Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to those online, and thank you, those in the room, for braving the snow this morning. It's now 18 months since we launched the STAR Strategy, and we are making excellent progress. This is demonstrated by much stronger financial performance, improving operating metrics, and a fast-growing order book. Yet, I am perhaps most excited by the ability of the organization to change and translate strategy into action. We're building a culture and a capability where improving is becoming the Avon way, and the pace of change is accelerating. With confidence increasing, we're more ambitious. We now have plant-wide improvement projects in three of our factories, and we see further opportunities to reduce inventory, increase quality, and drive productivity. The order book increased by 66%, and we have a stronger contract portfolio to support the medium and the long term.
This reflects the strength of our product portfolio and the relationships with our customers. There is still a lot to do this year, but with confidence increasing, we see potential to deliver our medium-term targets a year earlier than originally planned. We will expand on all these points during the rest of the presentation. I'll now hand over to Rich to talk you through the numbers. I'll then come back and give you an update on strategy, with some detail added from James Wilcox, President of Team Wendy, and Chandler Gabara, Continuous Improvement Lead in Avon Protection.
Thank you, Jos, and good morning, everyone. So, as you can see, the headlines point to a year of encouraging progress. As usual, all the comparators will be on a constant currency basis. The order book at the end of 2024 stands at a record $225 million, 64% higher than the prior year. This leaves us well covered for FY25, with DOD helmet cover stretching well into FY26. Revenue growth of more than 12% dropped through to strong adjusted operating profit, up 53% at $31.6 million. And my preferred area of focus, return on invested capital, came in at 13.7% after significant progress was made, reducing the level of working capital tied up in the business.
Cash conversion was exceptionally strong, helped in part by the unwind of the high receivables balance coming into the year, and the combination of all of these factors resulted in a materially stronger balance sheet with net debt leverage below one time. Moving on to the P&L, order intake in the year was very strong at $364 million, up 40% year- on- year. Within this, we have seen good intake on DOD helmets through the year, the highest ever level of orders received for our underwater rebreathers, and success in the recompete of the U.K. General Service Respirator mask. This has resulted in a closing order book of $225 million, representing significant growth in both Avon Protection and Team Wendy. Revenue growth of 12.2% reflects nearly 50% growth in Team Wendy, driven in part by the fuller effect of run rate IHPS deliveries.
This more than offset the expected decline in Avon Protection, resulting largely from the well-trailed hiatus in US filter orders. Operating profit of $31.6 million, over 50% above prior year levels, results in margin of 11.5%, an improvement of 310 basis points year- on- year. I'll walk through an operating profit bridge shortly to pick out the key moving parts. Net finance costs of $6.3 million came in at the lower end of our guidance range, given the better-than-expected cash flow, and the tax charge of $4.4 million equates to an effective tax rate of 17%, which has benefited from a number of non-recurring adjustments. We would expect our normalized tax rate to be around 22%. This all adds up to basic adjusted EPS of $0.69 per share, a very strong performance.
To put the reduced effective tax rate into context, EPS would have been approximately $0.66 per share at a normalized rate. The standout number on the respiratory side of the business is the order book, which has doubled over the last 12 months. We have seen good demand growth for our rebreather product, with significant orders received from the German Navy and New Zealand Navy, and a number of tenders still live in the market with other potential customers. Further, we saw a modest resurgence in demand from the U.S. DOD, with orders up 23% overall, much of which came from increased mask demand. Commercial Americas orders have remained strong through the year, up 29% on 2023. The modest decline in revenue was expected following the gap in the U.S. DOD filter deliveries, and we're hopeful that deliveries will restart later in FY25.
The operating margin held up well in the face of a 7% top-line decline, thanks to the focus on right-sizing the business and driving operational improvements, resulting in an outturn of 18.3%. Given the strength of the order book, however, Avon Protection is well positioned for a return to growth in 2025. The strong order intake picture in Protection carries forward into Team Wendy, with order intake up 45% year- on- year, driven by strong demand on the two U.S. DOD programs. This takes the order book up by over 50%, giving exceptional visibility through 2025 and into 2026 on these two important programs. Revenue growth of 49% was driven by the commencement of ACH Gen II deliveries and the benefit of a full year of IHPS shipments, which, as a reminder, started in earnest in H2 of 2023.
