Good morning, welcome to the Coats Group Plc Full Year 2022 results presentation. We have here today Rajiv Sharma, Coats' Chief Executive, and Jackie Callaway, Coats' Chief Financial Officer. They will now take you through the 2022 results and strategic progress, as well as the outlook for the business. I will pass you over to Rajiv to start the presentation.
Thank you, Chris. Good morning and a warm welcome to all. Today, I will take you through the strategic highlights and then hand over to Jackie, who will present the financial performance. I will talk through the operational performance, strategic update, and close with a summary and outlook. Following this, we move to Q&A and then conclude our results presentation. I am pleased to say we have delivered a strong set of results and also made significant strategic progress during the year. Organic revenue growth was 10%, which is above our 6% medium-term guidance. This includes 11% price, 4% mix, and -5% volume. Organic adjusted operating profits grew 22%. The apparel and footwear business experienced a demand surge in quarter one and destocking in quarter four. Volumes were -5% in 2022, but similar to 2019 levels.
We saw a big shift in mix with more sales of higher margin products and price more than offsetting inflation. In terms of volatility, Coats has much better customer service and supply reliability when compared to competition. This allows us to win more business, and it's our estimate that we have taken 100 basis points of market share to take our total share to 24%. We completed the acquisitions of Texon and Rhenoflex, and as a result of combining these with our existing footwear business, we are now the global market leader in footwear components with a market share of circa 23%. 12 months back, we announced strategic projects that would deliver an incremental $50 million EBIT in 2024. These projects were largely confined to the Americas and Europe. We have made good progress and seen an acceleration of benefits in 2022.
Today, we expand the scope of strategic projects to include some Asian markets. We now expect to deliver $70 million of saving by 2024, which is $20 million more than the original target of $50 million. In late 2018, we developed our sustainability strategy and disclosed targets for the end of 2022. I'm proud of the work done by all in Coats and thrilled to announce that we have substantially delivered on our 2022 targets. Today, we are announcing targets for the next four-year period of our journey. These will take us closer to our 2030 goal of reducing emissions by 50% and firmly putting Coats on a path to net zero by 2050. We have made significant progress de-risking our U.K. pension scheme and announced a GBP 350 million buy-in transaction in December last year.
Further, we have agreed with the scheme trustees a switch-on, switch-off mechanism regarding the current schedule of contributions that potentially has significant free cash flow benefits. All of this progress and our confidence in the long-term future of Coats has led the board to recommend a final dividend of $0.0173, representing an increase in the final dividend of 15%. I now hand over to Jackie, who will give you more details on our 2022 financial performance and pension progress.
Thanks, Rajiv, and hello to everyone on the call. Let me start by summarizing the key highlights of our financial performance for 2022. We've seen a strong sales performance, showing organic sales growth of 10% for the full year, despite some market softness due to customer destocking in the latter part of the year, primarily in apparel markets and to a lesser extent in footwear. This sales performance included a significant amount of pricing actions, which together with our self-help and productivity initiatives, more than offset heightened inflationary pressures in the areas of raw materials, labor, energy, and freight. Our adjusted operating profit of $235 million and margins of 14.8% were both well up on last year.
This adjusted operating profit performance was despite lower year-on-year volumes in the second half, supported by ongoing tight cost management and ahead of scheduled delivery of our strategic projects. We delivered free cash flows of $114 million, which maintained a strong balance sheet position with pro forma leverage at the period end of 1.4x. We are ahead of schedule on our strategic projects and are pleased to announce that our overall expected incremental EBIT benefits from these projects has now increased from $50 million- $70 million by 2024. We will achieve these $70 million of incremental benefits for an overall cash exceptional cost of $50 million.
Following the Texon acquisition in July, which we funded with a specific acquisition debt facility, we have recently successfully refinanced the acquisition facility with a new $250 million US private placement. This placement comes with a mix of five and seven-year tenors and at highly competitive investment-grade rates. Lastly, in terms of key highlights, we can report significant positive progress on the de-risking and funding position of the U.K. pension scheme. In December 2022, the pension trustees successfully completed a buy-in transaction of GBP 350 million, covering circa 20% of the scheme liabilities. Alongside this, we have also seen significant improvements in the funding position of the scheme, and we are now approaching being fully funded on a technical provisions basis.
As such, we have agreed with the pension trustees a trigger mechanism that will see pension contributions stopping if certain funding criteria are met, which could yield significant free cash flow benefits for the group in the relatively near term. Slide seven sets out the financial summary and our key financial metrics, which shows significant improvement year-on-year. Let us now take a deep dive on these financial metrics, starting with revenues. Overall, the year-on-year increase in group revenues was 16% on a constant currency basis. This strong performance was driven across both the apparel and footwear and performance materials organic businesses, in addition to a 6% contribution from the Texon and Rhenoflex acquisitions. Group operating profits were up 27% on a constant currency basis to $235 million and up 22% on an organic basis.
We continued with our proactive approach to managing inflation through pricing and self-help levers. We also tightly controlled our cost base, as I mentioned earlier, we delivered ahead of schedule on our first year of strategic project savings with $20 million incremental benefits. As a result, margins increased by 120 basis points to a healthy 14.8%. I will cover the key profit lever movements in more detail shortly. On a reported basis, growth rates of both sales and operating profits were lower than the constant currency basis, primarily as a result of translation effects headwinds due to the U.S. dollar strengthening against some of our key local currencies, for example, the euro and the Indian rupee. In addition, the constant currency sales and operating growth was impacted to a small extent by the adoption of hyperinflation accounting in Turkey.
