Welcome to today's Bodycote 2021 full-year results presentation. My name is Jordan, and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you'd like to register a question, you may do so by pressing star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad, or for those of you connecting via the webcast, you can submit questions via the questions tab at the top right. I'm now gonna hand over to Stephen Harris, Group Chief Executive. To begin, Stephen, please go ahead.
Thank you, Jordan. Hello, everyone. If someone had told me even a month ago that in this day and age, we would be witnessing what's going on in the world right now, I would have questioned their sanity. It brings to mind that song back in the '80s, "Live on TV, you can watch them die." Watching this tragedy unfold right before our eyes makes it deeply personal, and our hearts go out to everyone touched by it. Let's move on to the business of the morning, if we can. From a business perspective, just let me clarify, Bodycote has no direct exposure to Russia, Belarus, or Ukraine. Undoubtedly, some of our customers are likely to be impacted, and I will try to bring out those relevant items as we go through the presentation this morning. Dominique and I will be taking you through the business.
I will try and cover what we believe may be top of shareholders' minds first, then Dominique will take you into the financial review, and then I'll come back and we can look at the business. Finally, we'll open it up for Q&A. So if we go to our highlights, I think, there should be no surprises in these numbers. If there are surprises, they should be pleasant surprises. Basically, our revenues are a bit less than we told you that we were probably gonna get at the trading update last year, and our margins are a little higher. And all in all, that brought us to headline operating profit, pretty much on the button as to where we suggested it would be. Very good free cash flow, as you can see, and we've got closing net debt of GBP 52 million.
Now, on this highlight slide at the bottom, because of the relevance of this in the world today, I've just clarified for everybody when we talk about emerging markets what emerging markets are for us. They're arranged in order of size down there at the bottom of that final slide. In terms of dividends, I'm pleased to say that we've actually got an increase in dividends. It shows our confidence in the future. We're basically gonna be recommending that we have a total year dividend of 20p with an ordinary dividend of 13.8p. Now, the strategic progress bullets on this slide we'll be covering as we go through this presentation, so you'll see these items coming out as we move forward.
So let's move to the first item that I well, Dominique and I believe are the kind of things that, you know, you're interested in. So we'll go to the strategic progress items first. So if we look at, you know, what we've been doing in the year, our energy and carbon reduction program is gathering pace. I'll remind you that Bodycote is primarily an energy and people manager. This is what we do every day. Our restructuring program completed successfully in the year, nice result. And we've refocused our Western European business on higher quality opportunities. And in doing that, we've transferred equipment around our footprint both within Western Europe, but also into Eastern Europe. And what we've done is target the capacity where business is more flexible and prospects grow, growth is stronger. Just a point on our capacity, we've preserved our productive capacity.
We have less sites, but our productive capacity has been preserved. And if you see what we had in 2019 and the fact that we were only in 2019, we were only at somewhere around 60% utilization. We have a lot of spare capacity, and that's quite important, and I'll come back to that later on in the presentation. In doing this, we've increased our focus on emerging markets investments, particularly on the automotive electric vehicle project. And we opened three new facilities in the year, one in emerging markets. And basically, the one in emerging markets was in Hungary. If we look at the and by the way, they're all in early ramp-up phase, so they aren't generating profits at this point in time. Moving on to Specialist Technologies, so we've continued our investment in that.
Two of the main points of that are we've got a major expansion of one HIP plant. That's in North America. We also have one new HIP plant nearing completion. That's also in North America. Then the final point, we did actually make a small acquisition in December. That, in fact, is a HIP business, and that's in Switzerland. So let's move on to something that a lot of people have been asking us in recent weeks, is what about inflation? So let's talk about what we do in Bodycote day in, day out. So the cost inflation in 2021 was passed on successfully. We have the usual lags. So let's go through the mechanics of this. So significant cost inflation in energy and labor impacted Q4 profitability, and we think that will continue into early 2022.
If anybody's got a different opinion than that, please let me know, but that's what we think. So the way we deal with energy cost increases is that we use surcharges, particularly when they're high, it's a highly volatile energy market. Or we've got contractual indexation. So, about 20% of our business is managed by long-term agreement that has, built into the long-term agreement, contractual indexation for labor and energy. Those are there, and some of them last, you know, the next 15 years or so. What it means is that, there's no chance that the inflation won't be passed through. It's just a question of timing. Labor cost is a little bit different. So when you get labor cost, when the company sees that as a major form is when the pay reviews take place.
Basically, in our business around the world, those pay reviews take place between 1st of January and September, with the vast majority being in April and May. The labor cost inflation, we address through price increases, or contractual indexation. So we know when the labor cost is gonna hit us, and we go to customers and we ask for price increases. Typically, we buy energy forward a quarter in advance. This is what we do every day. Surcharges and price increases typically take effect in 1-3 months. You can't just immediately tell a customer, "Sorry, your surcharge is now whatever it is." You have to give them some notice. So, typically, if you give them a surcharge now, there'll be a 1-month delay on that, and price increases, when you notify them of the price increases, they typically need 3 months for those.
That's important because the price increases are something that we have notice of because it's trying to cover our labor, and the energy surcharges are things we don't have notice of. Just to make sure everybody's aware, we started with surcharges and price increases back in September. We're already in motion in covering this current period of, you know, probably the most volatile inflation we've seen in a long time. Just going back to contractual indexation, that lags cost impact by about 6-12 months. It varies, but, you know, on average, it's 6-12 months. Going on to our ESG strategy, very timely in some respects. The biggest impact for Bodycote in ESG is climate change. One, because we use energy, and two, that managing climate change at energy and carbon is actually good for business.
So we have committed to the Science Based Targets initiative, and we intend to publish our 5-year targets later in the year. Our environmental strategy is based around reduction of carbon emissions as we have got no other emissions of note. We are not only reducing our own footprint. That's something that is fairly straightforward to do. But we're also helping other companies with their footprint. And the reason for that is, as a specialist in this area, Bodycote is effectively, as I've said before, a manager manager of energy and a manager of people. And we've got inherently higher utilization and more energy-efficient processes than typically captive or in-house facilities. So customers who outsource their work to us often get a 40% reduction in their carbon footprint, read energy. So with that, I'm gonna hand over to, Dominique, who's going to walk you through the financial review.
Thank you, Stephen, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Chart 9 summarizes the group's financial results. Revenues grew 3% at actual rates, at 7.1% when you take foreign exchange movements into account, 7.1% at constant currency. It's not on this chart, but stripping out Ellison, which was acquired in April 2020, organic constant currency revenue growth was 5.2%. I'll come on to discuss the increase in profitability and our cash flow performance, later. In the meantime, I think it's worth noting that margin increased significantly from 12.6% to 15.4% at group level. Again, I'll come on to look at the divisional margins in the slides to come. Return on capital employed also improved, reflecting the improvement in profitability.