The operating leverage effect of this growth has taken operating profit margin from - 9.3% in 2023 to +3.9% in 2024, which is a great improvement, but still some way off our medium-term ambitions. As a reminder, ACH Gen II shipments, although driving top-line growth, will remain dilutive at the gross margin level, and significantly so until we have completed the move from Irvine to Cleveland in H2 of 2025. So now we move on to the operating profit walk for the year, and starting with the $20.6 million jumping-off point for last year after adjusting for FX. The first positive bar of $10.9 million shows the effect of the 49% revenue growth seen in Team Wendy. Then you can see a further $6.4 million benefit from the operational gearing effect of that growth, which saw gross margins moving forward at a healthy pace.
Then we have a $4.6 million headwind from volume decline in Avon Protection, more than offset by a $4.9 million benefit from the right-sizing exercise within Protection early in FY24. This is where we adjusted the cost base to ensure an acceptable level of profitability without needing any of the unpredictable large one-off orders that this business does benefit from time to time. The next bar shows a $4.1 million positive effect of lower scrap rates across the business year- on- year as we build maturity into the IHPS production, partly offset by the learning curve effect of early production of ACH Gen II Then finally, the last two bars demonstrate a step forward in the quality of earnings within the business.
The first negative bar represents the fact that the business achieved its financial and operational targets in full for the first time in a number of years, resulting in a triggering of the discretionary compensation schemes from a very low base in 2023, and then the last bar shows the year-on-year headwind from the tightened approach to capitalization of R&D. While R&D expenditure grew by more than 10% in 2024, we capitalized $3.9 million less than in 2023. In fact, we capitalized nothing at all, so with capitalization at zero and discretionary comp at max, neither of these two items will be a headwind in 2025. Moving on to the cash flow statement, you can see that net debt reduced by $21 million in the year. The big driver of this improvement was the release of working capital despite the revenue growth seen by the business.
While we had expected the unwind of the high receivables balance at the end of last year, we had also assumed a level of inventory build to support future sales growth. However, owing to the focus on continuous improvement through the year, we have actually held inventory broadly flat. As a reminder, we had prepaid the FY23 pension deficit contribution in FY22, and so the year-on-year impact of the $9.1 million contribution in FY24 is significant, essentially absorbing the increase in EBITDA for the year. And as usual, guidance on future contributions and other financial matters is provided in the appendix to the slides. All of this translates into a meaningful reduction in net debt of $21 million at the end of the year.
The big movements to highlight on the balance sheet include the working capital improvements mentioned earlier, which have resulted in inventory turns increasing by 7% in the year, and overall average working capital turns, which is a measure I like as it eliminates the impact of any period-end heroics, improving by 22%. The other item worth drawing to your attention is the significant decrease in the pension deficit to $17.2 million, down from $40.2 million this time last year. This is due, in part, to our $9.1 million deficit contributions in the year, with the balance owing to a favorable actuarial gain following a change in accounting estimate to use a detailed member-by-member analysis of the deficit. I've included a capital allocation slide in the deck again this time, reflecting the year-end net debt to EBITDA ratio of less than one times.
The chart is essentially unchanged, other than to highlight the progressive nature of the dividend and, given the healthy balance sheet, once through our transformation activities, we will be in a position to look at alternative capital allocation opportunities. So I thought it was worth giving a quick update on transformation costs incurred to date and where we expect them to go from here. In 2024, we invested a total of $13 million in OpEx projects, of which $2.2 million related to the accelerated depreciation and amortization of assets, which won't be needed in the future. There was a further investment of $1.7 million in capital equipment related to the transformation programs, and the buckets of cost broken out on this slide remain largely unchanged from the breakdown provided at the launch of the initiative a year ago.
Investment to date is $3 million higher than originally forecast, partly due to the accelerated D&A costs and partly due to the increased scope of the footprint optimization program. This increased scope will confer incremental benefit over time, which is in part what has highlighted the potential to achieve our medium-term margin and ROIC goals a year earlier than originally expected. Investment in FY25 is expected to continue at broadly comparable levels to 2024, based on projects that have already been identified and processed through our project appraisal funnel, and we remain open to further opportunities with a good payback. The projects in process will be mostly complete by the end of 2025, and we therefore continue to expect a substantial decline in transformation costs in 2026.
So finally, moving on to our expectations for the full year, we expect further good growth in helmet deliveries as we get the full year effect of the ACH Gen II ramp-up, with IHPS deliveries continuing at a similar level to FY24. We also expect to return to modest growth in Avon Protection, underpinned by the robust order book in this business. These factors combined equate to a mid-single-digit revenue growth at the group level. As previously communicated, the financial benefits of the transformation program are not expected to drop through to the bottom line until FY26, and the dilutive effect of ACH Gen II ramp-up is expected to largely absorb the operational gearing from top-line growth, resulting in operating profit margins remaining broadly flat year- on- year. As highlighted on the previous slide, we expect transformation investment in FY25 to remain at a similar level to that seen in FY24.