Adjusted EPS of $0.082 per share was up year-on-year, primarily due to the profit increase we have seen, as well as improvements in our effective tax rate and despite higher interest costs. Finally, on this slide, cash generation was a strong performance, with higher profitability and well-controlled CapEx and working capital contributing to this. I'll give some more details on these items later. Now moving on to operating profits, the next slide provides an overview of the movements in our group operating profits and margins during the year. Operating profits for the full year saw a headwind on volumes which arose in the second half as year-on-year performance slowed, as we anticipated. Partly, this was due to strong comparatives, as well as a softening in demand due to macroeconomic factors, with some destocking.
This mostly impacted apparel in Q4, also footwear towards the end of the year. We continued to offset high levels of inflationary pressures and successfully offset these in full, I'll cover this in more detail on the next slide. At an SD&A level, these costs remained well-controlled, with the necessary underpinning actions quickly instigated in the second half as we faced lower demand levels. In addition, year-on-year profitability improved due to our ahead-of-schedule performance on strategic projects, with $20 million incremental benefits achieved. We also saw a $9 million contribution from our Texon and Rhenoflex acquisitions in the second half. Both of these acquisitions remain in line with the acquisition business cases, which includes the synergy targets we have set.
The above impacts has led to a healthy increase in operating margin in the year, which was up 120 basis points to 14.8%, driven by both segments. On the next slide, you'll see that we've continued to offset high levels of inflationary pressures such as raw materials, freight, labor and energy. We did this through price and productivity initiatives by executing our tried and tested playbook, including early pricing actions and our self-help productivity and procurement levers. On pricing, it's not just about our proactivity to move quickly, but also our product differentiation and quality that allows us to go to market and get the pricing that we ask for. In total for the year, this led to 118 million of year-on-year inflation, and our offsetting actions contributed $150 million.
We are now seeing some moderation in certain raw materials and freight inflation from the 2022 highs, with prices returning to 2019 levels. Energy inflation remains a headwind, particularly in Europe, and we continue to see general inflation on the remainder of our cost base, for example, labor. We expect to continue to successfully manage these headwinds in the future with self-help and tactical pricing actions. Moving on. Let's now look at segmental margins on slide 10. Both segments saw healthy improvements in margins year-over-year. A&F margins have increased by 100 basis points to 17.3% on a reported basis.
This was despite lower volumes and factory utilization in the second half and comes down to the ongoing excellent commercial and operational delivery, our ability to pass on input cost increases, and our execution of strategic projects and general cost discipline. PM margins are up 130 basis points year-on-year to 8.1% on a reported basis. Margins in this segment continued to trend upwardly, and while still impacted in the U.S. by labor availability issues and labor inflation, U.S. margins have improved significantly due to the positive impact of both pricing actions and the strategic project actions that have started to take effect in the period. Excluding the U.S. businesses, PM margins remained double digit. On slide 11, we show the bottom half of the profit and loss account, and there are five areas I'd like to cover off on this slide.
Exceptional and acquisition-related items of $54 million, which includes $31 million spent in relation to the commencement of our strategic project initiatives. There are $24 million of costs in relation to our acquisition of Texon and Rhenoflex, which include the impacts of the amortization of the newly acquired intangible assets and transaction costs. You will see that net finance costs were $9 million higher than 2021. This relates in part to rising interest rates, as well as the new debt to fund the Texon acquisition, but also in relation to mark-to-mark losses in relation to hedging instruments, mainly around sterling weakness at the period end. There was some offset from a lower pension finance charge, which reflects the accounting surplus we have in our UK pension scheme.
The third item is the continued reduction of our underlying tax rate to 29% as profit mix continues to move favorably based on higher year-on-year profits. Fourthly, the loss on discontinued operations relates to the exit of our Brazil and Argentina businesses. This consists of $49 million of net assets disposed, $20 million of buyer payments and fees, and $15 million of historic recycled FX losses that previously went through reserves. The final item to flag is the proposed final dividend of $0.0173 per share, which is 15% above 2021 levels and reflects the excellent overall performance of the group and the board's ongoing confidence in the medium term. Moving now to slide 12, where we see the strong cash generation for the year.
At an adjusted free cash flow level, we delivered $114 million compared to $124 million last year. This was a strong performance compared to historical delivery, albeit behind last year due to some specific timing impacts in 2021. Our working capital has continued to be well-controlled despite ongoing global supply chain disruption and inflationary pressures due to the increase in our raw material costs. CapEx remained at broadly similar levels to last year, and we continue to selectively invest in the most value-add initiatives to support future growth and the group strategy.
Our closing net debt of $394 million, excluding leases, was higher than at the end of 2021 due to the debt funding of the Texon acquisition, as well as continued payments to our pension scheme, shareholder dividends, exceptional costs, and cash paid to the buyer of our Brazil and Argentinian businesses. This level of net debt equates to a pro forma leverage of 1.4x, which is well within our target range of between one and 2x . We're also pleased to have completed the successful refinancing of the Texon acquisition facility with a $250 million US private placement. The deal was seven times oversubscribed, and as such, we were able to secure very attractive investment-grade pricing with our chosen five and seven-year tenors.
