I think we at least just wait a couple more minutes. We're getting a good turnout already, and then we'll just fire into it. I think we'll keep it pretty relaxed, guys, but maybe if you would like to refer to the presentation and take us through it at your own pace, and then we can open up for questions, that might be the best way of going about it, I think.
Yeah. What I'll do, I'll just sort of talk a bit, and link to the presentation. I might go through slide by slide because I just find that gets a little bit monotonous for everyone.
Yeah.
They've all read it. What I'll try and do is pull out some of the key highlights and just give a bit of a sense as to what we see is coming in the next six, 12, 24 months.
Yep, good idea. Sounds good.
Just let me know when you want me to kick off.
Yeah. I think whenever you're ready, go for it, and we'll let people just come in as they wish.
Okay. Fantastic.
Thanks.
All right. Well, you know, overall, we were pretty pleased with the half year results. We generated sales growth and profit growth despite the fact that we had a number of things happen to us during the half that were out of our control, if you like. The largest of those events and the most important one to call out was the New Zealand government lockdown. Now, that meant that the whole of New Zealand shut down for a period of time, and then a part, mainly Auckland and some of the areas around Auckland, shut down for a longer period of time. That cost us in the vicinity of NZD 3 million of sales and about three-quarters of a million NZD of profit, which was just unavoidable.
Unlike last time, when the whole country just shut and opened, it all sort of went back to normal day one. This time it took a bit longer because with parts open and parts not open, freight and other things got out of kilter and just took a bit longer. Right now, New Zealand's just pumped out a very, very strong February result. Everything's sort of back to normal over there, if you like, and we're growing and performing well. The other main, and I'll just call them COVID impacts, were the construction lockdowns here in Australia, so mainly New South Wales and Victoria. That slowed down our sales in that sector for a period of time. Right across Australia and New Zealand, and this is a global issue, is supply chain creating problems for us.
We've done pretty well, and you'll see we've ramped up our inventory levels quite a bit to try and offset some of those issues. I'll talk about a little bit more in a minute. Mainly where we've been caught a bit is on our roofing screws products into New Zealand. We've had shortages, and for a while we had steel shortages going down into our Nubco business. About 35% of their business is steel products. That steel bit's tidied itself up now, partly due to the construction shutdowns in Australia, mainland Australia creating supply availability. We've also sort of caught up there at the moment. Overlay all of that is just been trying to manage the ongoing issues around our people. Our Thomastown office here, we're just starting to try and get people back again now.
January in particular, we lost some of our staff down the eastern coast of Australia due to COVID, either catching it or close contact. What happened more was a bunch of our customers had up to 50% of their staff unable to work. That slowed January sales a little bit. That being said, February's bounced back super strong. We've probably caught up anything that we didn't get in January through February. Again, the markets have come back strongly.
If we look at the splits across the business units, starting with Trade Distribution, probably the most encouraging news for us is the fact that our Konnect and Artia Australia business, which got back to breakeven after four years of hard work at the end of last year, has added another AUD 1.5 million of EBITDA over last year in the first half. We certainly feel now as though we've got that business to a level that's sustainable from a growth perspective, and we're on track over the next, you know, two and a half, three years to get that to our benchmark for a business unit, which is 10% EBITDA. That's very encouraging. We've got a new general manager in there. We did a long handover with the previous general manager. That's gone smoothly.
We're pretty confident about our position in that business, particularly with strong markets here in Australia. In New Zealand, we would have grown again with the exception of that shutdown period. We've got an experienced team, we're market leader, and again, we're confident that the markets will be strong over in New Zealand, that we can continue to grow there. The Nubco business, which we acquired about three years-
Yep.
Has gone from strength to strength. It's had a very good first half on the back of a very strong year last year. What we find with our acquisitions is they slow a little bit the first year after acquisition as the people settle and get to know us and understand that we are going to not come in and try and change everything. That's bounced very strongly again on the back of good markets. You know, a very, very good acquisition for us down there in Tasmania. On the Fluid Systems side, the numbers there, sales are up but the profit number down slightly. The call out there is that last year we had the AUD 8 million, I'll call it one-off order in for the refueling systems. That was at very high margin. Take that out.
We've managed to fill the board with sales, but they are at lower margin and hence the reason that we haven't had a stronger result. We've also had to put some additional resources into that business to keep it sustainable. It's doubled in size in the last four years. We got to the point where the general manager had 18 direct reports, which just doesn't work, so we've had to put some extra resource in. On top of that, we've also got some pressures around labor shortages that push wages up. It also means we're having to do overtime to keep up with the work. You know, moving forward, again, market's very strong. Mining resources look good at the moment.