Given the increased profitability in earnings, the board has decided to recommend an increase in the final dividend from 13.4 pence to 13.8 pence, bringing the total dividend for the year to 20 pence. The final dividend will be paid out as usual in early June. Chart 10 shows the headline operating profit bridge. Now, Stephen's just taken you through the impact on our business of the cost inflation that we are currently experiencing. Overall, for 2021, we again recovered the impact of inflation across our business through pricing. This is in spite of the price lag effect on our business that Stephen has already described and which was certainly having an impact on our results towards the end of last year. Organic revenue grew 5.2%, which translates into GBP 30 million last year.
But with good drop-through and cost savings from restructuring, this translated into a GBP 43 million contribution to operating profit. The chart also shows that having cancelled our bonus in 2020 as an immediate cost saving measure in the face of the pandemic, variable pay returned to the P&L in 2021. Chart 11 shows the divisional split and, unsurprisingly, reflects in part the different experiences of the two divisions in terms of revenue development, with AGI revenues up while ADE's revenues were down versus 2020. Analyzing this a bit deeper on Chart 12, you can see that we've juxtaposed here the two divisions, organic revenue and operating profit development, since 2019. Looking first at ADE, while we saw positive development on civil aerospace revenues in the second half of the year, overall revenues for 2021 were still below 2020's.
Nonetheless, cost savings from the Restructuring Program and other efficiency gains allowed for a 3 percentage point increase in margins. As revenues come back, we would expect to see good drop-through and strong profit and margin development. Looking then at AGI, you can see here that AGI's revenues have already partially recovered during the year. Consequently, with the positive drop-through from this revenue increase, combined with savings from restructuring, positive revenue mix, and other efficiency gains, AGI margins were up 7 percentage points. Profits were actually above 2019's level. Onto Chart 13. Once again, we have strong cash flow performance with free cash conversion at 111%, which is excellent and working capital levels back to normal levels back in 2021. The next chart, 14, looks at how we use our free cash in order of priority.
So it's there to support profitable organic growth primarily, then paying our ordinary dividends, investing in acquisitions aligned with our growth strategy, and finally, returning any excess cash to shareholders. On Chart 15, then taking a look at the balance sheet, net debt's at GBP 52 million. That's after we paid GBP 49 million of dividends in the year and the remaining GBP 58 million for the Ellison acquisition. We've got plenty of liquidity, and more than four years still left on our credit facility. Our headline tax rate at 22.3% is in line with guidance. Finally, based on current exchange rates, today's exchange rates, we would face, all things being equal, a GBP 2 million negative headwind on headline operating profit from the strength of sterling versus last year, during 2022. Now back to Stephen.
Thank you, Dominique. I haven't just glitched on the slides. Yeah, go back. Thank you. So, we're on slide 17. This slide I've put up there is really just a summary slide, and it shows you the comparative shapes of the revenues and sizes across our main areas. And you can see the general industrial slide there, heading north. I can remind you that general industrial of all of our areas covers pretty much everything. We've actually lumped energy in there for now because energy's so small, and you'll see that later on. And the general industrial curves, they move quite slowly. They don't move quickly. And when they keep going, it takes a lot to turn. That's not to say there's not a lot going on right now. Automotive, you can see smaller amount. And then aerospace and defense, you can see what's happening there.
So let's go to general industrial first. Here you can see that general industrial makes up 49% of the total revenues of the group. And 8% of that is energy. Year-on-year change, 10% increase. And the pleasing thing about this is that, as I said, general industrial does not move quickly. It comprises so many different segments. And the exit rate for the year is already above the pre-pandemic levels. The initial recovery was actually funded out of the operating expenditures as customers' production lines switched back on. Some people don't realize that there's a significant part of our business that actually is OPEX-related. And now we're actually seeing additional revenue growth as the capital cycle ramps up. And that's ongoing. And that's very pleasing.
Just a point to note here that if anybody needs to move in a hurry in the next 2 years, because that's how long it takes to lay down capacity in this business in this industry. In fact, if they want to move in a hurry in the next 2 years, they have to go to where their capacity already exists. And Bodycote has a lot of capacity in the world. And I have to say, we've got spare capacity and lots of it. Moving on to automotive then. This is quite an interesting situation. You can see the shape of the curves there in the sequential downturn that we've been seeing in automotive. And of course, everybody's pretty aware of. There were supply chain issues there. And for shorthand, people have been saying chips, semiconductors.
But of course, we all know it's not really just chips. This is supply chain issues right through the supply chain, and it's all kinds of stuff. Yeah, I think everybody can remember the ships on the west coast of the U.S. lined up for, you know, hundreds of miles trying to get into port to bring in product after the pandemic freeze down. Trying to get the supply chains moving again has been a laborious effort. And what we see today is that those supply chains are actually easing. In fact, we've got quite a few indicators that the supply chain is starting to be available. Some people might say, "Well, does that matter in the current environment?" Well, we watch this area, you know, a lot.
We have various signposts that we look at, including stuff that's published to the general, you know, the outside world, which I'm sure you folks are all familiar with, plus also, of course, the information that we get directly from our large customers. And I have to say that even as we sit here today, the signposts are indicating, particularly in North America, that automotive is moving north, which is a staggering thing. But if you all recall, it might be somewhat different kind of crisis that we're in today. But back in the pandemic, you know, we've been through, sort of, sharp changes in automotive. And the indicators we got then were very accurate. Are they going to be different now? I don't know.
All I can tell you is that, you know, when the price of gas - and I mean here at the petrol pump in the US - was similar to the prices a little bit lower, but similar to the prices that we have today, the amount of gas guzzling four-by-fours and pickup trucks didn't even dent. Right now, the indicators are that that's carrying on. So moving on to the growth in China. So we had very good growth in China all throughout there, 16%. And as a result, China is now 10% of our automotive revenues. A reminder that our automotive these days, it's either platform agnostic, or we're targeting electric vehicles. And we've got most of it's platform agnostic. It doesn't matter what kind of vehicle it is. You still need to have steering gear and running gear.
I mentioned the significant pent-up demand for new vehicles. Now, the semiconductor situation isn't completely out of the woods yet, clearly. But it's quite interesting to see what's happening in terms of the new car build, because there's a tremendous demand for second-hand cars or has been up to now. And the OEs, the OEMs, what they've been doing is taking all the extras out of the car. So you can't get your seat heat, so your heated seats or your heated steering wheels maybe. And they're basically offering standard systems so that they can conserve the amount of electronics and semiconductors that they have available, and put them into the vehicles that, you know, that are best used. So, you've still got a lot of productive capacity in automotive. And the real question is, do people want to buy it?