This is in addition to our existing $225 million U.S. PP notes and also our $360 million RCF facility. It leaves us with a diverse funding base with a spread of maturities and therefore gives financing certainty well into the future. On slide 13, we lay out the latest funding position of our U.K. pension scheme. As a reminder, at our last triennial valuation in 2021, this resulted in a technical provisions deficit of GBP 193 million, which resulted in an agreed set of funding contributions up to 2028. We are pleased to be able to say that the deficit has significantly improved since that date, and we are now approaching a fully funded position.
This improved position has been driven by a number of factors: ongoing employer contributions, favorable market movements, and the completion of further de-risking actions, most notably the buy-in completed in December, and I'll talk about that more shortly. As a result of this excellent progress, we've agreed with the scheme trustees to a switch off / switch on mechanism regarding future contributions. This means in practice that if we reach a certain funding position for a consecutive number of months, contributions will cease so long as the scheme remains fully funded. This is a very positive development which could yield significant improvements in group free cash flow in the near term. On slide 14, there's some further information on the positive progress on our U.K. pension scheme. I referred on the last slide to the buy-in transaction that the trustees completed with Aviva in December 2022.
This is in effect a GBP 350 million perfect liability match with an insurance product. It fully de-risks around 20% of our total scheme liabilities. As I mentioned previously, due to the attractive pricing received on this transaction, we had a further favorable movement in our overall funding deficit. Before I finish on pensions, it's important to note that our de-risking journey is not over. We continue to seek further opportunities in this space. This has been made possible by the collaborative relationship and alignment of goals that we have with the scheme trustees. Our overall collective ambition remains to de-risk the scheme in full in the medium term in a cost-effective manner.
This will remove the scheme from the balance sheet as well as the associated cash contributions we currently pay. Lastly from me, and as with previous announcements, we've provided future modeling guidance, the latest of which is set out on slide 15. I'm not planning to go through this in detail, but we'll be very happy to arrange follow-up calls if you have any questions on this. I conclude by reiterating the excellent performance of the group in the year, the strong financial delivery across all key metrics, the ahead of schedule delivery on our strategic projects, and our significant progress in a number of critical strategic areas such as financing and pensions. Now I'd like to hand back to Rajiv.
Thank you, Jackie. Before we look back at 2022, a reminder of how we will report the group's performance going forward. With the acquisitions of Texon and Rhenoflex, we have changed the makeup of the group. Effective 1st of January 2023, we have three divisions with end-to-end accountability for operational and financial performance. This will drive agility, speed, efficiency, and better customer experiences. As stated during the Capital Markets Day in October, we will start reporting three divisions with effect from H1 2023 results. We believe this allows for better understanding of end market dynamics and divisional performance. I thought it useful to present some headline numbers that enable you to see the current overall shape of the group and remind you of our medium-term revenue growth and adjusted EBIT margin targets for each of the divisions that we set out at the October 2022 Capital Markets Day.
Apparel is approximately 50% of the group, with footwear and Performance Materials accounting for 25% each. As I've said before, there are good organic revenue growth prospects for all three divisions. We expect footwear to grow over the medium term at circa 8%, Performance Materials at 6%-9%, and apparel at 3%-4%. Apparel accounts for a majority of our employees and operating sites. We will provide historical numbers for the new division structure ahead of our half year 2023 results. For these results, we are reporting in accordance to the structure last year based on two segments, which are apparel and footwear and Performance Materials. Apparel and footwear full year performance was strong with constant currency growth of 18% and organic revenue growth of 9%.
As we had stated 12 months back, that 2022 would be a year of two halves, and it certainly played that way. We experienced a demand surge in Q1 and industry destocking in Q4. As we went through the second half, year-on-year performance slowed as we had anticipated. Main reasons were macroeconomic factors and industry destocking. This mostly impacted apparel in Q4, but also footwear towards the end of the year. Overall volumes were 5% below 2022, but similar to 2019 levels. There was a positive mix shift with sales of higher margin products growing faster. We also had very good price performance, which more than offset the entire inflation that we experienced last year. All of this has resulted in the adjusted EBIT margin increasing 90 basis points to 17.3% at constant currency.
We continued to gain market share during the year and added 100 basis points in 2022. We estimate our share to be around 24% of the global thread market. This ability to grow market share is a testament to our strategy, scale, and people. We are a global leader in apparel and footwear threads. We supply premium products and value-added services such as technical and color matching, as well as important software products that can help our customers improve their operational performance. Our recycled products grew 37%. We are an industrial leader in sustainability and social credentials. This is a big differentiator and a source of competitive advantage. I will talk more about the group's ESG performance a bit later. Our apparel and footwear business has global scale, strong technical expertise, winning products, and deep customer relationships.
We have a strong business that is well-positioned to serve leading global and regional brands with innovative products and world-class service well into the future. Performance Materials had an excellent year delivering full year organic revenue growth of 13%, with its three subsegments which are personal protection, composites, and performance threads all contributing to this growth. The adjusted operating profit in this business increased by 190 basis points at constant currency to 8.1%. This is primarily due to price. Due to lack of labor availability in the U.S., we had decided to move some production to Mexico. We are halfway through this journey. Last year, we opened a new factory in Huamantla and upgraded our manufacturing technology at our existing Orizaba factory.
