Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the full year results presentation of discoverIE Group plc. And as is normal, I'm just going to give a few words of introduction, hopefully not stealing the thunder from Nick and Simon, but perhaps just giving a little bit of context before they give you the detail. And I'm not going to apologize by actually starting by repeating about our strategy, because it is a very consistent strategy, and I stand up at every results presentation and repeat it because it is worth repeating. Over the years, we've really focused on a number of key elements of the strategy.
Firstly, in terms of organic revenue growth, targeting over the business cycle to actually beat the background market in terms of organic revenue growth, and that's really by focusing on target markets and design wins within those target markets. Secondly, strong and improving operating margins. By running our businesses efficiently, we're able to, over time, along with higher margin acquisitions, actually improve our operating margins. Thirdly, we compound the growth by actually having an ongoing program of acquisitions, where we're looking for value-creating acquisitions, which really add to the operating margin and give us a good return on investment. And through all of this, a real focus on cash flow to fund the investments and also return on investment, to make sure that we're really actually delivering value to shareholders over time.
So a very consistent and simple strategy, and I hope you agree, successful over the years. If we sort of bring it forward now to this last financial year, it's been a tougher environment to operate in and, and therefore a real test of, of that strategy. And if we look at the organic revenue growth, we've had certain areas in terms of our target markets, which have grown well: renewables, the medical, the transportation, particularly electrical transportation. But the industrial market, which is also a large target market for us, that has been tougher with building up of stock in our customers, and that's been a reaction to the supply chain shortages, and perhaps we're starting to see that ease a little bit now. But that really has held back the organic revenue growth.
But I think what we need to keep in context is that what discoverIE has managed to do over this period is really retain the gains in revenue of the last couple of years. So if we look back at the prior two years, revenues have grown at constant exchange rates by almost 50%. So it's been quite an achievement to actually maintain that revenue during the year. And I think, again, it's always good to take the slightly longer-term picture. And Nick has picked out in his commentary that over seven years we've seen organic revenue growth at a compound annual growth rate of 7% per annum, and that really sort of meets the objectives of beating the background market on organic revenue growth.
It's also been a very strong year in terms of operating profits, in terms of operating margin, and also cash flow and return on investment. So I'm not going to say any more. Nick and Simon will give the details, but a strong performance in challenging markets. And I think also we see some good evidence of building for the future, particularly in terms of the strong level of design wins, which ultimately work their way through to revenues and profits, but also a building acquisition pipeline, and that, again, contributes to our compounding growth strategy over the years. So with that introduction, I'm going to pass over to Nick to give us a bit more of the detail.
Thanks, Bruce. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for coming. Excuse me. Right. Just a quick run through the highlights, and then Simon will go into the financials before we come back to the operating review. So, you'll have seen the highlighted sales up 1% CER, which is down 1% organically. As Bruce said, that's on the back of sales increase of 48% in the prior two years. The point I want to bring out, though, is that we've delivered very strong organic growth in three of our target markets: renewables, transportation, and medical. Those markets are up by 12%, although albeit offset by the industrial destocking, more of which later. We've kept the operational efficiencies coming.
The operating margin is up by 160 basis points and 170 basis points on a CER rate to 13.1%. So we're well on track ahead of our planned margin targets so far and putting us in good position for our longer-term or mid-term 15% target. Cash flow up very strongly. Operating cash flow up 22% to GBP 59 million with 103% conversion. Really pleased with that. And our underlying EPS up 5%, 10% at CER, that would be, which, you know, given the extra interest costs and the FX headwinds, we're, you know, you know, we're, pleased with that. And of course, it's ahead of ... It's a small beat against consensus, so we're pleased with that, too.
Carbon emissions down by 47% in absolute terms. We continue to make really good progress on that. There's a lot going on around the group, and, you know, we're well on track for our targets, our published targets in the next few years. We've been busy on the acquisition front. We've got a team of five people now in the M&A group, at the center. We made five acquisitions for GBP 83 million in the period. We also sold essentially half of the Santon business, which is the solar business, the costs of that, of which are in these results, and the gains, the proceeds from it, are in the new year's, will be in the new year's results. But, you know, we're very pleased with the five that we've made.