It would seem to be, at least in North America, the answer is yes. So in total, the automotive business, our automotive business, we spent the last 2 years really streamlining it and positioning it for growth, particularly in electric vehicles. And I think we're in a very good place on that. So aerospace and defense, this is a very interesting, at least for me, area. So we've seen progressive improvements through the year. But it's still down 34% compared with 2019. Civil aerospace revenues in the fourth quarter were up 37%. What we've seen is improving narrowbody new build, and we thought that would happen. I think the shock for us, if it is a shock, is how strong the widebody aftermarket has been. And it's been much stronger.
I mean, for a market that up to now they've not really been building new platforms, the widebody aftermarket's been very strong. We can talk a little bit about why that is, maybe later. But I'll just mention the fact that you have had a case of delayed or deferred maintenance when all these planes were grounded and as they've been coming into the air. That's happening. There are sort of so-called hot-swap engines. Numbers are bigger. And you've also got more flying hours. So it's flying hours that matter in terms of spares. Reminder for everybody, our spare sales and our new-build sales are the same thing. We do the same components. There's no difference in price. There's no difference in margin. It doesn't matter if it's new or aftermarket.
And the aerospace and defense mid-term revenues, we still believe will climb well above 2019 because of our higher platform content. Let me just pause on this and draw out the fact there. Well, what happens if you can't get new titanium? What happens if the price of nickel's gone up a lot? So titanium is used these days primarily in the platform, the plane platforms. You can't build these modern planes without titanium. And the primary reason for that is that if you overlay carbon fiber onto aluminum or aluminum, it the aluminum corrodes. So you need something that is not going to be subject to that. And it's electrolytic corrosion that's going on. And titanium was the answer. Titanium's very light, very strong, and you can use carbon fiber on it. So that the majority of titanium being used is in the airframes.
Nickel, on the other hand, is actually used in the engines in terms of the nickel alloys. It's tiny amounts of nickel in the steel, but they go into the engines. Just so that we understand the situation, I'm told that Boeing brought forward a year's supply of titanium. So they already have a year's supply of titanium in stock. Airbus, of course, as everybody probably knows, brought Aubert & Duval to integrate their titanium supply chain. The interesting thing about Aubert & Duval is that they have the only real scale recycled titanium facility in the world. So they don't necessarily need that much new titanium. So there looks to be about a year's worth of titanium in the pipeline. Of course, the stocks, inventories in the supply chains here in aerospace and defense, they, they're pretty full anyway.
So the immediate impact, in terms of building things, is not, is not here this year. But it does beg the question if the price of nickel is so high and the price of fuel is so high, are you going to build two narrowbodies? Or, or if you can only have enough titanium in 2023 to build one plane, would you build a widebody? I have no idea. But the paradigm that we were backing, on narrowbodies versus widebodies may have fundamentally shifted for the near term. Don't know the answer to that. The nice thing about it is we've got great exposure on widebodies, and we've got very good exposure on narrowbodies. So whatever comes, comes. That's really an interesting thing on aerospace and defence. Moving to Emerging Markets. So, you know, the growth for our Emerging Markets has been held back by revenues in Mexico.
And once again, I've put at the bottom of the slide here, our particular emerging markets, where we are. Those are the only places we call emerging markets. And China, of course, is a big contributor to this. The reason Mexico held us back is that Mexico is fundamentally the supply chain for North American automotive. So a lot of the components that go into North American automotive are manufactured in Mexico. And during this supply chain problem that we saw last year, Mexico didn't fare very well. And our customer in Mexico, customers in Mexico, are tier ones. So, you know, that's an interesting twist on life there. Outside of those areas, automotive revenue grew 20% elsewhere. So in emerging markets. So good growth in automotive in the emerging markets, ex-Mexico. And importantly, general industrial revenues were up 30%.
So quite a nice progress going on in emerging markets. So just a word on Specialist Technologies. You can see they are not going to go into much details, but they continue to outperform their Classical Heat Treatment sort of neighbours, if you like, or comparators, and doing quite well. They will continue to do that as we go forward. Then just going to a summary on page 23, slide 23. So in summary, we finished our restructuring program. We've actually had GBP 30 million of permanent cost savings occurring in 2021. And in 2022, we'll see a further GBP 10 million from the program, in terms of the full impact. The overall quality of the business and the mix in the business has been improved. And by that, I mean the quality of the business.
So to be clear, I'm not suggesting for any moment that we produce poor quality. It's actually the quality from a financial perspective. And we've improved that. Our margins have improved to 15.4%. And this is just carrying on the journey. We've said now that we expect our margins to be over 20%. The only question is when. It may be sooner, maybe later. And then cost inflation's being successfully passed on, albeit with the usual lags. Automotive's is recovering quite well. But, you know, there are supply chain issues. Importantly, aerospace is now accelerating. But there's supply chain volatility ahead. And you can see that from nickel prices and the like.
The other thing that's interesting that's going on is, of course, unsurprisingly, the aerospace and defense area. We're seeing a very large growth in demand, which for us, I mean, we're not a big company, but for us is quite material. This is people wanting to quite quickly turn around additional capital, frankly. And that means they need capacity. Whether we get it or not is a different question. But there's clearly some acceleration. And this is mostly in North America, and in our strategic priority focus areas. I think we've done quite well there. We're moving ahead, well. And we would expect, as our revenues grow, we would get strong margin and profit improvement. And then finally, to the outlook, you've seen this on the press release. I don't intend to talk through it.
What we will do, at this point in time, is throw the meeting open to questions. We'll try and take your questions, if we can, as, as you ask them.
As a reminder, if you'd like to register a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind at any time, please press star followed by two. Please ensure you're unmuted when speaking. For those connecting via the webcast, you can submit questions via the questions tab in the top right. Our first question comes from Andre Kukhnin with Credit Suisse. Andre, please go ahead.
Good morning. Thank you very much for taking my questions. Thank you for the presentation. I'll go one at a time. If we could start with the energy prices first, please.
Could you give us some numbers around what sort of level of inflation you're facing now? And so we can take it to calculate how much of a price increase you need to push through.
Okay, Andre. I'll take that one if you don't mind to start with. And Dominique might give you a bit more information. But yeah, you're asking a very difficult question. First of all, it varies country by country. And in North America, it varies, you know, sort of region by region. There's no one answer for this. And the biggest issue with the energy prices is that it's all different and it's highly volatile. So for example, if you've got hydropower, which is particularly in the Nordic areas, you know, Sweden and Finland, then their costs aren't going up very much. And things are far more stable.