Further footprint enhancements are planned for 2023. As mentioned last year, we will see the full benefits of these changes in 2024. We have continued to win customer business during the year. Our end markets continue to be attractive and robust. Personal protection and composites are underpinned by structural growth drivers such as industrial worker safety and comfort, rollout of 5G networks, and expansion of fiber optic cables to home. Performance materials organic sales should grow 6%-9% CAGR over the medium term. We expect to see its adjusted operating margins rise to circa 14% in 2024. We have continued to invest in innovation, bringing new and differentiated products to market. One of these is FlamePro Splash, a product which gives enhanced Personal protection against molten liquids with application in steel and foundry industries, amongst others.
It has already won its first significant customer. Next, we will show a video of the recently launched FlamePro Splash product, which offers life-saving protection in a high-risk work environment. A key element of our company purpose is to make a better and more sustainable world. In late 2018, we took on the challenge to set bold targets to be delivered over a four-year period. Despite the pandemic year of 2020 and subsequent significant supply chain disruptions, we did not change the original targets. I'm thrilled and proud to say that we have substantially delivered on these targets. Having reached our 2022 milestone, we have now set new and challenging targets for the next four-year period ending in 2026. These build on our achievements to date using 2022 performance as the baseline.
We continue to focus on people, water, emissions, and waste reduction, as well as product innovation and material transition. We have also added two new 2026 target areas relating to the number of female leaders in the business and Scope 1 and Scope 2 emission reduction. Among our 2026 targets, we are looking to achieve zero waste to landfill from all our sites. We are also targeting a reduction in our Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by a further 22% from last year's baseline of 212 kilotons. We have introduced these new targets to keep forward momentum as we drive towards our 2030 Science Based Targets initiative goals and our 2050 net zero aspiration. I now want to talk about the significant strategic progress during the year, starting with the Texon and Rhenoflex acquisitions.
As stated in the Capital Markets Day in October, the acquisitions of Texon and Rhenoflex have transformed our position in the large and faster-growing footwear components market, making Coats the clear market leader in footwear components. Let me recap the main points from the Capital Markets Day. Footwear is a faster-growing and more resilient end market. Coats has built a successful footwear threads business over the past two decades, and when combined with structural components from Texon and Rhenoflex, it propels Coats to be the largest footwear component supplier. Our addressable market has gone up 3x from $600 million to $1.8 billion. This business has 23% market share in a growth market. We expect sales to grow circa 8% CAGR over the medium term. Our sales and athleisure and sports subsegments should grow double-digit.
Premium performance and luxury footwear products are highly engineered and specified by the brands. Coats' footwear differentiates itself through global scale innovation and sustainability. In many surveys, consumers have shown a clear preference to buy products from brands that have sustainability at the core. Innovation is increasingly being focused on materials and supply chains. Texon and Rhenoflex have strong sustainability track records and will be a net positive contributor to the overall Coats sustainability story. We believe there are good growth opportunities for us in footwear components. As mentioned, we're targeting an 8% organic sales growth CAGR over the medium term, and there's also good potential to expand the adjusted operating margins of this division to over 20%. In 2022, we have completed several footprint projects as part of the ongoing transformation in Coats. This chart summarizes the footprint changes made last year.
Our acquisitions of Texon and Rhenoflex have brought us additional manufacturing capacity in Europe and Asia. As part of the Performance Materials sales and margin improvement plan, we have opened a new state-of-the-art factory in Mexico and upgraded the existing site with new bonding technology. We have closed one of our U.S. factories and downsized another to match labor availability. Within Performance Materials, we have opened a new 50% larger composites facility and innovation center in Spain. We have opened a new thread distribution and manufacturing hub in Romania, which will support the apparel growth plans in Europe. During the year, we exited a number of non-strategic and low growth markets such as Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Hungary, South Africa, Ukraine, and in early 2023, Madagascar and Mauritius.
In summary, it's been a year of expanding capacity where we see medium-term sales and margin potential, optimizing capacity in certain areas to improve productivity, and exiting low growth and non-strategic markets. In March last year, we announced strategic projects to help lift the overall margins of the business to 17% in 2024. We said we will deliver $50 million incremental savings by 2024. The projects are well planned and executed, resulting in an acceleration of savings. Last year, we achieved $20 million of savings, well ahead of the original target of $5 million-$10 million. We are also announcing today an expansion in the scope of our projects, increasing the total expected savings from $50 million to $70 million by 2024. The scope expansion is focused on additional actions to transform our Asian operations, in particular in India and China.
In 2022, we delivered an operating margin of 14.8%, exceeding the pre-pandemic peak in margin of 14.3%. The increased margin achieved last year is partly the result of improvement in end markets, especially in the first half, but mostly the result of self-help around pricing, productivity, strategic projects, and fiscal discipline. We continue to invest in sustainability, innovation, and productivity. Our short-term goal is to get to 17% adjusted operating margins in 2024. We have in place the building blocks that should enable us to deliver 6% organic revenue growth over the medium term and 17% adjusted operating margins. These building blocks include the two footwear acquisitions, sustainability, innovation, pricing, productivity, strategic projects, talent, and technology. Now to wrap up with the highlights and outlook statement.