Finally, we expect cash conversion to return to a more normal level of above 80%, with continued improvements in operating efficiency being partially offset by increased cash costs of transformation as we exit the Irvine, CA facility. You clearly shouldn't expect deleveraging at the same rate as seen in FY24, however, as we don't have a working capital overhang coming into FY25. And with that, I'll now hand back to Jos to update you on operational and strategic progress on our areas of focus.
Thank you very much, Rich. As a reminder, the STAR strategy is designed to deliver our medium-term goals and to deliver long-term growth. When we launched STAR, the strengthen part was about fixing the foundations, and we've now done that. So we've repurposed the strengthen limb of STAR to be all about continuous improvement. This reflects its increasing importance to value creation.
The aims of CI are shown on this slide. Our objective is to use CI to develop our people, create wealth, and drive growth. The other limbs of STAR illustrated on this slide are unchanged. This slide summarizes the key elements of our continuous improvement approach, starting in the center. On the shop floor, our objective is to improve safety, quality, delivery, inventory, and productivity, or SQDIP , as it's known internally. If you visit any of our factories, you will see these metrics on every line, and each line is expected to improve these metrics through Kaizen, continually taking steps forward. Moving around the outside of the circle, we've done a lot to set the tone from the top. Rich and I are regularly on the shop floor taking part in Kaizens, and so are the rest of our senior leadership team.
You will hear from one of our CI leads and one of our business unit presidents in a moment. We have reorganized every factory into value streams to increase accountability and ownership. Every production line now has visible metrics showing progress by the hour, and we now have digital data on our most important lines showing progress real-time. We've developed a new production preparation process to completely transform three of our plants. This process creates a plan for the whole plant, which is then implemented through Kaizen. We've carried out over 350 Kaizen last year. That gives you an idea of the pace that this organization is moving at. We've now changed the majority of our manufacturing lines from traditional batch manufacturing to flow, resulting in some radical improvements. As part of CI, we have a plan to shrink our manufacturing footprint at all plants.
This frees up space to do other things, reduce costs, and reduce our impact on the environment. As our approach to CI matures, we see the improvement steps being taken faster and faster. Velocity is increasing. This slide shows progress on our key operating metrics since the middle of 2023 when we set the targets. As you can see, we're making excellent progress against productivity, scrap, and inventory turns. We've already exceeded our original productivity improvement target of 25%, so we've now increased it to 35%. You will notice that productivity dropped a little recently. This is largely because the rolling 12-month revenue no longer includes the big P12 from 2023. The improvement in inventory turns by 37% has freed up $19 million of cash since the middle of 2023.
We now believe that through CI, we can free up enough cash from inventory to largely pay for the entire transformation project operational expenditure. We thought it would be good to add some color to how we are driving the improvements we are seeing. So I'll now hand over to our head of continuous improvement in Avon Protection, Chandler Gabara. He will then hand over to the President of Team Wendy, James Wilcox.
Thank you, Jos. And good morning, everyone. I'm known as Avon Protection's CI guy, and it is my responsibility to help the team identify continuous improvement activities, but also coach and mentor my team so we can all move forward together through Kaizen. To illustrate how all this works, I'd like to talk to you about GSR manufacturing in our U.K. facility, which was one of over 350 Kaizen events that Jos mentioned earlier.
The spaghetti chart that you can see here up on the board shows the current state of GSR manufacturing pre-Kaizen event. This is a great visual representation of batch production and non-flow. Similar machines are organized with their friends and make components that just go into inventory and zip, as you can see by all the red lines hitting the warehouse there. We recognize that the need to transform our traditional batch manufacturing processes through Kaizen was a necessity. The chart now on the right-hand side shows the current state after the Kaizen was completed. The line flows raw material, so it does not stop until it is a complete and finished good. To achieve this, we had to move equipment around and also make sure we removed unnecessary movement and waste throughout the process.
This Kaizen was able to improve productivity by 25%, reduced our lead times from four weeks to 91 minutes, reduced our inventory by 70%, and reduced the footprint required by 43%. And one thing that we all need to keep in mind is that Kaizen happens at a very high velocity, and this occurred in a very short period of time. And in true continuous improvement fashion, we took these gains and spread it to other processes throughout the UK facility. I am confident that Avon Protection has engaged its people, aligned its purpose through our fierce values, and is effectively improving our processes through Kaizen, which is a fine recipe for the sustainment of a continuous improvement culture and program. Now, it's just a matter of keeping up with our ambitions. But now I'd like to hand it over to James Wilcox, President of Team Wendy. Thank you, everybody.