Don't forget, we're not exposed particularly to oil. The oil-to-gas linkage has pretty much dislocated. What we use is gas and electricity. And if you don't use any gas and you're only on electricity, most of the electricity markets are regulated, in some shape or form. And they're fairly steady for a year. Not so in deregulated markets like the U.K. But most of the world's not like the U.K. So in France, for example, there's the price is set for the year ahead. And on electricity, there's not really any volatility in that. In some markets, we brought forward a year, in ahead. Not that we were prescient or anything. It was just the right thing to do at the time. And so we don't see volatility there. But there's a huge variation around the world.
So, there is no one answer, Andre, on this. Suffice it to say that price increases is not a function of energy inflation. That's surcharges. And what happens with surcharges is they go up and down. And so what happens is that when we see energy go up, we'll put the surcharge on, notify the customer. And when it goes down at some point, we'll put it down as well. But it doesn't necessarily mean it goes down the second that the price goes down, or the cost of electricity. Gas is a slightly different matter. That situation is also covered by surcharges. But it's far more volatile. And where that's going, nobody knows. So asking me or Dominique for a number, I'm afraid, Andre, you know, our crystal balls aren't that good.
No, I appreciate it. There's a great degree of volatility and variability there.
I just wanted to kind of have more mass behind. Sorry, can you hear me?
You cut out completely. What we might do, Andre, is come back to you later. Because I know you might come back to ask lots of yeah, Andre, you're breaking up.
Can we come back to you later?
We will come back to you. But, I really like you we'll come back around to you later. So when this question is over, if you put your hand up again, we'll come back and pick you up. Okay? Can we move on, please, to the next person in the questions? Of course. I think that's
our next question. Our next question comes. Is that Andy Douglas? I can see him on the screen here. We don't have a question currently from Andy. Our next question comes. Oh, Andy's just registered.
Andy, your line is open. Hi there. I'm quite sure I haven't there. Can you talk to us briefly about Ellison, how that's progressing? Just want to make sure that that's progressing as we would have thought, given the aerospace evolution. You've answered my questions on GI and the CapEx cycles. I'm assuming that's quite difficult to unwind once you start kind of firing that up. But whereabouts in GI are we seeing restocking? I think there's a comment in the in the statement regarding restocking. And it's slightly similar to Andre, but hopefully it's slightly easier answer question to answer. What kind of labor inflation should we be thinking of for the year? I'm assuming it's kind of around a 3% or 4% level. Just want to make sure that's broadly right.
As always, Andy, your guesstimate on labor inflation is pretty close to the mark.
Although, I mean, that's a weighted average. I mean, to be clear, in some markets, we're seeing much more than that. So, you know, for example, in Turkey, we're going to be doing, probably, you know, two increases per year, in Turkey, given the, kind of labour inflation there. But a blended rate across the group, wet foot thumb in the air, because we're not there yet. We've got to wait until we get closer to pay raises. 3%-4% is not a bad guess. And I'm sure you didn't guess it. You probably worked out that. In terms of the areas of restocking, it's a small amount. I mean, we haven't seen a lot of restocking, frankly, in the areas that are starting to restock. That means that there's still a lot of the GI sectors where they still have stock.
The areas, I think that's easier to analyze is where we see the capital expenditure happening. That's interesting because it's the longer cycle stuff. This is machine tools. This is heavy truck and bus. This is marine. Those kind of markets that we're seeing the CapEx turning up. And in fact, you know, we saw this happening. We've just recently seen some corroboratory. I can't say the word. Some other evidence that says exactly the same thing where we're seeing across different geographies that the CapEx cycle is sort of moving up. And that's good news for us. Because once that starts going, it doesn't sort of change very quickly. So we've got GI in general. Yeah. And the CapEx cycle means that they won't change in a heartbeat.
Of course, I've no doubt that the energy markets, which are those only 8% of our business today, clearly, they're going to be moving up pretty fast, in terms of the oil and gas. Interestingly enough, probably subsea gas as well, which is something that we have an exposure to that would be quite nice if that grew. So, I hope that answers your question, Andy.
Yeah, definitely. And Ellison?
Ellison, yes, Ellison. Ellison, well, all things are relative, right? When to buy a company, right, at the top of the cycle. 10 out of 10 for that, Stephen. But actually, the Ellison business is moving ahead quite nicely. I mean, it's quite clear that we've improved the margins in the Ellison business as we said we would. And they're very good.
What will happen is, as the aerospace business moves up, Ellison will move with it. And they've got a big exposure. It's North American only. They've got a big exposure to both narrowbody and widebody, and indeed defense work, in Ellison. So, yeah, I think their, their future looks pretty, pretty good, actually, one way or another. But, not quite where we thought it would be at this point in time. But, as you know, you get a, a pandemic and then the current situation, you know, what more is there left to surprise us, really? Does that cover it? I'd like to think. But, yeah, that does. Just one, two quick small follow-ons, if I may. Can you give us the, rough sales for the HIP acquisition? I'm assuming it's, not material, but just, just in case.
And there's quite a big pickup in bonus and employee share plan costs in the year. I'm assuming that's the big correction. Then we should think about more of a normalized level year-over-year. Is that also fair?
Thank you.
Yeah. So the HIP acquisition, GBP 7 million, roughly, is the turnover that they had last year. And on the bonus and bits, yes. I mean, effectively, last year's number reflects a much more normal level of bonus and long-term incentives than what we saw in 2020.
Okay. That's really kind. Thanks, guys.
Our next question comes from Michael Tyndall with HSBC. Michael, the line is yours.
Morning, gents. Couple of questions, if I can. Just thinking about the recovery in A&D and the exposure to specialist technologies, am I right in assuming that it is far more exposed to specialist tech?
So if you like, that recovery will be far more margin-rich than perhaps the other areas of the business. And then, I guess, touching on the inflation, the pricing, can you just give us a reminder of what your services represent in terms of your customer's bill of materials? In other words, you know, if we're thinking that putting all through these prices, maybe you'll get some pushback, can you kind of give us a sense of, you know, when it comes to building something at your customers, how much Bodycote contributes to the costs thereof? Thanks.
Thanks, Mike. Very good questions. I shouldn't say that term. But, for me, I, that's a question I like. So let's talk about Specialist Technologies in aerospace and defense. The primary reason why it's focused, the largest portion of Specialist Technologies, is in aerospace and defense is our HIP services business.
You're absolutely right. It's one of the reasons why we're quite confident in our North American position, is that the dropthrough that you get on the increased revenue in HIP services is very high. And it is, one would expect, as revenues move up, that we would, that would be margin-rich. When or how they move up is not something that I can actually sort of be clear on. But your analysis is very true. If we move on to the bill of materials question, I so let's go back to the pandemic. You might remember that during the lockdown, or as I like to refer to it, the freezeout that happened in the pandemic, Bodycote was actually critical, was classified as a critical service. And the reason for that is people can't actually do things without the services we provide.