We have delivered a strong set of results in 2022, and while we are mindful of current macroeconomic uncertainties, we have made significant progress in transforming Coats into a stronger, nimbler, and more efficient business with greater focus on faster growth markets and good margin enhancement potential. This, together with the pension progress, allows us for enhanced cash generation over time. We expect to deliver another year of strategic and operational progress. Destocking by customers has continued into the early part of the year, primarily in apparel markets and to a lesser extent in footwear. We continue to proactively respond to the macroeconomic uncertainty and inflationary pressures using our well-defined and tested playbook, focusing on cash, cost, self-help initiatives, deep customer relationships, and tactical pricing actions.
We continue to anticipate the full year performance to be in line with the board's expectation, with the second half weighting underpinned by the contribution of acquisitions, associated synergies, and strategic projects. This concludes the presentation. I now hand over to Chris for the Q&A.
Thank you, Rajiv and Jackie. The Q&A session will begin shortly. If you would like to ask a question, please dial into the conference call using the details provided on the screen in front of you. Otherwise, please stay connected to listen to the Q&A. We will pause for a few minutes to allow time for people to dial into the conference call. Once you are online, please follow the operator's instructions.
We will now begin the Q&A session. If you'd like to ask a question, you can press star one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, you may press star two. Please ensure you're unmuted locally when asking your question. Our first question for today comes from Charles Hall of Peel Hunt. Charles, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Morning, everyone. Well done on a very good set of figures.
Thank you.
Few questions. Can I start on market share? Obviously, you had another good year last year, and I think that makes 300 basis points over two years, which is well ahead of the long-term track record. Is this an aberration with COVID and you picking up extra business during that period, or do you see a change in terms of your capability of gaining share?
Charles, I guess if you look at the past decade you know, pre-pandemic, we were picking up between 50 basis points and 70 basis points of market share each year. As you have sort of rightly said, in the last two years, we have picked up a combined 300 basis points market share. What we are seeing is that, you know, volatility is helping us. We are able to respond to the last-minute customer requests much better than competition. On a global scale is really, you know, a big factor in this whole, you know, area here. As we see volatility into this year, I think that, you know, those will be opportunities for us to further take market share.
Okay. You mentioned, Rajiv, the H1 H2 weighting, and obviously very different shape to this year compared to last year. Do you want to just give a bit of color on how much that might be? I think you were something like 53 47 last year in favor of the first half. Is it gonna reverse?
Charles, if you sort of, you know, recollect, same time last year, we said, 2022 is gonna be a year of two halves. That's exactly how it played. The split is exactly what, you know, what you've mentioned here. This year, we expect it to reverse. It's gonna reverse, based on what we know today, and it's a very preliminary estimate. I think it's gonna be a 45/55 split in EBIT between H1 and H2 this year.
Lovely. That's helpful. Last question, can you just give some thoughts on the Texon and Rhenoflex performance post-acquisition? Obviously, we see the profit number. In terms of operating together, any customer activity that's looking encouraging, how does everything feel as that's going?
Yeah, absolutely. In terms of the integration, it's going on very well. The business is actually performing in line with expectations. They have continued to take market share. As a matter of fact, post the completion of the acquisition, Rhenoflex was nominated as a strategic supplier to Nike. You know, we are now a strategic supplier to both Adidas and Nike, and that's a privileged position to be in. They have had some significant wins in the fourth quarter last year, and those wins will start to play out in the second half of this year. Broadly, it's absolutely in line. The synergies are sort of coming through, again, in line with expectations and the business, you know, overall seems to be humming and doing well.
Brilliant. That's great to hear. Thanks very much.
Thank you, Charles.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Maggie Schooley of Stifel. Maggie, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everybody. I had a few questions, if I may. First of all, congratulations on the pension switch on. I think that, obviously highlights, as you said, the material improvement in the pension and what you're doing there. Given the pension trustees' comfort with this, I know you've stated that you believe the medium term of full buy-out and getting that liability off the pension fund is possible. Can you give us some further background into if the agreement today, possibly accelerates that potential to get the liability off the balance sheet a little bit earlier than what you were previously thinking, given the comfort that at least the pension trustees have, which should possibly translate to the insurance companies? That'd be my first question?
The second two questions, if I may, is you talk about the new technology in the Mexico plants, and that bonding technology and how it increases flexibility, and also enhances operations. Could you explain that slightly in more detail? Is that something that you can roll out across the rest of the footprint? My last question is, you also mentioned in the statement you spent $10 million on water-free dyeing solutions. Was this intertwined or was this another technology that we can look forward to, as you progress through the next couple of years?
Hi, Maggie, it's Jackie here. I'll take the first question on pensions. Look, we have announced today some very positive news on the pensions, and I think there's really two parts to this. The first thing is that on a technical deficits basis, we're broadly fully funded. We're sitting in a slightly technical deficit position at this point. What we've been able to agree with the trustees is that when we hit a certain threshold, it's actually at a 101% of the deficit. It needs to be a surplus of about GBP 14 million. If we can do that for two months, they'll allow us to turn off contributions.