Thank you, Chandler. Good morning, everybody. Although my name might be new to many of you, I've been with Avon Technologies for over 20 years, working mainly on the respiratory side of the business. Now, leading our Team Wendy business, we are seeing significant traction with our transformation programs to improve head protection division's operating performance while providing a stronger foundation for DOD and commercial growth. It is hard to convey the amount of change in our Cleveland factory over the last six months. Our vision is to have the world's most efficient helmet factory and perhaps the only one with single-piece flow. In order to achieve this and to absorb the work moving from California, we've effectively built an entirely new factory in Cleveland. By using our CI methodology, we are reducing the space we need to manufacture.
As this slide shows, we expect more than double revenue per sq ft in 2026. We have now relaid out all of our commercial lines and built a completely new line for ACH Gen2 and IHPS. These lines move us to much more improved flow so that helmets never stop moving, apart from where there are planned cure times. As this slide shows, there is significantly reduced people movement with a doubling of productivity, 43% reduction in inventory, and much lower scrap levels as a result of having real-time digital data to fast-spot inefficiencies in the line. For the customers, this results in higher quality and a 65% reduction in lead time. I will now hand back to Jos.
Thank you very much, James. Now moving on to transformation. This slide's familiar to you.
The degree of shading on each star illustrates how far our initiatives have progressed through our gates. Looking at the vertical columns, we've now finished planning almost all initiatives, the exceptions of functional excellence, where we're still planning the removal of SAP from our Salem plant, which could save over $1 million a year. In commercial excellence, we've identified an opportunity to accelerate our US commercial sales, and we had a planning workshop on that only last week. Most projects are now well into execution. In some cases, we're already seeing the benefits flow into the P&L. In particular, the work done to improve our Cadillac and Melksham plants has helped respiratory margins, and the work done on pricing has helped gross margins. This slide shows the milestones we've achieved so far, starting with footprint optimization.
The Unity program to consolidate helmet manufacturing on the U.S. East Coast is still on track for completion in 2025. In operational excellence, we are partway through major plant transformations at three of our plants. In functional excellence, we completed the restructuring of the finance function. We're now switching our attention to HR. We need to improve our ability to recruit great people to support our growth. We have done a lot this year to train people on program management, and a new sales excellence program has recently been started. In commercial optimization, we continue to strengthen our e-commerce platform, and we plan to expand that internationally this year. Moving on to growth, the order book is extremely strong. In fact, it's the strongest it's ever been. This slide shows pictorially the main elements of our order book.
The main takeaway is that the order book is broad-based, illustrating the strength of our product portfolio. We have strong demands for masks in Avon Protection, particularly from the U.K., U.S., and Australia, as illustrated in the three left-hand boxes. We also have excellent demand for rebreathers and our supplied air products. In Team Wendy, we have excellent orders for IHPS and ACH, as well as for bump helmets and pads. Happily, the DOD has decided to offer our Cloudline lightweight high-performance pads as an extra with every IHPS helmet for at least the next year. This is in addition to the pads that come in the helmet, which we also make. We are very well positioned for the medium and the long term, adding to our portfolio of long-term contracts. These support our objective to grow above our markets over the long term.
In Avon Protection, we won contracts with the Swedish police, German rebreathers, the U.K. MoD on GSR, and masks into Australia. The Australia win is particularly exciting. We expect to equip the Australian military over the next two and a half years with our most advanced mask, the FM54. This is an important win for us and cements our position as the key supplier to the Five Eyes nations. In Team Wendy, we've been told that our contract to supply helmets to the Australian military will be extended by another five years. We're also making good progress on discussions with the DOD to extend our next-gen IHPS program into sustainment beyond 2028, and an extension has been identified for ACH Gen2 helmets as well. Just stepping back for a moment, our markets remain supportive.
This is driven by technology refresh in helmets and rebreathers, the importance of infantry and CBRN protection, as illustrated by the Ukrainian war. The continuing rise in gun crime and drugs in the U.S. drives demand for both ballistic and respiratory protection, and the upcoming Soccer World Cup and Olympics on the West Coast of the U.S. drives demand. We do not typically see much difference in defense spending between the Democrats and the Republicans, but note that European defense spending may increase in response to President-elect Trump encouraging NATO members to spend more on defense. In advance, in Avon Protection, winning the GSR contract was important to defending our commanding position in air-powered respirators. Pricing is challenging to start with, but it will increase significantly in H2 of 2026. Demand for masks from the DOD has picked up a bit, though obtaining reliable forecasts remains a challenge.