The biggest challenge we've got there, as has been the case for the last two-three years now, is just getting enough resources to do the work. We're running our own apprenticeship programs. We hope to see immigration come back online soon, which will bring some skilled labor into the country and help us fill up some of the opportunity, 'cause at the moment, we can't do all the work we'd like to do in that market. From a balance sheet perspective, you will see that we have increased inventory quite a bit. Now there's three components to that increase. The first is, for the first time in a long, long time, we're seeing significant price inflation in the market. A lot of our goods going up quite a bit.
We have been able to push all of that through to our customers, so we're not seeing any margin decline because of that price inflation. What it's done is, it's meant there's a one-off increase in the value of our stock as we replace it with inventory that's at these higher costs. That's quite unusual. In probably my whole career, I haven't seen price inflation at the sort of levels we've got at the moment. I also haven't seen it as easy to push through to customers because they need the stock and they're seeing increases from everybody else, so that's been a positive outcome. The second component in there is actual physical stock increase to offset potential supply chain issues.
The third is we've got a couple of million dollars of extra work in progress in our Fluid Systems business, and that will ultimately end up being a sale, so is not an issue. Now we are gonna pull inventory levels back to normal levels again now and take out that buffer, extra buffer we put in. You'll see the debt level come down quite a bit before the end of the year on the back of you know some reasonably, hopefully some good profits, as well as pulling that inventory level back down again. On the acquisition side of the market, we're seeing an increase in inquiries coming our way there at the moment, so we're assessing a number of different possible acquisitions mainly on the Trade Distribution side.
What we're seeing in our markets, they're all very fragmented, lot of family-owned businesses. Those owners, after two years plus of COVID interruption, are just exhausted from it. While their businesses have performed well, as ours have, you know, they've just had enough and they're looking to get out now. We think that's a positive for us moving forward. We will stick to our acquisition strategy, which is to only buy profitable businesses, so 10%+ EBITDA businesses. They're immediately helping us get up to our first benchmark, which is 7.5% group EBITDA, and they're low risk. We're not going to take any chances in that area and buy something and try and fix it or do anything like that. We don't rely on cost or buying synergies to make our acquisitions work.
They just have to stand up by themselves. Look, some interesting activity in that space at the moment, which is nice. That's probably Sam, the really fast version of what's going on. I think looking at the outlook, we're pretty positive. Despite all of the things that are going on, COVID-related and other things as you can see around the world at the moment, all of our markets are performing really well. If we look at mining resources sector, we've got good commodity prices. There's lots of production going on. There is lots of investment still going into capital in that market. If we think about what's happening globally at the moment, governments the world over are doing what ours are here in Australia and New Zealand and pouring money into infrastructure and construction projects.
That's gonna put huge demand globally on steel. That puts demand on iron ore, that puts demand back on coal. We think at the moment, unless something changes around the world, that the mining resource sector cycle will probably run longer than what it normally does at the moment. That's a real positive for us. Infrastructure and construction, we've got all of this government spend coming for the next 10 years. Again, we don't see any particular issues in those markets. You've probably seen the Probuild situation where they've gone into administration in that construction sector. We've got a tiny little bit of exposure to that. Probably the bigger picture there is that the construction market is all fixed contract, fixed pricing contracts. In high inflation, that creates a big problem for those contracts.
We're seeing already the market changing to having variable contracts and rise and fall in them. The Probuild stuff, you know, those building sites are shut at the moment. Someone will pick 'em up. That work will come back online at some point in the future. All of our industrial markets supply into all of these other markets, so into construction customers, infrastructure customers, mining. That part of our market's going very well as well. Overall, we're pretty optimistic for the next, not just year, but probably five, 10 years, that our market's going to stay strong. Subject to COVID and crazy people around the world, that all looks pretty good. Our strategy, we think stands up for itself now. We've been following it for the last five years.
It's been evolving, but it hasn't really changed the fundamentals of it. It's simply have a great value proposition and have the best service in the market, to grow sales organically. Have the best people, and we're more and more able to get those into our business as we're demonstrating success and improving our culture, and then do those safe acquisitions to support the growth. The strategy, it survived COVID. We feel comfortable with it. We think it will continue to work. The third component to our success really is our people. In the early days, you know, Rod and I had to try and beg people we knew to come and work for us. These days, we're a more attractive place for people to come and work.
Retention's difficult in the current environment, but overall, we're improving the caliber of the team all the time at the moment. Probably one other callout for the next 12 months, maybe longer, is we now expect for the first time in the last 10 years to see some decent sort of wage inflation as well. We'll be budgeting FY 2023 at about 5% wage inflation, about 4% cost inflation, whereas we would normally have been 1.5%-2%. We will just simply pass that through to customers with a cost of doing business increase, and we're confident in the current environment we can get those through.