Look, what we're doing there is we've set up a mechanism with the trustees now to look at the valuation on a monthly basis to monitor that. There are different aspects that go into that valuation. Of course, it's interest rates, it's inflation rates, asset values, mortality rates. Of course, the contributions that we make on a monthly basis, which are just under GBP 2 million on a monthly basis. Taking all of that into account, we would expect at some point to get to that surplus position. If we're in that position for two months, we'll be able to turn off contributions. What we will do is we'll keep you updated on that.
If we hit the trigger, we'd issue a short RNS to the market to let you know that that has happened. Off the back of that, we've got a very constructive relationship with the trustees, and we're working towards longer-term, what we call de-risking of the pension scheme, which is further buy-ins or ultimately a buy-out of that pension scheme. If you, if you'd asked me this question when I first joined Coats a couple of years ago, I would have said that's probably an eight to 10-year journey. What we think at this point is it's much closer, probably a two to three-year journey at this point in time.
Okay. Very clear. Thank you. Very positive.
Maggie, on your second question regarding the new bonding technology. This is something that we have been working on for the last four years. We are actually partnering with a British company to come up with these machines. Conventional bonding happens in large horizontal electric fired sort of heaters. The new technology is vertically stacked. You know, the heating happens through, you know, infrared heating. It occupies much less space. It is very energy, you know, efficient. The quality and throughput from these new horizontal infrared bonders is much better. We do plan to scale this up and, you know, have these new bonding technologies, you know, in factories that have got a lot of, you know, performance materials or footwear kind of, you know, applications there.
The answer is yes to that.
Mm.
The third part of your question was the $10 million. As you would remember, this is a $10 million fund that we created to accelerate the material transition and, you know, breakthrough technologies that, you know, that can help us in the industry. The first $2 million of that is going towards waterless dyeing. We have been working very closely with Twine. The plan is to have about 20 of the machines placed, you know, at our customer site, in the next 12 months to actually, you know, test these machines in real-life environment. You know, $2 million is for waterless dyeing. The balance $8 million is gonna be for renewable materials or recycled materials.
Excellent. Can I sneak in one last question? It goes back to Charles's on the split. Historically, through 2008, 2009 and COVID, you've seen a very sharp restock after a destocking event. Does the inclusion of Rhenoflex and Texon in any way change your expectation that historical pattern would be any different?
I guess, you know, this is my fourth destocking cycle in the last 12 years, Maggie. You know, it's just part of the normal, you know, business, you know, business cycle within the apparel, you know, industry here. There's nothing unusual about it. Normally what we have seen in the last decade or so, anytime there's destocking, there happens to be a rebound, you know, in terms of the restocking. Usually on the way up is when we take sort of, you know, market share in terms, you know, in terms of the volume, growth that happens here. I would expect something kind of similar to happen this year. The only question which we can't answer today right now is when will that restocking start, right?
Again, I'd like to just sort of clarify that this whole restocking, destocking primarily happens in the apparel division. It doesn't happen in Performance Materials, and it's very limited in the footwear space here, right? This is largely an apparel phenomena that happens. For us, we, you know, we don't mind it because, you know, because of the volatility we tend to gain when things start to improve here. I think it's gonna be the same sort of, you know, reputation this time around.
Excellent. Very clear. Thank you for entertaining all of my questions. I know there were many. Thanks.
Thank you, Maggie.
Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Kevin Fogarty of Numis. Kevin, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone. Well done on the results today, and thanks for taking my questions. If I could ask two, please. First is on supply chains. It looks like there's been some kind of moderation to some extent during H2. I just wondered if you could put a bit more color on that, how significant that might have been or is it sort of less material? I guess really with a view on what do sort of current supply chains mean for the level of inventories you think the business needs to carry going forward, particularly the year ahead? That'd be first question, please.
The second question, in terms of the expanded potential savings you've outlined this morning from strategic projects, I just wondered, is there any sort of granularity on the source of those? Are there any really specific areas of big wins in there, or does it tend to continue to be a series of smaller projects within that?
All right. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks for your questions here. The first one around supply chain. I think 2022 can be characterized as a period of, you know, supply chain stability. We did have pretty significant, you know, inflation in the first three quarters as far as raw materials, energy, et cetera, concern. From a supply chain standpoint, things were pretty stable last year across the world, and we expect, you know, the supply side to continue being stable this year and next year. We don't see any issues with respect to distress within our supplier base, you know, financial distress. People seem to be in a healthy space here. There are no issues with respect to raw material, you know, availability across the world.
Broadly, I think the supply side is stable and in a good position here. You know, the question mark is more on the demand side, which we have answered, previously that, you know, that's a bit unknown in the apparel space right now. That's on the supply side here. We do expect inflation to come down in raw materials and freight this year, so that's gonna be a tailwind for us. They did start to moderate in the fourth quarter of last year, and we expect that moderation to continue into 2023 here. The second question was around the expanded scope of the strategic projects.
When we announced our original strategic projects, it had a, you know, a price of $50 million of EBIT by 2024, and those were largely confined to the Americas and Europe. The expanded scope now includes Asia, within Asia, there's a heavy focus on India and China, where we have large sort of, you know, manufacturing capacities. It's to a large extent optimizing the manufacturing footprint, optimizing the distribution footprint, and redeploying some of the assets, you know, the people assets that we have, within these two countries. Southeast Asia, to a large extent, is gonna be left untouched, in terms of the strategic projects, but we will be looking to expand in Indonesia, especially on the footwear side towards the end of this year.