The DOD recently donated 30,000 M50 masks to the Ukraine, but we do not yet know when those will be replaced. In rebreathers, we've been busy submitting three bids to NATO countries and hope to hear whether we have won over the next couple of months. The US Navy canceled its long-running procurement for rebreathers. This is disappointing, but we remain hopeful that both the US Navy and SOCOM will ultimately align with other NATO countries and buy our rebreathers. We have the most advanced rebreathers in the world. As a NATO Navy recently said to me, Comparing our rebreathers to the competition is like comparing a Tesla to a Model T Ford, and we are the Tesla in this description. Looking forwards, we plan to launch the mid-tier mask this financial year. There's actually one on the table there.
We're ramping up production of rebreathers and boots and gloves. We're starting to get traction in chemically resistant suits, with some early sales demonstrating that customers do value a one-stop shop in CBRN protection. In Team Wendy, we achieved run rate on IHPS and delivered five lots of ACH. We plan to produce around 50,000 ACH in 2025 and approaching 100,000 in 2026. ACH is diluted from a margin perspective due to historic pricing, but we are making progress, getting the gross margin to a level that is acceptable to us. The EPIC helmet is popular with US police forces, but sales in 2024 were hindered a bit by long lead times. We've now got the lead times down, and that should help sales this year.
Looking forward, our plan is to increase market share by offering the shortest lead times and exciting new capabilities with a new rifle-rated helmet, a new bump helmet, and a broader range of accessories. There is a lot to do this year, and execution is going to be critical. In Revolutionize, we continue to invest in the long term, generally co-investing alongside our customers. We've won funding for three different projects to improve the interface between our masks and the DOD's chemically resistant suits. If successful, that could lead to significant revenue in 2027 and beyond. We continue to work on the next generation of filters and diving masks, and perhaps more significantly, we have two further funded DOD programs in the pipeline, which will accelerate air-powered respirators beyond the current M50 range.
Both SBUs are working towards greater integration of head and respiratory protection, and we're seeking funding to accelerate that project. In Team Wendy, we're working towards higher-performing ballistic materials and next-generation pad systems to further reduce traumatic brain injury and to avoid heat buildup in the helmet. Turning to the medium-term goals. As you can see from the middle row of this slide, we're making real progress towards our medium term. Now we're well into our value creation plan. We can be more precise on timing. We see potential to reach our medium-term goals of operating profit and ROIC targets a year earlier in 2026. Our style is to be transparent about risks. The ramp-up of shell molding on the East Coast will be challenging. The material science is complex, and we will need to be both creative and disciplined to reduce scrap and rework.
Recruiting and retaining good operators is tricky, but we are making progress on this front. We don't currently have an order for filters from the DOD. We remain hopeful that this will come, but for now, DOD filter demand is low. We have recently seen increases to U.S. healthcare costs and employer National Insurance in the U.K. We will try and offset these through CI improvement and pricing. With regard to opportunities, we have a pipeline of helmet and rebreather opportunities internationally, which could help accelerate growth. There is also a possibility that the DOD could increase demand for masks to backfill the ones that it's recently given to the Ukraine. With regard to CI, I still see a lot of opportunity in every plant. If we can achieve the capability and culture we want, we may ultimately find that we've been a bit conservative in our modeling.
In conclusion, we believe that we have a recipe that will lead to growth, margin cash, and improved ROIC. Our transformation program remains on schedule, and progress made to date can already be seen in our financial and operational metrics. We have supportive markets. We have a record order book, and that gives us excellent visibility for the year ahead. We have a stable recurring revenue base, which will get even larger as we deploy rebreathers, masks into Australia, and helmets into the U.S. police forces and SWAT teams. We have a strong competitive moat with long-term contracts and de-leading technologies. All of these factors give us increased confidence, and we now see the potential to reach our medium-term operating profit margin and ROIC targets a year earlier. Thanks, everyone, for your time, and we will now happily answer questions. Have we got Steve in the room as well?
No. Yes, we do. And we've also got the president of the respiratory business here. So any difficult questions on respiratory? Straight to that man there, please.
Good morning, Henry. Morning, guys. It's Henry Carver from Davy. Just a couple from me. I mean, one, I'm interested in that you mentioned in the statement the relationship with the DOD and how that's sort of progressing, and it sounded like there was a bit of change in movement there. I just wondered if you could give any more color around that, sort of what you're doing and how that's changing.
With the DOD in respiratory or health?
I think it's in respiratory in the statement. That's what you're talking about. But to be honest, I'm interested across the board how they're approaching.