There's a whole lot going on in the macro, a bit going on in the micro environments there, but again, overall, good market, strategy working, good people executing on that and we're pretty optimistic about the future at the moment. Sam, I might just pause there and see if you've got questions or others have got questions.
Yeah, thanks, Robert. Very good summary. I'll open up to the floor to start with and then I can chip away at some questions if there's not much debate. I'll just kick off then, Robert. I think that what stands out, as you pointed out, is that quite staggering Trade Distribution growth or organic growth at 12.5%. I suppose that's the driver of Coventry, is that division. So can we continue to see that sort of growth in the second half? Are you expecting that that's a sustainable level of uptake? You know, I know you guys have invested heavily in a sales force. Is that, sort of, the lift we can get in the second half again?
There is a little bit of skew from a seasonality perspective to the first half. There's three months in the year, December, January and April, which are lower sales months due to holidays and just the way things play out.
Mm.
You know, you don't do 1.5x two equals three to get the year results. Look, we do expect positive growth in that KA business in the second half of the year as well, and another strong performance from them. Then that should just keep accelerating from that point on. We basically, as you know, we've set that business up for sustainable profitable growth the whole way through.
Yeah.
We've invested a lot into people into branches, into inventory, into a vehicle fleet and all those things. What we've got at the moment can sustain AUD 100 million-AUD 120 million turnover business. We don't have to put a huge amount of extra costs.
Yeah.
The sales we're getting at good margin now flow to the bottom line.
Yep.
You know, whereas our other three businesses are more mature. They're all over that 10%+ EBITDA target. I wouldn't call them a maintenance mode because they've got great growth opportunities, but we have to keep reinvesting back into those businesses at the moment.
Yeah. I suppose the run rate on that, on the KA business now, in terms of earnings is getting close towards AUD 3 million, right, at the EBITDA line? I might refer that to Rod. You know, I know you guys are targeting at least AUD 7.5 million from that business over the midterm. Do you have a target on when that might be achieved? Or is it over the, you know, is it before FY 2024 that you're looking to get that back to those levels?
I think FY 2024 is the year to get to that level.
Okay.
Yeah. Again, our competitors don't just let us waltz in and take the business. You know, we've got to fight for it and we've got to hang on to it, and they'll come back at us. Look, you know, our service proposition is better than our competitors now. That's the big change that's happened over the last, you know, three or four years.
For sure. You know, we can see there's no shortcuts in terms of the gross margin that you guys are getting. Whereas I think some of your competitors, mainly in New Zealand, sort of seem to discount. Is that what you're sort of seeing in the market? Are you seeing some irrational pricing from some competitors to take you guys on?
In New Zealand, absolutely.
Yeah.
Because they're, you know, most of the competitors are really struggling over there now. Mike's, you know, taken a lot of market share off them over the last sort of couple of years.
Yeah.
Down in Tassie, they attacked us a lot post-acquisition. That sort of has gone away a bit now, so I'll just call it a normal competitive landscape down there. On mainland Australia during parts of COVID, we've seen some unusual behavior where people have not had enough stock or had too much, and then done silly things to try and tidy it up, because they don't have the same ability to, you know, use debt or whatever it is like we have to manage that.
Yeah.
Look, overall, we're finding at the moment in a price inflation environment, it's a bit surprising to us that, you know, we're actually creeping up our gross margin, our product margin a little bit at the moment.
Great. Thanks for that. Or could you just give us maybe an update on Nubco as well? I know you did briefly, but is that still shooting the lights out? Is that the main driver of Trade Distribution, would you say? Or how do you break up the three segments there?
The reality is, if New Zealand hadn't been shut down for that period, all three would have had a great first half. You know, Nubco have had very, very strong results on the back of a very strong result in FY 2021 as well.
Mm-hmm.
They've got quite by far the best service levels down there. We've got the best expertise to help the customers. We can compete easily against the Bunnings and the Mitre 10, the Total Tools, the fastening businesses. It doesn't really matter. We can compete against each of those. There's a Bunnings store across the road from most of our branches. They just can't help their customers because they don't have the expertise. Half the time they'll end up sending them to us, and then they won't go back to Bunnings again. It's a strong value proposition. We've got that interesting mix of products.
Yeah.
The steel, the fasteners and all the branded and ancillary product and, yeah, it's just a good business in a good market at the moment. That market's performing very well for us. What we hope to do, we're looking at a few targets at the moment, is to try and replicate what Nubco does in Tassie and Konnect in Australia, and there's some interesting opportunities out there.
