do have a point of view around where we'll see higher growth in our portfolio versus consistent, meaningful, and ring the cash register growth on some of the other core parts of the business.
Okay. Excellent. Thank you.
Okay. Graeme and Martin, there are no further questions. Graeme, it's back to you to wrap up.
Okay. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the time taken to listen to our results. Appreciate the questions. Thank you. I'm very pleased with where we've got to in H 1. Organic growth sitting there, you know, in line with expectations specific on APG. The margin maintenance and demonstration again of our pricing power responsibly. Got a bit of work to do on net working capital, that's very clearly in our sights. Ultimately, we reaffirmed again our point of view around where the leverage comes in, we're not backing away from that. With that, really it just leaves me to say thank you to the GUD team, the leadership group and the employees who continue to deliver day in, day out.
It's just an outstanding opportunity and privilege to be able to represent their results today. Thank you.