I think we're not seeing a major difference in demand from the DOD at the moment. What we definitely do have is a much stronger relationship, and that's translating into future programs of record, which will benefit us in the medium and the long term. I think the three we talked about, all on the hood mask interface, if successful, you probably are familiar with how this works, but you have a year or two, well, probably more like two or three years of research and development with the DOD and working with them to refine the product for their requirements. But actually, that particular product is the interface between the mask and the suits, and there's millions of masks and suits out there. So that could be very good for us if we can develop a product that meets the customer's need.
I think the other thing that we are excited about, but we're not getting too carried away, is we are working with the DOD on a next generation of masks with them. We're still working towards the contract on that. We hope it will go our way over the next few months, but we'll see. But I think what these long-term programs illustrate is the strength of the relationship that Steve and his team are building. And it is radically different to two years ago, where we had no programs of record. Now we've got three, and we're working on probably a couple more.
That sort of leads on to the other question, which was about the cost of that hood mask that you're looking for funding on, or was that a different? That was the helmet and the hood mask interface.
Okay, so it was the helmet and respirator combination you were saying you're looking for.
Yeah, so we've been working with the DOD on funding of an integrated system. We actually have, I think one house has approved $10 million. One's approved $2 million. The funding will probably end up somewhere in the middle, but we will then have to compete for the funding. So again, not getting carried away at this point, but the important thing is that the relationship with the DOD is creating opportunities for long-term product development. I think that's what excites us.
I think the other thing, and we had a chat before this, but it is really important that the relationship on helmets with the DOD has really helped us with our continuous improvement because historically, they've taken months to approve an equipment move in one of our factories, and that really runs our continuous improvement process into the sand. Now we've worked with them. They've been very constructive, and they've shortened that to about five days now, and that is enabling us to really speed up the improvement process. And I think it's also a very good indication of how strong our relationship with them that they are willing to work with us.
Great. Thanks.
Hi, guys. Andrew Humphrey at Peel Hunt. Wanted to follow up on some of the margin dynamics on Team Wendy in particular with the factory move ongoing.
You're clearly seeing big volumes coming through on those two major helmet categories, which is great to see. If I look at this year, it looks like drop-through there is in the region of kind of 30%, which is a combination of IHPS and ACH being up year- on- year. You've clearly highlighted that ACH is dilutive to mix there, so clearly kind of lower than that 30% figure overall. I want to get a feeling for how much of that expectation for this year, the kind of conservative expectation on margin is driven by overhead ramping up in Ohio ahead of the wholesale move of production there in 2026.
Very little, actually. So the incremental overhead in 2025 is going to be pretty minimal.
Actually, as a blend across the year, it's going to be de minimis because while we are adding in Cleveland, we're also subtracting gradually in Irvine. So that sort of stuff is a bit of a wash. The thing to watch, as you've highlighted, is the product mix. ACH is going from a relatively small volume in 2024 to a reasonably significant volume, probably 50,000 helmets or so in 2025, and it is dilutive. As I said earlier, it will continue to be dilutive, actually, but it will be substantially dilutive until such time as we've exited Cleveland at Irvine.
You've highlighted some of the pricing dynamics on ACH in particular. Is there opportunity for a repricing on that at some point?
It's a five-year contract. It does increase every year a bit, but only really with inflation. I think that's a self-help story.
We'll start with the pricing we inherited. We would love it if it had been priced differently, but you've got to play the cards you've got. However, there's a bit of me that likes the pricing because it's forcing us to get very, very efficient. And actually, our pricing is a lot more competitive than the competitor. That's frustrating. But if we can make money at the pricing we've got, we are going to be unbeatable in the medium term. And I think that's really the big picture is we want to become the most efficient, highest technology helmet provider, and I think ACH is kind of forcing us to go there anyway. I would say that the ramp-up is pretty extraordinary.
We have a very experienced plant manager in Cleveland, ex-Toyota guy, and he said to me the other day that never in his career has he seen a factory expand as fast as that Cleveland factory is expanding, and it's got to go from 0 to 100,000 ACH helmets this year, by the end of this year. That is pretty extraordinary. Stuff could go wrong. I think some of that stuff going wrong is in our forecast. Could it go a bit better than we expect? It could do. It could also go a bit worse than we expect. It's going to be a real challenge, and I think James has got a lot on his plate this year. If we exit this year well, then next year is looking good.
Can I ask about how we should be thinking about the working capital dynamics with that factory move as well? Clearly, really strong performance on inventory this year. You've highlighted the receivables timing effects as well. How do we think about working capital this year with that factory move ongoing, and how should we be thinking about that longer term?