We're a little bit like a telecoms company. You know, you can't run your business unless the telephone company gives you a line. The cost for the telephone company is a telephone line is tiny compared with what you're doing. And that's indeed our case. So, you know, even, you know, our specialist technologies, they are a tiny proportion of the bill of materials. So when a customer is seeing double, triple, quadruple even on their material prices, which they have seen, our percentage of it is a tiny, tiny piece. It doesn't stop the buyer community, sort of, moaning and groaning and saying, "Oh, well, I don't know. This is too much money," or anything. But at the end of the day, if we put it up and they want to use our services, they pay us. You know, it's, it's a bit like the telephone company.
You need the telephone company. You don't cut the telephone company off. So, you know, we are, you know, not necessarily popular sometimes, but we're a tiny proportion of what people do. And that's the reason why we're able to pass our pricing through. This is an unusual time. Who knows what will happen? But I can tell you this, that people who want to move fast and do things in the next two years, they need the suppliers they've already got. I hope that answers your question. I'll just add the numbers. So, civil aerospace is 15% of our classical heat treatment business. And to your point, it represents 22% of our specialist technologies revenues.
Got it. Just one quick follow-up on the energy side of things. And it's just an understanding question for me.
I mean, so your pricing is pretty much set at the local level. Because I guess it depends on the energy source at a local facility that will determine pricing. Is that the right way to look at it?
That's absolutely correct. And indeed, it's the same energy price input, cost input that our customers are seeing because we're local. So, in some territories, you know, they move the industrial price of electricity up, you know, for example, once a year. And then everybody gets it at the same time. And if you've already had a surcharge put on your plate, maybe a month before, it's pretty hard to argue, actually. Because at the end of the day, we're not trying to rip people off. But it's all priced locally.
Got it. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Jonathan Hurn of Barclays.
Jonathan, please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. I just have three questions, if I may. Firstly, can I just come back to the outlook? Obviously, in the outlook statement, you talk about high profit dropthrough over the longer term. How do we think about that? Is that at the 50% level, or is it potentially higher than that 50%? That was the first one. The second one was just on automotive. I just wondered if you could talk us through the margin of EV, essentially where it was in 2019, and ultimately where you think it can get to. Because obviously, you do reference strong growth in margin there. And then thirdly, just coming back to aerospace and HIP, can you just talk about the HIP capacity?
Is everything you have there back online, or is there still more stuff to come on? Thanks.
Okay. Let me address the first two. So in terms of profit dropthrough, I mean, we talk in the short term about a 50% or so profit dropthrough for volume-related revenue growth. Clearly, this year, where we're going to see a lot of inflation-related revenue growth, there is no dropthrough to the bottom line. Because all we're doing is recovering our costs through our price increases. But in terms of volume-related revenue increases, 50% dropthrough in the short term is the right number to go with. Now, just a caveat on that, it is, that's a general statement.
If we're talking about Specialist Technologies where we already have some very good capacity utilization, and therefore, to grow our business, we will need to invest further, building additional facilities and adding equipment, the marginal dropthrough tends to be more like the average margin. So while the average margin in Specialist Technologies is very good, the incremental dropthrough is one looks out. It's probably somewhat below 50%. So it really does depend on where exactly so a similar story for Emerging Markets, where we again have been growing and have quite good capacity utilization. So it really does depend where where the revenue drops through. Question then on automotive margins and where we're going to go on that. Yeah. Well, you know, obviously, we're already above where we were back in 2019. Well, we're already above where we were on profit.
And that's not just automotive. That's automotive and, well, that's AGI. So that's a wider map. But clearly, as Stephen's already indicated, we've got plenty of capacity across our business. And as the automotive revenues do come back, then that will have a very healthy dropthrough and improve our AGI margins in particular, as that revenue comes back. Taking your HIP on the past, can I just sorry. Can I just ask just on that automotive? Just, it's more specific on the EV side rather than automotive generally. I just wanted to know, essentially, where the EV margin is now roughly and ultimately where it can become or where it can go. So it's just more of an EV focus rather than a general auto.
Okay.
So the EV focus, so this isn't the generic work, you know, sort of steering gear and steering joints and stuff like that, which they've all got. And the margins for us on that stuff is exactly the same as for internal combustion stuff. So the EV very specific content, so this would be sort of engine casings, which are, well, electric motor casings and stuff like that. Today, our current work that we're doing there is very small. And the reason for that is because it's just not that much stuff, relatively speaking, you know? I mean, in terms of, I know we all get excited about electric vehicles, but the number of vehicles being built in the world as a percentage of the total, as yet, isn't that large.
Most of our progress in EVs is actually currently in the situation where people have said, "Right. I need X million of capacity in such and such a country." Our go live date is 2023. You know, let's all get that all sorted out. And so you're in at the moment in ramp-up phase. And that's some of the things in the new facilities, but also in existing facilities. So, to quote an EV-specific margin at the moment would be difficult. I would fully expect because the technologies that are used on the EVs and now the pieces that we're talking about here is something that we really have a great market share in. And now we're talking about low-pressure carburizing, which we've talked about many times, gas nitriding. We're the largest gas nitrider in the world by a factor of three.
Corr-I-Dur, a proprietary process of Bodycote. Those are the, you know, the primary technologies that people want to use, which, you know, we can go into why that is at some point. But I've said it many times before. And so there, I don't, those are those three that I've just mentioned. They're all specialist technologies. So one can imagine the margins on the electric vehicles for us are going to be pretty nice. So does that answer your question on electric vehicles?
Yeah. That's great. Thank you. Very clear.
HIP capacity, which is the other one that you asked.
So the North American HIP capacity is by no means anywhere near 100%, particularly because we just moved a very large HIP in from Europe that we had to deploy into North America because we saw the opportunities in North America to be slightly better than they were in Europe. And we've also commissioning a new facility there, which has been ongoing for some time. So as of where we sit today, we've got substantial capacity, because our existing facilities were only at sort of 80% or whatever, maybe a little lower even. And we've got new capacity coming online. So tons of capacity in North America. In Europe, slightly less. But we've got this nice facility that we've acquired in Switzerland. It's not a huge capacity, but it's useful. And that gives us some extra capacity there. So we've got capacity around the place.
I don't think it's pressed. And as Dominic said, if you don't have capacity, then you'll just see the margins drop through. You know, if you're full in HIP services, we would expect to see the margins increase, because we're going to be filling up existing capacity, and we'll get dropthrough fr om it. Okay?
Brilliant. Great, guys. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Christian Hinderaker with Liberum. Christian, please go ahead.
Yes. Good morning, Stephen and Dominique. Thank you for the opportunity. I've got three, maybe best in turn. I guess, firstly, follow-up to Andy's question. Could you just remind us of the split in terms of CapEx versus OpEx-led business within your AGI business, and whether there's any mixed considerations? And we can come on to those two.