They're doing well, and, you know, integrating as expected. So at this stage in the cycle, where revenue has plateaued, you know, what can we do and what can we control? Well, we can focus heavily on our organic performance, which is design wins. So we've got a lot of focus on that, and it is building, the bank of design wins is building very, very well indeed, very, very strongly, and that will set us up as the market turns. And we now have a very strong pipeline of acquisitions in the mix as well. So, we feel that we're in good shape for when the sort of cloud of destocking lifts and confidence starts to sort of return in some areas, then we think that we're very well positioned.
More of that later. I'll now hand over to Simon to go through the finances.
Thanks, Nick. Thanks, Bruce. Good morning, everybody. Nick's run through a number of the financial highlights already. So, you know, first up for me is revenue. So, you know, sales this year, GBP 437 million, that's up 1% at CER, and that's a good performance, you know, given the tough period of destocking the market has experienced, and also against the tough comparators that Bruce mentioned. So, you know, sales up 48% in the prior two years. So that, across the three-year period, that's really good, strong through-cycle performance on the sales line.
You know, and in terms of organic performance, again, the through-cycle performance that we've delivered is 6% CAGR growth. Over 10 years, it's 7% in the last seven years. So that's a really good performance. It's -1% this year, but we've given some breakdown. There'll be more from Nick on this later, between the target markets, and you can see actually it's... we've got some really strong growth, 12% growth, in three of our four markets. And but it's down 19% in the industrial and connectivity market, and that's principally just a few of the bigger customers that have really, you know, destocked, you know, quite heavily.
So the good news is that actually we're seeing a lot of growth in most of our customers, and I think that will, you know, bode well as we sort of look forward to the next, you know, the next upcycle. So that's, you know, it's very much, you know, you know what we are. We are, as a model, you know, in normal times, you know, we're strong growth. You know, in tougher times, we're resilient. So next, on to profit and margin. You know, sales have been low, but actually we've still delivered, you know, some strong growth in margin and in profit on, you know, on the back of operating efficiencies that Nick's talked about. So we've kept...
You can see the profits are up 16% at CER to GBP 57 million. We've got a record operating margin at 13.1%, 13.4% in the second half. You know, ultimately, as I said, it's down to those operating efficiencies and some acquisitions. It's jointly between the two. You know, we've kept our costs. The cost base, as you'll see, has been well managed, and we've. There's a number of margin initiatives, gross margin initiatives that we've sort of seen through. You know, we transferred production down to lower margin areas such as Mexico, such as Hungary.
We've done some production sharing in the U.S. and in the U.K., and there's, you know, the cross-selling within clusters and between clusters is on the growth. So that's all good news. And this all sort of builds into, you know, what we've been achieving, the progress we've been achieving. So you can see the margin is up 5.5 percentage points since FY 2018, and the actual profits are up 22% CAGR since FY 2018. And we're well on track to achieving the 13.5%. You'd say that's in the bag for the FY 2025 and 15% in the medium term.
And this chart, you know, summarizes a good summary walk between last year's profits, GBP 51.8 million, this year's profits are GBP 57.2 million. The first three bars you can see on the left, that's our organic performance, and the real standouts are the operational efficiencies. So GBP 4.9 million extra profit from gross margin, that's over 1% organic improvement in gross margin. Costs, organically, you know, down 1%, so GBP 4 million in total from an organic profit growth. Amount sits nicely alongside GBP 4 million that we've achieved from acquisitions. Five acquisitions this year, one acquisition last year.
You can see also on that chart, we've absorbed GBP 2.5 million just from, you know, a translation hit from, you know, stronger sterling, which is good to see we can, we can absorb that type of, type of impact. So I like, you know, I really like this, this graph. I think we like this graph. It sort of, it shows what we're about, it shows the model. It's about, you know, organic growth with operating efficiencies, with accretive acquisitions on top. Next, on to the two divisions. You know, both divisions have had a really, you know, strong performance, given this, the tough conditions they've been operating in. As you can see on this chart, it sort of shows performance results against last year at constant exchange rates.
You know, first the M&C, you know, sales of you know, roughly flattish for the year, and but again, some quite differences, stark differences in within the markets. So, you know, the U.S. is up very strongly, as has been the Nordics has had good growth, but it's sort of been offset by Asia and also by softness in you know, in Germany. I think a lot of companies have seen that. The operating efficiencies, you can see, are strong. You know, very good growth margin. OpEx down 2%. We've had three acquisitions into that division, you know, during the year, and the result being profits up 12%, and the operating margin up 1.6 percentage points to 15.3.