I'll let Rich answer that, but I would say that the factory move will result in a bit of an inventory build. In fact, it is now because we're building ahead in California so that we can seamlessly move and the customer doesn't really notice the move. So I think turns, average turns, which is what we measure, won't progress as much this year as it would ordinarily because of the inventory build.
Actually, rebreathers, we've got some inventory build there as well because as production ramps up, there's some long lead time items.
Did you want to comment further?
Yeah. I mean, first of all, absolute inventory, as Josh said, will go up a bit. We're building some buffer for a whole load of very good and healthy reasons. In fact, in some cases, we're probably not building it as fast as we'd like, but we will catch up. The turns is the important thing. So I think absolute inventory will creep up, but the business is growing. Average working capital turns, again, as I highlighted earlier, that's the measure I like. We won't see another 22% improvement in 2025, but we should see north of 10%. And frankly, it'd be a bit disappointing if we didn't. So I think the turns will continue to move in the right direction.
Great. Thank you.
Morning, Toby Thorrington from Equity Development. Just obviously a very good year for order intake, record order book position. Just trying to get a bit more color on that, if possible, please. So was it as simplistic as a higher level of tender activity and a similar sort of conversion rate or an improved conversion rate over where it's tracked historically? That's the first question.
Yeah, it's a good question. It's kind of a bit of a game of two halves, actually. On the helmet side of the business, it's cementing progress to date on those two key US DOD programs, which has given the customer confidence to lean forward with orders placed on us. So we're well covered, well into 2026 on both of those programs. When you get the helmet orders, there are associated orders with pads and retention systems and everything else.
So that's a little bit of a snowball effect, which is helpful. On the respiratory side, certainly increased tender activity, particularly when you look at rebreathers. So there's a lot more activity out there in the market now than there was certainly 18 months ago and probably 12 months ago as well. We've really started to see some of those convert. So we won Germany. We won New Zealand. There are a few more live ones out there that we're pretty confident in. So looking forward to some good news there, I think, over the course of the coming six months or so. On the mask side, there was a resurgence in the U.S. DOD. That helped, certainly, both on masks and accessories. Commercial Americas was strong in 2024. I don't necessarily expect to see significant growth there in 2025, but we have seen some good wins elsewhere.
Josh highlighted the Australian ADF, actually, Australian Defense Force order. I mean, that's fantastic news for a whole load of reasons. Reason number one, it's a pretty chunky set of orders over the course of the next two or three years. Reason number two, strategically, it's our fourth of the Five Eyes, which is great. The one we don't currently have is Canada, where Airbus, who are a competitor to us, are incumbent, and they're Canadian. So I think we've seen increased tender activity. We've seen a pretty healthy win rate, and in some cases, I think that win rate has exceeded our expectations.
Okay. Would you care to give us a bit of guidance at the macro levels of tender activity for the new financial year and expected conversion rate?
We tend not to guide on orders. Sometimes we see these things coming.
Sometimes we don't. And that's kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't. If we don't guide, that an order we don't see coming comes and then we win it, we look a bit daft. And if we do guide and we don't win it, we still look daft.
It was a macro question on individual orders,
but a pipeline is year on year stronger. Stronger, right? Yeah. But there are some quite big things in the pipeline that are quite binary. I would say respiratory, in particular, Steve Steen has been very busy on bidding recently, and some of those we're now waiting for with anticipation. In fact, the board's been quite busy because some of them have been big enough to trip into board approval level. So I think there's stuff in the pipeline, but we still have to go and win it. Sure.
Understood. Okay. And completely unrelated question. Should we be expecting a similar sort of cash contribution to the pension fund in this financial year? And what's the outlook for the next triennial and all that kind of thing?
There's guidance in the back of the deck. So we set out contributions in 2025, 2026, and 2027. From memory, it's just a shade under GBP 5 million in 2025.
Right. Okay. That's grand. Thank you.
Hi. David Farrell from Jefferies. Kind of alluded to kind of a fresh capital allocation policy at the end of next year once you're through the kind of transformation spend. Maybe slightly to preempt that, can you just talk about M&A and what you're seeing in the pipeline there?
So we're not yet working on M&A opportunities.
I think we've certainly tried to be very consistent that we want to demonstrate that we have a recipe for improving our own businesses, and once we've done that, then we will consider buying other companies and improving them using the same recipe, so we've always felt that we needed a few years to demonstrate to the market that we have a value creation methodology that is effective. I think last year's results are definitely a good step in that direction. I think we need to also get this year to work out well. I think if we do that, though, and we really start building confidence internally that we have a team that can keep repeating that, then we would look at opportunities. We would stick very close to our existing markets.