Say again, please, Christian. Apologies.
Could you could you just remind us the split in terms of CapEx versus OpEx-led business in terms of your AGI revenues and whether there's any mixed consideration there?
So no mixed consideration in terms of profitability. It's all the same profitability, because it's quite interesting. Our processes are really the same between all these different sectors. It's not like we've got a process that's specific for a particular sector. So the processes determine what the margins are, and the prices pretty much are the same across segments. So there's no real difference in available margins or contribution margins. What does change is you know what's the capital intensity of it and where we've got poorly utilized facilities or we've got poor customer quality.
So, you know, in Germany, for example, we had poor quality business, because we were priced into commodity business that there were no real barriers to coming in and out of. And that's what determines the pricing. Where we are today is a far more robust situation where you don't have the quality pricing. So the prices aren't the same. And it doesn't matter which market segment you're in there. So there's no profitability difference between the market segments. In terms of our OpEx/CapEx split, that is a very difficult question to answer. The reason we know that the CapEx cycle is going up is because there are some sectors, which I mentioned already, which we, from history, know they are CapEx-driven. And they're the ones that we see going up.
But if you wanted us to be specific in terms of what the percentage is, I have to tell you, we're not that precise. Bodycote is not a precision machine on those kind of things. And the reason is that there's just the thousands of customers that we have and the fact that they're all buying pretty much the same stuff, just has a different label on it, and we charge the same kind of pricing. We don't price discriminate by what they do. We price discriminate on the basis of how much money we think we can get out of an individual customer. Sounds like really a bad thing to say. But it's to do with what costs we've got to provide for that customer. And if we can't get the margins, we've got to find another customer.
So no real, exact answer for you, I'm afraid, on this one. But it gives you just an indication of the issue.
Okay. Thank you, Stephen. Maybe secondly then, on aerospace, so just interested. Howmet's talks about no evidence of supply chain disruption. But then in the presentation, and I think just now you're talking about some volatility in supply chains ahead. I presume it's linked to recent events, but just grateful for some clarity there.
Yeah. Absolutely right. I mean, up to now, literally up until yesterday, which is when we checked last time, we've seen no issues there. But, we've done a deep dive into who is going to have problems, knowing that you would ask us this kind of question, who is going to have problems.
That's how come I know that Boeing, for example, has bought a year ahead on titanium, and that the, I think the price of nickel, yesterday was about $101,000 a tonne. That's pretty expensive. So, the guys that are going to, you know, have the volatility and the problems there, that's what we're talking about. Personally, and I might be 100% wrong, I think we'll see civil aerospace pretty much carrying on okay because they've got the stocks and because they've already bought the products. 2023 will be a core at that point as to, in civil aerospace, well, have things stabilized. There's plenty of nickel in the world. The only problem we've got with nickel is its volatility in pricing. The titanium is clearly an issue in the longer term.
And I, as a, that's what I was alluding to as to what planes will you build in the future if you've got a titanium supply shortage. Because I think it's 40% of the world's titanium comes out of Russia. So, defense, if, you know, that seems to be very robust. But right now, today, nothing. Do we expect it tomorrow and the day after for the rest of this year? And, you know, yes. But will it affect sales of the actual platforms and engines in 2022? I'm not sure. I couldn't call it either way, but I'm not sure. So it's a very difficult time to call anything because things, you know, there are pluses and minuses out there. There are opportunities. And clearly, there are problems. And the only thing that I can take some hope in is we're sitting here.
We've got the capacity. People need us. And if anybody needs to do things, we're here. But we certainly don't have any sort of psychic insight. Fair enough. Thank you. And then just my third question is on automotives. You had 9% growth, I think, despite negative contribution from Mexico. I believe you highlighted 20% growth from the rest of the year. And I'm just interested in the impact for from Mexico in particular, and also given that perhaps supply chains are improving, but the U.S. automakers have been a bit more bullish than others in terms of their expectations and, in some cases, have had to sort of row back. Just curious as to the level of sort of optimism or rather, sorry, the level of conviction in that optimism. I'll take the conviction point.
So I find it staggering the fact that things roll on in North America, seemingly irrespective of what's happening in the rest of the world. I mean, it would seem that North America is insulated from everything that's happening. And the indicators are still very strong in North America. It's very hard to get any real signposts in the rest of the world because they're changing every day. And it's not really semiconductors. Okay? In North America, it's not really semiconductors that's been the supply chain issues. And they are very bullish. Now, we got completely stitched last year by listening to them, as you all know. So we aren't necessarily listening to them. But they are very bullish. And as far as the rest of that is concerned, Dominic was. Yeah. So you, you're probably right.
You know, Mexico, Mexico was holding back the emerging markets business as, as we outlined in the presentation. I mean, Mexico, I think it's important to understand, is effectively, or our business in Mexico is, is very much tied in with the whole U.S. auto supply chain. And, and the customer that Stephen was just referring to there is a big customer of ours in Mexico. And that's what was impacting our Mexican business. So as those issues resolve themselves, then we absolutely will expect we expect our Mexican business to come back stronger.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from George Featherstone with Bank of America. George, please go ahead.
Hi. Morning, everyone. And, thanks for taking my questions. I'll, I'll go one at a time if that's all right.
I just wondered, initially, given what's going on in the world, whether your investment decisions have changed or been deferred at all for, for this year and perhaps anything you're planning for 2023, think in particular whether you're planning to accelerate any further investments in EM regions like China, maybe to diversify.
Y eah. So I, I, I don't think we can claim to really have changed our minds about what we're doing. And to be honest, that's nothing more than, you know, we haven't had time to catch our breath yet. You know, this has all happened so quickly. And we don't change our investment decisions with a knee jerk. We'll be evaluating it. We'll be seeing it. Happy that where we are is a good place. I'm happy to see that, you know, we embarked on this carbon and energy management to focus.
That's going to serve us very well going forward, although that's more about energy than carbon because it would appear that a lot of the world has decided that climate change has been postponed for a decade. But as far as we're concerned, you know, getting energy management in place and getting customers to come to us to get their carbon footprint drawn is a win-win, you know? I mean, it's just a win-win. So I think where we're going is right. And we will evaluate. And maybe in due course, we might have a different priority. Up to now, I've been thinking that we should be going much faster in China. China is becoming more and more self-reliant in terms of production. And they are going to be buying locally. And we in China, we are local. We're not, you know, everywhere, we're local.
And so having a more local support in China, you know, if it if it works out in the geopolitics of the world, would be great for business. But we need to sit back and think about it. We need to sit back and consult with people. But we're not going to change our investment decisions overnight if that's, if that's clear.
Thanks very much. Then a couple just, kind of clarifications on maybe add-ons to other questions that have been asked. Just coming back to civil aero, I wondered if you'd changed your view on whether this market will have fully recovered by 2023.