Are there any locations you're targeting, Rob, or?
We'd probably prefer, if possible, to do something in regional Victoria.
Yeah.
Only because it's closer to the guys in Tassie, so it's easier for them to get there and assess and make sure we go about it the right way.
Great.
If we found something nice somewhere else, we would still look at it.
Cool. I might just flip over to Fluid Systems. I mean, it's the result of the labor costs. We're seeing that across the market and, you know, it's probably even more so or the cost inflation is even more so and I think it's caught out a number of people in the market, myself included. What does that margin look like going forward? Is it. It's sort of come down from 12.2% and you said that there was that big order was at a high margin. Is 9.8% in the first half, is that. Can you sustain that or is it gonna step down again further, do you think?
No. We can get that back above 10% again. We want to get it up to 12%, but it should sit somewhere between 10% and 11%, that business.
Okay.
For us, anything that can't get 10% is not what we do. This business can definitely keep the 10% plus.
Okay, great. Thanks. For context, you guys did AUD 64 million of revenue in the first half 2022 versus AUD 55.7 million in the first half 2021. I think that points toward relatively flat organic growth because I was expecting maybe AUD 10 million-AUD 11 million of acquisition growth in there. Am I right in saying that? Will that grow again, do you think?
Yeah. Excluding the acquisition stuff in there, it was relatively flat.
Yeah.
You did have to try and find enough stuff to replace that big order. Moving forward, once we can get more labor, we'll be able to start accelerating that growth within the end.
Okay.
When you think about our business, you know, we're one of the largest in our markets, but still would have less than 5% market share. There's so much more out there to get.
Are you replicating at least earnings on H.I.S. Hose and FPS? How are they tracking in terms of integration?
Yeah. H.I.S. is going okay. Fluid Power Services down in Tassie is also shooting the lights out down there.
Great. Cool.
If we could do that, if we could keep getting acquisitions like that at 2.1x, we'd be delighted.
Yeah. It's hard to believe, really, hey. I suppose going forward, it's a reasonable assumption to sort of hold revenue there while we're still seeing these shortages of labor and then over time, you'd expect to see some growth or are you more bullish than that in terms of-
No. Look, I think some growth really constrained by the inability to get as much labor, quality labor as we would like.
Yeah.
you know, we've got some big projects on the go at the moment. We've got some big quotes out there. you know, there's still plenty of activity in our markets.
Great. Thanks. And I'll just switch to the outlook. You guys flagged possibly three store openings, and that's the first time that I think anyone at Coventry has in over four or five years. You know, returning to that store opening strategy. What's the reasoning behind Rockhampton and Mackay and Palmerston North? Is that looking to get into Ag or what are you
No. Those two in New Zealand are just towns that are large enough for us to operate in successfully, but we don't have a presence at the moment.
Yeah.
Palmerston North, we've now got a rep there building up some sales before we open that location. These are really just straight geographical build for us there. Rockhampton, to be honest, was opportunistic. One of our competitors, Motion Australia, who'd bought a fasteners business, Global Fasteners, rebranded it to SpecFast, and then were just driving the team into the ground. The team literally walked out and said, "We've had enough. Can we come and work for you?" That was the driver behind opening that branch.
Okay, great. Thanks very much. What sort of store opening growth are you expecting over the mid-term? Are you gonna continue opening up new places?
Yeah. There's probably only two or three more options in New Zealand. There's lots of options in Australia. I think it'll depend a bit on what happens from an acquisition perspective as well, and how many locations that we don't have we can fill via acquisition. It does take a lot longer to get a greenfield operation up to profit than what we'd like, I guess, so.
Okay. Great. You'd be expecting to target store metrics of over 10% contribution or?
The stores to cover the central costs from the Konnect business need to be more like 15%.
Okay, cool.
We've got some branches that bump out 25%.
Yeah
That, regardless, we aren't making any money, so.
Yeah. Do you think you need to upsize any existing stores or rationalize some stores? What's your reasoning or how are you thinking about the network as it is right now?
Yeah. Rod, you might answer that because we've got a number of upgrades at the moment, including one that's
Got a new swimming pool.
Yeah, that's unfortunate. We recently did a renovation and upgraded Lismore branch. This time yesterday it was under 2 meters of water. That's a bit of a setback. Look, we're also, you know, in Artarmon. We've relocated that, and we're making it a bigger branch. It's a better location. For us, that's always the play. Have a look at the market, have a look at our locations. Is it right? At the right time, do we just move it a little bit and get a bigger footprint? We're really thinking a lot more about merchandising, leveraging it off our learnings from Nubco. When we get the opportunity, we do it. We're not just throwing money at these things. It's got to all sort of line up.