We'd ideally look for more of the same and ideally something that we can put through our channel to market, which we think is extremely strong. We are very well aware, though, that most M&A deals don't create value. And if we can't find something that we consider value accretive, then we'll look at returning cash to shareholders.
Okay. And then follow-up question. Some of your peers have kind of alluded to the U.K. Defence Review slowing down orders. Is there any kind of risk to your business? I know it's a much smaller portion relative to the U.S. DOD.
We don't think so. I mean, we don't make great margins on GSR anyway. So if we sell less, the margins will go up. But I think, joking aside, our mask contract is, I think, four years with another five option years.
So it will depend on the number of recruits they have that drives the number of masks. I don't see that radically changing. They've already cut it pretty hard. So I think GSR mask demand will probably be pretty steady over the next eight years or however long we've got left of the contract.
Great. Thanks.
Morning. Richard Paige from Numis . Hello. Before, you've always sort of said you don't get much visibility with what's being used in the front line of your kit. Obviously, you mentioned the U.S. order there. Do you get much visibility of what's being changed?
No. They're not very able to do that. The problem is that every base is using our mask up, and they get broken or they have new recruits or they lose them, and they're not very good at feeding in that into the central organization take on the orders.
So we tend to get quite reactive orders. The best we can do really is kind of use regression analysis to try and work out what they're ordering every year. They do give us a forecast of 15,000 masks a year, and then last year they bought 25,000. So that shows how good their forecasting is. I mean, we like it when it's on the upside, but I suppose it could also go the other way. So it can be a bit frustrating. I think if they have definitely given 30,000 masks to the Ukraine, logic would suggest they will have to backfill them at some point, but we don't have a forecast that has demand picking up at this point.
And aligned to that, is there any technology or learnings from anything being used that's changing how certain countries are procuring or looking to you to change what they're?
I think Australia is really interesting because they have moved straight to our highest-end mask, the FM54. It's also our most expensive mask. Generally, that's sold to special forces, but they've equipped their entire military with the FM54. I mean, interestingly, they also buy one of our highest-end helmets. So they clearly have, they look after their troops very well. We would like other countries to adopt the same approach of going down the FM54 route. But I don't know if you want to add to that, Steve.
That's more of an increasingly you're seeing end users start to want to move from a standard 50 series to 53 and then eventually 54. So there are a number of reasons for that. But most often on the respiratory side, it's a need to be able to survive that fight.
So, to get increased lethality, that's typically what you'd see with an FM53 or an FM54. The FM53 and FM54, you're much better able to shoot. As the FM50, you can survive. So as the philosophy of fighting changes, then people should migrate to our higher-end offerings.
Thank you. Shifting focus back, if I think back to the CMD, you obviously have that wonderful building bridge to the margin targets with a rather red downward column of contingency. You've accelerated delivery. This feels like a [uncertain] . Has anything in that red column increased or is anything in terms of executing?
Yeah. I mean, actually, yes. I actually referred to them, but U.S. healthcare costs actually went up quite significantly. And obviously, National Insurance costs us about GBP 450,000 a year on an annualized basis. We didn't plan for that, but we did plan for stuff going wrong.
I think the stuff that has gone wrong is well within our planning assumptions. We didn't know exactly what it would be, but we knew some things wouldn't go our way. Will more contingency unwind? Obviously, we're not guiding to that at this point. We're going to try and unwind more contingency through this year. But we're still seeing pretty high scrap levels. We're still seeing pretty high rework rates. We do have a big ramp up. I think the guys are doing a good job on getting the scrap rates down. In fact, we had some quite good breakthroughs over the last couple of weeks. But there's still things that can go wrong. So we're going to hold some contingency for now. We'll let you know if things change.
I knew you'd like that one. Just finally, on the filters contract for the DOD, what is the timeframe we should expect?
Since we've got the head of the division here, and I want to know the answer to this, we'll turn over to him. Steve. I'm going to go on microphone as well.
Yeah. Great question. I'd love to know the answer. You'll remember we had a history where we had a two-year contract delivered in 12 months. Officially, we've just last week, maybe the week before, we actually closed that contract out, although we delivered it. The official closeout of that contract was about two weeks ago. I expect that now to be the trigger that will start the discussion on when the next filter order will come. We're reasonably confident. We'll see some order activity this year.
Specifically when, I can't really tell you whether it'd be H1 or H2 of the year.
It would actually, if we get it, it'll probably be announced also. You'll see it.