A very similar picture from S&C. You know, sales up 4%, you know, 2% organic. Again, this sort of mixed picture by territory. You know, North America, strong again. You know, we've had a good performance in the UK, but sort of offset by weakness in both Asia and in Europe. But yeah, similar operating efficiencies, you know, to M&C. Again, we've had three acquisitions in this division. You know, two this year, and we had the Magnasphere acquisition last year. And the result, 15% growth in operating profits, and also a 1.6 percentage points lift in margin to 16.8. So really good performances. You know, more detail from Nick on the two divisions, you know, coming up.
Next on to PBT and EPS. So this table gives you a walk from the profits of GBP 57.2, down to the underlying EPS of 36.8p. The big standout is obviously the finance cost. That's up 64% on the back of the rate rises you'll all be familiar with. I've put a little chart down there in the lower left-hand corner, just to remind you of how quickly they went up. I've put them there for the three currencies. There are our three borrowing currencies that we borrow in, typically a third, a third, a third, in order to sort of, you know, manage our cash, you know, cash flow exposure.
So up 64%, so that brings EPS 10% growth in operating profit at a statutory level, down to 5% EPS growth. As Nick said, that's 10% actually at a CER basis, and on the back of that, we've also paid a dividend. We've increased the dividend 5% in line with the EPS. A reminder that, you know, as interest rates do, you know, if and when they do eventually start, you know, coming down, you know, we're gonna benefit quite nicely. You know, we have a variable debt base, and I've put a sensitivity there. A 1 percentage point annualized reduction in base rates will increase EPS by about 3%.
And just at the bottom there, Nick talked about the disposal of the solar business unit, and that is... You know, the way the accounting works, it's sort of split between two periods. So we had GBP 6 million of costs, you know, this year, of which GBP 2.4 million are cash costs, but the proceeds are only booked on receipt, and that will be next year. So the net proceeds of the overall transaction will be GBP 7 million cash upside, which is great news, and you can be sure we will recycle that into acquisitions next year.
And if it hadn't been for that, you know, the cost impact this year, the actual statutory EPS would have been broadly neutral. So the cash flow, you know, Nick and Bruce both touched on the cash flow. We're, we're really pleased with this. Again, this table at the top, you can see a walk from EBITDA, GBP 66 million, down to free cash flow of GBP 37 million. The two bars on the left, you know, that's our investment into, into capital. GBP 2.2 million into working capital. That's actually down GBP 6.6 million since the half year, and that's as expected. We talked about we'd be reducing inventory levels, and we've, we've done that.
In fact, stock turns have increased to 3.3x , which is the highest for over two years, you know, from our perspective. GBP 4.9 million into CapEx investment, that's only 1.1% of sales, and so, you know, those two combined really illustrate, you know, how capital-light, you know, this model really is. In the middle chart, you can see the growth we're achieving in terms of operating profit. That's up 22%. 12% increase in free cash flow. The difference in the growth rates, obviously, the interest rates can have a big bearing on that, but also tax rates. Tax is up 40% from a cash perspective, you know, partly on increased profitability, but also, we've utilized a lot of our U.S. tax losses.
You know, conversion rates, you know, Nick talked about that. We've got some excellent conversion rates, both over 100%, and if you look at the table at the bottom, shows our track record of conversion over the last 10 or 11 years, and that's averaging around about 100%. So it's very much, you know, what we are, it's a capital light model. It's cash generative, it's great conversion rates, good cash flow. In terms of balance sheet, balance sheet, net debt at the period end of GBP 104 million, GBP 7 million lower than it was at the half year, and we've funded three acquisitions in the final quarter. Gearing is at 1.5. You know, we're comfortable in the range 1.5-2x .
If we fund up to 2x , that gives us an extra GBP 45 million of funding capacity. And if you add that to, say, the GBP 30 million we could achieve in funding capacity next year, plus the GBP 7 million from the sale of recycling the sale of the solar business, that will give around about GBP 80 million-GBP 85 million, which is, it's the sort of level we invested this year. So we're starting to move to that sustainable funding level that we'd like to get to. Next, on to ROCE. You know, as is, it's a compounding model in terms of ROCE. So as we, you know, as the underlying businesses grow, what we call the organic ROCE is gonna continue to grow, but that will be tempered as we do acquisitions.
which typically we're gonna buy, we're gonna do acquisitions at, you know, sub- you know, our target is 15% overall ROCE. You know, acquisitions are gonna typically be, be below that as a, as an initial ROCE. So if you look at that chart, what you can see, I've put the organic number, so the 15.9% has grown by two percentage points in a year to 17.8%. We've done a record number of acquisitions, GBP 83 million spend. That brings, tempers the ROCE back down to 15.7. Still nicely comfortably above that, that 15% level. And I've also put a data point in there. You know, for acquisitions that we do, that are seven years or older, and don't forget, all of our businesses have been acquired.