Have changed my view or changed our view? I don't think we know at the moment. And I would say, I don't know. I, I have no idea. Who knows what's going to happen?
Is it if it recovers, it's not going to be to the kind of recovery we thought it was going to be. I think there's—I was very sure that it's going to be in a different shape. But you know, our widebody aftermarket revenues are very strong. And you know, we make the same amount of money across all this stuff. So in terms of our revenues, we might be, you know, doing okay. But I couldn't tell you. I mean, I just don't know.
Okay. Thank you. And then maybe just trying to put a little bit of context around how you see the phasing for this year in your outlook. Obviously, there's tougher automotive comparisons in the first half of the year, probably higher cost pressure given the timing differences you've already talked about in the first half. But then you've got the restructuring benefits.
So I just wondered if there was anything we need to consider about the seasonality and the delivery of the operating profit that this year that you'd like us to incorporate into numbers. Is it particularly H2 weighted as it appears that way so far?
Well, as you indicate, we're up against stronger comps on automotive in the first half of the year. But then our general industrial business was doing well through last year. And therefore, we'll be up against stronger comps effectively in the second half of the year and similarly with civil aerospace towards the back end of the year.
I think the other thing that's worth highlighting is, you know, Stephen mentioned the lag effect on our business as a result of our contractual long-term agreements where price increases are based on a contractual indexation and also the fact that surcharges take, you know, one month typically with a lag against the cost inflation that we're seeing. That undoubtedly has an impact on your P&L when you're seeing the biggest inflation hike. So I would anticipate, as we're looking at things now, that that would be a first-half impact rather than a second-half impact.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Our next question comes from Dom Convey with Numis. Dom, please go ahead.
Morning, Gents. Just the two questions, if I may. You've talked again about the excess inventory in the supply chain for civil aero.
I just wonder whether you could give us a bit more colors to when you would think that if Boeing and Airbus hit their publicly stated targets for the A320 and for the MAX, when you'd expect that to be burnt through and then see that acceleration in your own demand. And secondly, defense spending now very much back in focus. Could you just remind us what your exposure is here? I'm thinking specifically any key platforms. It would also be helpful just to understand that spec tech mix within the defense revenues. Thank you.
Sure. Let me take the defense revenues. So it's never really been a big focus that we talk about. But from it was predominantly flying assets. That's why we have defense revenues.
They have, in the past, not been affected by conflicts around the world, because the, the amount of wear and tear and, and the rest of it has been pretty steady in terms of a percentage of what they do anyway day in, day out in terms of exercises and all the rest of it. But, you know, I think we're looking at a period now where that's different. The key programs that we're on, we're not normally on, what most defense contractors call, you know, sort of really good sexy things, if you can call this stuff sexy. But we are on the F-35. We've got content on the F-35. We have content on, and I don't really want to go into a lot of details about it, but, on various land platforms. But mostly, they're all geared towards flying assets.
That's the kind of thing that we're into. And so that stuff is, I mean, the F-35 program, I see, has just been ramped up by an extra 25. I think it is F-35s this year. That's big. That's a big input. But I'm sure you can read the relevant press and have a much better view than I do of that situation. In terms of where the inventory is, so it was mostly down at the front end. So this would be castings and forgings. And then progressively getting lighter and lighter and lighter until you get to the plane final assembly. And when would that in and, you know, sort of all other things aside, how long would that have taken to get rid of that inventory? It typically would take one to two years for the inventory to actually normalize.
We are in a different world, though. So that front end, castings and forgings, they're titanium forgings and, and castings. They are high nickel alloys. So, you know, next year, there is going to be a, a casting and forging shortfall because they can't get their raw materials. So, you know, next, next year, I think the front end of the supply chain, if they don't already have access, there will be a problem. And in fact, we've already seen some European suppliers, basically squeeze out the market because they don't have access to the raw materials. And then the largest supplier in the market in that casting and forging area, which is in North America, and, I'm sure you're aware who it is, big customer of ours, they're basically they've got what they need. And their prices are what they are because they can.
So the whole world of aerospace is going to move dramatically. We supply the largest North American company in this area. We tend not to supply the smaller ones so much. And in Europe, well, we supply everybody. And some of that's owned by the same European that's the same North American entity. And some is buying a different North American entity. But, you know, the raw materials availability is going to affect how much inventory there is in the system at that front end. But that will be a 2023 problem. And who knows where we'll be at that point? And all I can tell you is that today, obviously, the big users of titanium are moving their supply chains. So this is not a forever problem. But they are moving their supply chains.
This, this idea that you can recycle titanium has been pretty much pooh-poohed by most people, apart from Aubert & Duval. Now, they've, they've actually got some quite good technology. So who knows where that will go? But, that's the sort of metric that you're looking at. And I'm sorry if it's a little bit cloudy for you. But believe you me, it's cloudy for us as well. And just on the, Specialist Technologies, Classical Heat Treatment split for defense, then, you know, Stephen's mentioned that defense is, is an important sector for Ellison. But overall, across our business, they are, similar percentage at very same very similar percentages of both Classical Heat Treatment and, Specialist Technologies.
Thanks.
Our next question comes from Andrew Wilson with J.P. Morgan. Andrew, please go ahead.
Hey, Conrad, could I ask you to get I'm waiting for sorry.
Could I just say to Conrad, could you get Andre Kukhnin back? Because we did put him off. So let's not forget him, please. So Andrew, carry on.
Hi. Thanks. Yes, just a couple, I think, probably relatively quick ones. Just on the GI recovery and the CapEx elements that you spoke to, I'm interested if that includes spending from auto customers on CapEx for things like tooling, etc. I seem to remember that that's reported within GI. And obviously, interested in terms of how that's developing specifically.
Yeah, because that's a leading indicator for automotive for us. We don't include that in CapEx, believe it or not. We include that in OpEx. And that's because that sounds counterintuitive. The tool is a consumable in the automotive industry. And so that's really OpEx. It's not CapEx. And that's not included in what we just said.
So now the question you've got is, what have we seen in tooling? If I can just pretend to read your mind. And the answer is, it is pretty flat. And Dominic can actually contradict me if I've read wrong, the numbers we got. It's pretty flat. No, it's, it's very, very flat. Very similar revenues first half, second half through last year. Okay.
Yep. Very clear. Thank you. Thanks for clarifying. And then just maybe, you know, for Dominic, probably, just on CapEx in 2022, interested obviously, a number of times you mentioned around the, the capacity. And I appreciate there's always projects going on in terms of, you know, reallocating assets, etc., and obviously making sure you've got the right footprint you want. But just interested in terms of a, a CapEx guide, I guess, for 2022 within that context.