We can only absorb so many at a time. We don't want to make mistakes along the way. They're well thought out. We've got a program of upgrades that we wanna make. Yeah, we just keep pecking away. We've got the dedicated resource in KA that just supports those moves and upgrades. We've got it down to a fine art now, which makes it easier for us.
Great. Thanks, Rob.
Sam, just going back, what the previous management of the business had done was downsize all the stores, put them in the back streets of the town, take all the product and the merchandising out. We're just really, as we see the opportunity, reinstating them back to their former glory, if you like, so that they've got a real chance of success. Then it really at that point just comes down to getting the right people in them.
Yeah. It's still that long process of restocking and upsizing that's. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah.
How's your online presence looking at the moment? I know we're getting close to the end of the time, but can you maybe comment on how your sales there are progressing?
Yeah. That's been probably slower than what we would have liked. The business had no e-commerce capability when we inherited it. It wasn't our initial priority because we just had to get the store networks and a whole bunch of other things fixed up. Our system with the master data the way it was and everything, you couldn't do it. We did get a little caught out there because we would have loved to have it all up and running at the start of COVID. Those sites are all coming up online now. The Konnect sites in Australia and New Zealand are starting to generate sales. The Konnect ones, we will see some growth out of that towards the end of this financial year and into next financial year. It's still not our main...
It's probably not gonna be our main go-to-market for some, quite some time.
Okay.
It's still very much a direct selling model that is best suited to the customers that we've got at the moment. You know, as the population changes and ages and more young people come into trades, they will trade more that way.
Great. Is there anyone in the market that you see doing it, you know, excellently? Because it makes sense that it's a go-to-market. You know, you have to be on site, and that's the value prop, bringing your expertise on site. Is there anyone that does it on the market?
Blackwoods do a lot of their business online. What they've also done is lost a lot of business that way because they try to force all their customers onto it.
Yeah.
The ones that didn't want to do that went somewhere else. You know.
Yeah.
We're not gonna take that approach. We'll encourage, if it makes sense, to get a customer on it if that's what's gonna work for them, but we won't force them.
Okay. Great.
We've got to deal with the customer the way the customer wants to be dealt with.
Fantastic. Okay. I'll just open up the floor again, as I realize I'm taking up everyone's time, to see if there's any more questions.
Yes, Sam. Good morning, Rob. It's Lionel here.
Hey, Lionel. How you going?
Good, thanks, pal. A quick one. Of the residual issues that you inherited. You and Rod, what are left? I mean, can you give us a rundown on the property issue over in WA and how that's panning out? The systems issues that you inherited. Can you just give us how many legacy issues do we have left, and where are we with those?
You've probably highlighted the two key ones there. We've largely got past all the people issues. We've got the fleet, the infrastructure's being rebuilt, so we're well on the path there. The system is still problematic for us, but what we've been doing is attaching things around it to help us, you know, get what we need out of it. We've put a business intelligence tool around it, the CRM, all the e-commerce stuff's just been attached onto it with, you know, up-to-date technology. At some point, we will have to upgrade the ERP system, but that's still down the track a bit. The property, Rod?
Look, the property over in Redcliffe is probably in the best state that it's been in a long time. We've effectively got it occupied fully. That doesn't mean it's occupied fully, you know, through to the end of the lease. We've got Main Roads there, one of our tenants, their lease is up for renewal in October of this year with a five-year option. You know, we think that they're fairly comfortable there, but you never know, so we work hard to make sure we retain them. Last year we announced McIntosh as a key tenant in our warehouse. Again, they've got a lease that goes through to August 2024 with an option through the end of the tenancy. The likelihood they will renew. There's always those things in the background.
It's not a distraction for us anymore. We sort of put that aside, and we just work it hard and make sure that we can keep it fully tenanted. That's a good thing 'cause that was a real distraction for many, many years.
Only six years to go on that lease, Lionel. For the others on the call here, we inherited a property with a twenty-year lease on it that had a couple of subtenants in it, but not many, but was burning probably AUD 1.5 million in our back pocket at that time.
Yeah.
It's pleasing to have a few more tenants in it now.
All right. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Lionel. No more questions, I think we might wrap it up there, guys. Robert and Rod, thanks so much for taking the time to present to us today. Congrats on such encouraging results, just particularly in that Konnect Australia business. I think that's what everyone's looking at at the moment. You know, best wishes for the second half, and we'll catch up again soon.
All right, great. Thanks for your time, everybody.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks all.
Thanks, Rob.
Thanks, everyone.
Cheers.