There's no sort of old business that's sitting, you know, sitting there. You know, we've acquired all our businesses in the last 13 years. Those businesses are achieving a ROCE of 28%, and that includes, that includes head office costs. So what we would expect to see is that 17.8 organic now, you know, through time will grow to that sort of 28%. So you, you're gonna continue to get that, but we will do acquisitions, which I say will, you know, will temper, will temper the ROCE at the newer side. We've also introduced this ROTE measure, so return on tangible capital employed, so that's sort of ROCE, but without the goodwill and the intangibles, and that's coming out at 54%.
That's up six percentage points in a year, which is a combination of increased profitability and also the inventory reductions that we've made. And that, again, it sort of really illustrates how capital light this model is. Next on to just a reminder of our capital allocation policy. It's a, you know, it's a simple policy. You know, we invest in organic capital opportunities, you know, as they arise. You know, we're gonna recycle value of, you know, underachieving businesses like solar. We're gonna pay a progressive dividend, and the rest of our free cash flow, we're gonna invest in acquisitions. If you look at the chart at the top, we've delivered GBP 215 million of free cash flow in the last seven years.
25% of that we've returned to shareholders, and so the other 75%, we're, we're, we're reinvesting into, in, into, capital growth assets, CapEx or, or acquisitions. And overall, we've, we've used GBP 440 million of capital in the last seven years, and you can see the split. Half of that's actually come from our own free cash flow, a quarter from equity, and a quarter from, from a balance sheet from, from debt. So that's quite a nice, a nice uniform split. And then just at the bottom, you know, we have a very disciplined approach to balance sheet management.
You can see on the chart of, you know, gearing ratios, and you can see we, we haven't gone above our 1.5-2x, you know, gearing range that, that we're comfortable with. You know, there's really no need from our perspective to, to overstretch the balance sheet. And if you look at the endpoint, it's just another illustration how quickly we can pay down our debt levels. The 0.7 gearing last year, had we done no acquisitions, would have come right down to 0.3 within a year. And that's given us capacity to do a record number of acquisitions this year, but, and still be at the lower end of our target range of 1.5. And finally, from me, it's just a look at the, the, you know, our, our key strategic indicators, our performance indicators.
Just, you know, it's good. We've been tracking these for 10 years and reporting back. So, you know, we set them, and, you know, as we deliver on them, you know, we up the targets. So just at the top, you know, the KSIs, you can see great performance from operating margin this year and from carbon reductions. You know, we've achieved some growth in terms of building the business outside Europe. We're at one percentage point, so it's very much driven by organic growth in North America, and we've done two acquisitions as well in North America. You know, target markets you'll see are down, you know, and that's very much linked to the destocking I talked about earlier.
But if, you know, we've got 90% of our design wins are in target markets, so you can expect that, you know, organically, you know, we'll grow, you know, back, you know, back up to, back up to certainly where it was in, in FY 2023. But again, it can get tempered by acquisitions, because typically they, until we get going, they're not, they're not necessarily have, have, you know, necessarily all their sales in target markets. If you look at the KPIs, again, you know, really strong performance. You know, cash flow, you can see great performance there. You know, ROCE nicely above our, above our 15% target. EPS, we would have achieved the target had it not been for, for good old, FX and for those, you know, high interest rates.
And importantly, if you look at the sales picture, that gives you the picture of our sales performance through cycle, and you can see that's a really good performance. I'd say 6%, you know, organic growth over 10 years, 7% in the last seven years. So with that, I'll hand back to Nick for a operational review. Thank you.
Thanks, Simon. Okay, so just a reminder, really. I mean, the discoverIE model is a model that's built for growth. We focus on high-quality growth target markets that account for three-quarters of our sales. The reason for having four target markets, as I say, I think every year, is because every year one of them is down, but three of them should be up, and that's no different this year. It's just the quantum is a bit more different this year. But by focusing on a portfolio of four target areas, we have been able to grow strongly in good times, and then we're more resilient in tougher markets, and that's certainly the case now, and we expect to continue as such.