Well, we split our CapEx up between two elements. There's the maintenance CapEx element and then the expansionary CapEx element. And I think your question is more focused on the expansionary CapEx element. But let me just make sure we're all on the same page on the maintenance CapEx element. I mean, that spend last year was GBP 43 million, and GBP 45 million the year before. It's roughly 60% of the depreciation cost. And we would expect a similar amount in 2022. As far as the expansionary CapEx is concerned, you know, that is a little bit, how long's a piece of string. We have a number of projects underway. And you know, we will spend money on those projects. But it's difficult to be certain at this stage.
You know, at this stage, I think best to guide somewhere around the GBP 25 million-GBP 30 million range. But it will depend on what projects we have come through and how quickly we can get them up and running.
That's very helpful. Thank you.
Our next question. We've reconnected to Andre Kukhnin of Credit Suisse. Andrew, please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks very much for picking me back up. Can you hear me okay?
Certainly, Andrew.
Yep. Andy. Andrew. Get it right in a minute.
Great. Thank you. So just to close off on the energy price inflation, you said you started implementing surcharges and price increases from September last year. Could you give us some idea of how much of price up or surcharges, together you're carrying into 2022, already from what you've already done during the end of 2021?
Sounds like a CFO question to me, Andrew.
I think the answer is, no, we don't really want to give you an idea of that. I mean, first of all, it's commercially sensitive, depending on the different areas we are. I mean, we you know, Stephen highlighted what we're doing is we're looking at our, our costs. We're typically, certainly in the current environment, hedging around about a quarter out. Based on where we're ending up on the different markets and the different areas for gas and electricity, that's how we're determining the surcharges in each market. I don't think I can give you much more color than that.
Okay. Got it. I mean, the reason I was asking is that, obviously, we discussed the sort of mid-single digit impact. I was just trying to get sort of sensitivities around it.
And when you pass through cost increases, which we have no doubt of you being able to do that, but through raising price, obviously, it still carries a margin impact. So it just helps us to calibrate that. That's the reason I was kind of pounding on that. But I'll move to the couple more interesting questions. I think in the past, we discussed that with this kind of higher steel prices, there is scope for customers to maybe generate savings by moving to lower grades of material, but use more of your services to bring the output quality up. I just wondered if that's if you've seen any of that starting to happen now that we've had well over a year of steel inflation of high steel prices.
Yeah. And of course, there's that. That is true.
You know, when you've seen such huge steel prices, there have been people moving to lower grades. It does. It moves slowly, though, Andrew. Because, you know, if you change the material, you have to, then you have to recertify it. And it takes, you know, maybe six months or nine months. So we were seeing that going on. And it, it could well be that we'll see that going forward. But then there are countervailing forces as well. I mean, one of the interesting things is the, is the labor areas. I mean, if you let me tell you how difficult the question is. If you look at stainless steel, it's a high nickel alloy. There are thousands of tons of stainless steel in the world. We process a—I think it's 0.00-something% of stainless steel in the world.
So, there's lots of stainless steel out there. But if the price of stainless steel's gone up, which it has, and it will do because of this nickel price, you're only going to see it in those very high-end applications, which just so happen to be the ones that we're on. You know, things like medical work, so the stainless steel side, ironically, even though the price is up, you might see more people moving to it, because they actually reduce the labor content. And the reason I say that is the amount of processing, post-heat process, that we do goes down. So overall, for the customer, they typically have a lower cost input than they would, you know, in total, than if they stayed with their other material because they're not putting coatings on and all that kind of stuff.
And by coatings, I mean, like, organic coatings and the like. So these things move in different directions. But yes, in terms of the bulk, classical heat treatment, classical heat treatment is used to turn poor-quality stuff, poor-quality steels into high-quality steels. So you there's all kinds of things that you can make use of if you do the thermal processing and heat treatment correctly. But it, it requires more of that. So one might expect in due course here, if the price of steel's gone up, that we would see a push towards it. And, and in fact, that's the case with all these rising prices. The higher the prices go, the volatility that's bad.
But the higher the prices go of raw materials, of which we don't have any, or energy, which we do have but which we actually, you know, we know how to manage, in the long run, it just makes us more competitive. It means people want to use us more.
Yes, exactly. I was going to ask on the energy side as well. But I guess it's a little too early, right, to see any evidence of, customers making decisions based on that yet, right?
Well, we are seeing projects being brought to the left, as they say, being brought forward, and indeed in a number of areas, not just in energy. I mean, you'd be surprised with the amount of semiconductor stuff that's being brought forward, with fairly large, expenditures going on, because they want it now. And so they need to move in a hurry.
They bring it forward. They're chunky contracts, but for everyone that comes forward, there are others that, you know, maybe cancel. So trying to divine the future right now is a little difficult.
Thank you. And just very last one, we talked about some of your own initiatives for efficiency improvement at your operations. I just wanted to check whether for 2022, is that all fully captured in the 50% drop-through ratio that I think you suggest we should be applying and the GBP 10 million of the restructuring savings coming on top? Or is there anything else we should think about outside of that?
No, I think that those are the numbers that you should look at. Obviously, you know, our objective, our drive is to do better than that.
We did do better than that over the last couple of years. But it's not something that I think one would want to bake in forever and a day. So 50% drop-through plus the GBP 10 million restructuring benefit, I think are good numbers to use. Very clear.
Thank you very much to both of you. Thanks for getting me back online.
As a reminder, for any further questions, that's star followed by 1 on the telephone keypad. Or for those of you connecting via the webcast, you can submit questions via the Question tab in the top right. Our next question comes from
Chloe Schooley of Stifel. Chloe, please go ahead. Morning. It's Maggie. Hi, Dom. One quick question from me.
Given you have ample capacity and in the world, we're starting to see energy increases and labor increases, when we balance that against the ESG benefits that you offer your customers, are you starting to see increased inquiries for outsourcing? Or is this still, you know, it comes when it comes?
Hi, Maggie. Could you say the first part there? Because we didn't quite hear it properly, please.
Sorry. I was just going to say, given that you have ample capacity and could probably quickly absorb further business, are you starting to see increased inquiries from customers looking to outsource? Yes. Expand a bit on that? Or is it just going to happen when it happens?
No, you asked me a question. Are we seeing increased inquiries? And the answer is yes. I can't give you a number. That would be but we are seeing them.
And, you know, we are okay.
So just the material?
No, it's not material. It's not material. Not yet.
Not material. Okay. Just as usual, but a slight increase. Okay. Thank you very much.
We have no further questions on the phone line. So I'll hand back.
Well, thank you very much, everybody. As always, we're here if you've got further questions. And, the first number to ring, of course, is Dominique De Lisle Yates.
Thanks a lot. Goodbye. And we'll talk to you in the future weeks, yeah.