Great. That's really helpful. Thank you for the extra color.
Thank you, Kevin.
Thanks.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Mark Fielding of RBC. Mark, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Yeah, morning, all. Three questions actually, please, if that's all right. First one picks up a little bit on the market share question from earlier, but in a more specific place, which is just in terms of the recycled product growth, whether that was a contributor to the market share gain or whether the business this year was more about substitution with existing customers. Maybe on that, you could just talk about the competitive dynamics and how they're evolving in that recycled product segment. Maybe just start with that, and then I can take the other questions after.
Okay. When you look at our recycled products, they grew 37% last year, all right? They could have grown a lot more. It's just that we saw, you know, a volume decline in the second half. That's gonna come back again. Roughly 2/3 of the recycled products go towards product substitution at an anchor European customer, and the balance 1/3 is largely market share gains here. Moving forward, I think it's gonna become 50/50. We are using recycled polyester thread as a means for greater market share gains going, you know, going forward.
Great. Thank you. Can we just talk a little bit about sort of the trading dynamics in terms of obviously you flagged the in apparel and footwear volumes through the year were actually down around 5% when we back out the price mix effect. I'm just curious on the divergence within that, 'cause that is apparel and footwear, and we're obviously gonna start thinking about the two separately. Just what was the divergence in that volume trend between those two segments of apparel and footwear and how we think about that in 2023?
Yeah. Last year, pretty much the entire destocking happened in the apparel division. If you were to break it up further into apparel separately and footwear separately, you know, it was largely an apparel phenomena. This year it's gonna be again, mostly apparel, but some footwear. Yeah, it was largely an apparel phenomena last year.
Perfect. Thanks. Finally, just on Performance Materials, obviously a good year, but looks like a slightly slower progression in just the last couple of months. I don't know if there was anything you specifically wanted to call out there and how we think about the outlook for this year in the context of obviously that wider 6%-9% growth aspiration you have for that division?
Yeah. The last quarter performance was impacted by one particular customer in the U.S. that decided to, you know, insource some of the production. You know, we were actually doing it for them, and they decided that they wanted to bring that sort of production in-house. That was the impact that happened in Q4. Beyond that, Europe has remained pretty much, you know, steady. The rest of the U.S. has remained reasonably steady. It's just one customer in one country that has created, you know, created that dynamic for PM.
Is there a reason that, you know, this year isn't, you know, in that 6%-9% type medium-term growth range? Are there, you know, factors that we think about there?
No, we expect it to be in the 6%, you know, 6%-9% growth rate.
Perfect.
With, you know, improving margins.
Perfect. Just one clarification, that U.S. customer insourced, that's nothing to do with obviously the issues you've had in terms of capacity and labor availability and things. That was just the decision they made for whatever internal strategic reasons, or was it affected by your ability to supply at times?
No, it was an internal decision by the customer.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mark.
Thank you. Our next question comes from Joe Spooner of HSBC. Joe, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Morning. Thank you. Can you just talk a little bit more about that pension agreement that you've reached? If, if the payments do stop because you reach a surplus but then it slips back into deficit, do those monthly payments simply resume or is there some kind of catch-up for the fact that you've gone back into payments? Just wanted to understand a little bit more about those dynamics. Thanks.
Joe, what happens is we need to stay within a range of 99%-101%. If we slip below 99% for two consecutive months, then we do restart the payments, and we restart them at 150% 'til we catch up. There is a catch-up element that we've agreed with the trustees there if we do slip back into a deficit position.
That's great. Thank you.
Thank you. Our next question comes from David Farrell of Jefferies. David, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much for taking my questions. I think there's still a few I can ask. Just wanted to understand what you were thinking about kind of China reopening and the positive impact that might have on your business as we progress through 2023. With regards to some of the new sustainability targets, specifically looking at the recycled and bio content in 2026 of 60%. I think if we look at EcoVerde, they are margin accretive. Just wondering to what extent in your margin target for 2024 you're factoring in a change in the mix of products to get to that 17%. Thank you.
David, thank you very much for the questions here. Let me start with the China question. I think China opening is a net positive for everyone in the industry and certainly for Coats. Retail shopping is back in full swing in China. Malls are full. Domestic travel is full. People are buying online and in stores. We are also seeing that reflected in the capacity utilization of two of our factories in China, which are currently running at 100% capacity utilization. They're the two factories that are focused primarily on the domestic Chinese brands here. We see this as a net positive. The other, the other dynamic is a lot of the Western brands that have been used to selling a lot of their product in China will see this as a, as a tailwind in 2023.
When that happens, it's gonna be a positive thing for Coats too. Overall, I think it's, it is, you know, good news from a Coats standpoint. With respect to your question on recycled product here, I think just to be clear here, recycled products for us, over the last few years have been margin neutral for us. It's not been margin accretive, but margin neutral. The input costs are slightly higher than that of virgin polyester. We do get a price premium, but the price premium covers the, you know, the higher input cost here. One should not factor in any margin accretion as a result of the recycled products going up in terms of sales.
I think in the long run, maybe three, four years out, when we get sufficient scale in terms of buying these kind of, you know, raw materials, and converting them into finished goods, we could see margin accretion. So far, we are not using that in our internal calculations.