It's worth also emphasizing we're not exposed to highly cyclical markets, so we don't sell into the big consumer markets, we don't sell into the big, tier one automotive markets, and we don't sell into semiconductor equipment markets, which are all much more cyclical than the areas we focus on. Our margins are robust. You know, our model is about designing in niche custom electronic components and pricing them properly. If we do that, they generate very long-term repeating revenues, and if we organize ourselves more efficiently through arranging our acquisitions into clusters, we're able to increase our margins, even if we don't increase our pricing at the customer, which we also do, but we have operational efficiencies that, by and large, increase both our gross and EBIT margins. Then the business is resilient, as I've mentioned.
There are two things that we do to drive growth. I always mention this. I mentioned at the beginning, and I make no apologies for mentioning it now. On an organic basis, the thing we can do that drives organic growth is get good, high-quality design wins in high-quality customers, and we focus an enormous amount of our effort internally on that, on an ongoing basis and on building the design pipeline that drives the wins. And secondly, on acquisitions, you know, we're scaling up our acquisitions. As Simon has talked about, we've made five acquisitions and one disposal. We now have a team of five people in the M&A team, including one... two people that have an engineering background.
We are building a strong pipeline of both, sort of near term, but also longer-term acquisition opportunities. And those two things, those two areas of priority, are the key to growing this business fundamentally. And I feel as though we're in really good shape on both of those. Just a reminder at a group level, those of you who remember us from 10 years ago will remember that most of our revenue 10 years ago came from Central Europe. You can see now that actually that figure is 23% from Central Europe, because 55% of our revenue now comes from North America, Nordic, and the UK markets, which, so I class that as the more resilient European markets, plus North America.
So we're sort of our axis is shifting, particularly with a strong North America focus. Going down to the chart at the bottom left of the slide, you can see there the growth profile. The standout figure is the organic growth in North America, up 20%. That's a combination of reshoring, freeing up of component supply in some of the, particularly one of the American businesses, leading to a rebound in sales there. And also, a very strong sort of Buy America sentiment that isn't talked about as much as it is acted upon in North American customers.
Asia there, minus 1% excludes that there was one large Indian customer, European customer in India, that went through a massive destocking program that I talked about at the half-year results. If you exclude that, Asia was down 1%, which is basically China, and then actually underlying Indian growth, which is India is smaller for us, but is underlying India growing at 8%. You can see there, Germany down 7%. Germany is certainly not out of the woods yet. Hopefully, we're approaching sort of the bottom in the autumn there, and hopefully, that'll present some opportunities. UK doing well, proving quite resilient. A lot of export-driven business in the UK, which is helping that.
Programs such as, many of you will be familiar with the new security scanners going in at the airports, where you don't have to take your liquids and your laptops out of your bag. There are two primary suppliers of those scanners. There's Smiths and there's Leidos. We're in Leidos. So if you go to London City Airport, Manchester Airport, Birmingham Airport, and Luton Airport, I think it is, they're all Leidos. Heathrow Airport and Gatwick Airport sadly have Smiths in the, Smiths equipment in, but hey, you can't have everything. Yeah, that's the group overview. Yeah, design wins, a little bit more color on the design wins. So the chart at the right here sort of speaks volumes. Since COVID, the volume of and value of our design wins has doubled. Really tremendous.
That's partly because, you know, customers have, you know, have recovered since the COVID period, but it's also because of the amount of focus we put on it. Every business in our group goes through a quarterly review on design pipelines, design wins, and margin, you know, pricing, and that is leading to some very, very, very strong design win activity. The key to achieving strong design wins is having a strong opportunity pipeline. So we measure the pipeline that we're developing, which now stands at over GBP 1 billion in potential value, lifetime value, with over 85% of that being recurring revenue projects rather than shorter-term projects. And that, again, is a very, you know, very strong base from which to reap the design wins.
So that has all resulted in design wins being up 23% and 90% of them, of those wins being in our target markets. As Simon mentioned briefly, you know, when we buy a business, typically, the proportion of revenue in our target markets is typically a bit less. So that's why it has a slightly dilutive effect at a group level. And it typically takes three-four years to start seeing that, from the point of an acquisition, to start seeing their revenue tilt in the direction of a higher proportion coming from these markets. But that's very much the focus we put, and it is a key to driving this business. Acquisitions, well, I mean, this is really a representation of the kind of space we're operating in.
This is not an exhaustive list, but it's a list of the major areas or some of the major areas that we're operating in. You can see from the shading of the boxes, the degree of position we have in those areas, and by and large, our position is very light. Just to recap, the electronic component markets, in round numbers, is about $900 billion globally. Of that, $600 billion is semiconductors, which we're not in, leaving $300 billion of everything else. Within that $300 billion, there's a corner of that market which is worth about $20-$30 billion, and our $500-$600 million of revenue is in that, within that sort of $20-$30 billion.
So we've got a small share of a small corner of a massive global market. That's a fantastic place to be. It's a great place for consolidation of these fragmented, smaller, mostly privately held businesses that we can bring into the group. High quality. We, you know, we bring in high-quality businesses and make them better. That's our, that's what we try to do, arranging them into clusters, and so it's a great area for us to operate in. And as a result of that, we have, you know, a large fishing ground, and there's a lot going on that will drive the growth over the short, medium, and long term on that front. So we talk about operating a decentralized business, which we do, but that's not to say that we don't make things more efficient.
We do it by organizing our businesses into clusters, and I'll talk more about that in the next few slides. But we're really now doing three things at a operational efficiency, with an operational efficiency focus. Firstly, we do consolidate sites. When we buy a business, we don't generally buy a business with the sole intention of consolidating a site. We buy a business with the objective of making it better and more efficient, and an output of that might be our ability to consolidate or organize some of our sites accordingly. So we've done quite a bit of that in the U.S. over the last few years. You know, in our largest cluster, we've consolidated three North American sites into one, for example. We've expanded our Mexican capacity, and so on.
In the U.K. and Europe, we've both increased our size and scope by investing in new buildings. In Germany, of all places, earlier this year, we opened a larger, new facility for a business that we bought back in October 2011. When we bought the business, it was a bit like operating above a garage. It's now got its own standalone, purpose-built facility, and it's, you know, a terrific business, growing very well, and we're investing in it, and we'll continue to invest in it. We've consolidated high-cost sites, so there's lots that we can do. By having cluster arrangements of technologies and engineering and production capabilities, we often and increasingly find the opportunity to move stuff around.
And by doing that, we can often increase the margins that we're operating at, without having to even, in some cases, change anything that we do with the customer. So it's invisible to the customer in some cases, which is obviously, obviously, you know, great for us. And then in Asia, we've increased capacity. India, we've actually paused what we're doing. We've increased part of our capacity, but paused the larger part. China, we're moving to a larger facility, and we've recently enlarged Thailand. We optimized production within region. I talked at the half year about moving a bunch of production in the US into Mexico, a bunch of production from the UK into Hungary, and also the US in some places.
and so that, again, just makes us more efficient, but that comes through both in gross margin and OpEx. And I've also now added disposals on. So we've, you know, we've recently announced the disposal of the solar business, because it's becoming a less attractive place for us as a business to operate in. We sold the Custom Supply business back in FY 2022. So as we're growing, the sort of portfolio management aspect is starting to come into play. Although I should say, we don't have anything else that we're planning to get rid of just yet. I'm always told that I've got to present this, so I'm going to present this. This is our track record of consistently improving performance.
You can see on the left-hand side, the orange bar, on the left-hand line, the orange bar is the ongoing revenue, continuing revenue, and the blue bar is the discontinued business. That was essentially the distribution business that we have since sold off, sold off in 2022. So you can see that the revenue is, the ongoing revenue has almost doubled in the design and manufacturing space in that period, up by almost 100%. The operating EBIT, there are three bars on there. You can see the orange bar is the EBIT of the operating businesses. The blue bar, the blue part section is the distribution disposed of part, and the white part is the central office, so the central costs.
Again, you can see there, the orange, the ongoing, continuing operating EBIT has more than doubled since 2018 or FY 2018. At the same time, the EBIT margin has increased from 7.5% to 13.1% and 13.4% in the second half of this year, just gone. And the underlying earnings per share up from just shy of 15 pence to almost 37 pence. So strong and continuing growth. And, you know, we expect to continue improving those figures as we go forward from here. So a little bit more about the organic sales. We've touched on it, 7% CAGR over seven years. We are, yeah, very much wedded to this grow in strong times, plateau, plateau in softer conditions, and then grow again.