Okay, thanks. Just one follow-up. If I look at the trajectory of kind of new products coming out over the last few years, they've been trending down. The actual revenue generated from new products has gone up or stayed stable, I think, this year. Another year of kinda higher revenue per new product. Can you just talk about kind of the new products that you're bringing through? Is there now closer collaboration with your customers and therefore you get a kind of a more immediate impact in terms of sales?
The answer to the second part of your question is absolutely yes. you know, our sort of Vitality Index KPI is sort of a rolling five-year view of kind of, you know, sales from new products. Products that were launched, let's say in 2017, have actually rolled off that, you know, that KPI. We have been sort of, you know, delayed in a few areas because of the pandemic in 2020, but I think we're catching up strongly here. One of the things that we have observed post-pandemic in 2020, 2021, 2022, is customers are now more interested in breakthrough products rather than, you know, than just incremental innovation or, you know, minor tweaks to the products here.
That is something which is gonna help us immensely because fundamental, you know, big-time breakthrough innovation usually happens with the larger companies working very closely with startups and technology companies on the side. I think this is gonna be a tailwind for us over the next next few years.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you, David.
Thank you. Our next question comes from James Zaremba from Barclays. James, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Good morning. Three questions, please. Firstly, just to follow up on the Asian transformation, is there any reason why you're looking at this now? Does this relate to the, kind of the acquisitions you've made or that kind of slight pivot towards Indonesia? That's the first question.
Okay. The only reason why we're looking at it now is because of internal management bandwidth capacity. You know, we were very much focused on the Americas and Europe, and like most companies, we have sort of, you know, finite capacity internally to, you know, run these projects. If you look at our track record, when we say something, we actually deliver it on plan and on budget. We need to make sure that our best talent is actually deployed for these projects. Last year, we didn't want to, you know, create too much of disruption in the Asian operations. You know, it's sort of doing things piecemeal, so sort of, you know, that's been the strategy over the past many, many years. We wanted to address the burning platform first before going to Asia.
Asia, as you know, is a well-run region for us. It sort of delivers a good amount of profit and cash for us, things were not fundamentally broken. This is, you know, in China and India, it's really an optimization play here.
Great. Yeah. I mean, that sort of goes to my second question, which was, you know, a few investors, you know, saying $70 million is an impressive amount. You know, what can you tell them about, I guess, your views on execution risk around such a large saving?
Of the $70, we have delivered $20 last year, so that's done. It's in the bank. All right? We expect to be delivering another $20 this year, and the balance $30 million will come next year. In my view, the execution risk is low to very low. You know, there are things that we probably cannot control, for example, getting the utility approvals in a particular country because it's a government utility there. You know, overall, I would say the execution risk is low to very low.
That's very clear. Then just, you know, in your comments about maybe having some raw material deflation this year, within that medium-term plan, you know, what's assumed for, I guess, the contribution from market share and then from pricing? You know, does this vary materially between the divisions?
Okay. Let me talk about raw materials first. In terms of raw material deflation, what we are seeing right now is the feedstock that goes into polyester and nylon production has already reached 2019 levels. Okay. This feedstock will now start to flow through into what we buy from our suppliers, and then eventually it'll sort of flow into the P&L for us. We expect that probably by the end of this year, raw material pricing will be back to 2019 levels. That's on the raw material side here. With respect to your question around how much of price mix and volume do we expect.
Our guidance for, you know, during the Capital Markets Day was 6% organic sales growth over the medium term. That 6% can be broken down into about, you know, 1.5% price and mix and the balance, you know, 3.5%-4.5%, you know, sort of volume growth.
I guess within that volume growth, you know, you've had really strong market share in apparel the last couple of years.
Yeah.
Is that a similar market share story in performance materials? Is that more, more about market growth?
I think that's more about market growth there.
Thank you very much.
Okay. Thank you, James.
Thank you. Our final question for today is a follow-up question from Charles Hall of Peel Hunt. Charles, your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Thanks very much. Just following up on a couple of the questions. Rajiv, can you talk a little bit more about the end markets in performance materials, and particularly for the telecom sector, energy sector, Personal Protection?
As far as personal protection is concerned, the end markets are robust, reasonably strong. We expect the end markets in personal protection to continue to grow at 5%-6% during this decade. We also feel that legislation in some countries is gonna help fuel the growth in this, in this space here. On the telecom side, again, it's structural growth with the progressive deployment of 5G networks across the world, with the progressive deployment of fiber optic cables to home across the world. I think this is, again, a decade-long structural growth that we see in the telecom sector.
As you know, oil and, y ou know, oil and gas has had a recent, sort of, you know, surge in terms of demand because of the shortage of, you know, oil, you know, a couple of years back. We expect that that conventional oil and gas will continue to be reasonably robust over the next two or three years before sort of, you know, tapering off there. Automotive will be slow this year. We, you know, during its peak, about 94 million cars were sort of produced in a year. The last couple of years, it's been around 84-85 million cars. We think that's gonna remain at the same level. The electric vehicles clearly are gonna be going up.
Great. Just lastly on market share, are you able to split it into new customers and greater share of wallet?
We have that. I'd be happy to share that offline with you.
Perfect. I'll look forward to it.
Thank you.
Thank you. We have no further questions for today. That concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.