That orange line on that bar, on that line chart shows that what we've done since 2017. We're obviously in that plateau period at the moment. You can see on the bottom, left-hand side of this chart, industrial—our industrial markets are down 19%. So that's basically all. A lot of the industrial customers were down, but the majority of it was a handful of customers, nine customers, all big names. I understand that Siemens have put out some public comment on the destocking that they've been going through, and we have certainly seen that. Siemens are a large customer of ours, and their, certainly their industrial business has been destocking. So that's yeah, that's quite a, quite a significant movement, and, you know, we, we, you know...
So the question is, when will that end? I think we're starting to see light at the end of the tunnel there. I think there's a little bit more time to go, but hopefully, we're approaching the end of that destocking phase. But then look at the other three target markets: medical up 5%, renewables up 15%, and transport up 22%. So very strong double-digit growth in aggregate there, from just under half of our revenue base, and then the other markets up about 3%. So excluding industrial, 71% of our group was up by 9% organically. So that's a very, very strong performance, and we're certainly pleased with that and looking forward to the stabilization of the industrial markets. A little bit on the divisions. So both divisions, interestingly, have a very similar sales profile.
55% of revenue comes from North America, Nordics, and UK, and the rest of it comes principally from Western Europe and Asia. You can see here, you know, on the bottom right, you can see the how the revenue profile has grown. We're acquiring in both divisions, and we've now got to the stage where in the Magnetics and Controls division, we have two clusters, plus three, as a typo, three other businesses across 16 countries. Our largest cluster is Noratel, which is the business, the magnetics business that we bought in 2014. And then the other business, the other cluster is our embedded control business unit. Geographically, you can see North America growing very strongly, Asia down. That -15% includes the large Indian customer destocking.
But I think the main point I want to make is, there are two clusters in this division, and you'll see that there are four clusters in the next division. Both clusters have a very similar performance overall, you could say, very similar geographic profile and, growth profile as well. So sensing and connectivity, there's the 55% in North America, Nordics, and UK again. As I mentioned, you know, we're making acquisitions in both divisions, so we've done 10 in this area in the last five years. And here we have four clusters, of which the largest is the sensor cluster, which was started with an acquisition in February 2017, the Variohm EuroSensor, which now comprises six, six bolt-on acquisitions to make up, that make our second-largest cluster.
Again, you can see the way the revenue's built, and you can see the revenue growth profile over there, again, driven largely by North America. So two very similar operating divisions. So the order book, so the lead times have come right in. As availability more widely across the industry has improved, then customers have reduced their order windows. We need around about three months lead time for our planning and production, which changes a bit by business, but broadly, it's three months, and we currently have about a 4.5-month order book. So having a four to four or so months order book is perfectly fine for us, and that certainly is what we've, what we've got, and that's down from seven months in September 2022. So our order book are firm orders.
They're not cancelable because it's custom product. Customers place an order, they've got to take it, and they've got to pay for it before they get the next delivery, really. So it's a very firm order book. We allow a little bit of rescheduling, but only a little. So, yeah, the order book's come off its peak, with order rates plateauing and book-to-bill ratios improving currently. I think we'll see this order book stabilize from here on, and, yeah, return to a sort of more normal level of operations in that regard. Okay, and finally, the outlook. So we've got a strong bank of design wins driving our organic growth.
We've got a strong pipeline of acquisition opportunities, so we believe that we are continuing to do the right things to get the growth going again when the fog of destocking has cleared. We've got a lot of work still going on the operational efficiencies and improvement areas, which will drive continued margin expansion, and the acquisitions will further enhance that. So we think we're doing the right things, and we're in good shape for continued positive development. Our FY 2025 outlook is unchanged. Q1 is in line with expectations, trading in line with expectations, although it's worth noting that the comparatives year-on-year will be tough. But the H1 sales we're expecting to be ahead sequentially. So, obviously, that's a good thing.
And the other comment, the order book that I've just referred to, that is pointing to a normal H1, H2 profile. So we're, you know, we're typically about 48, 52, H1, H2 loaded, and we think that that is what's gonna happen this year, and so our expectations are set accordingly. So that concludes our presentation. Thank you for your attention, and I think now we go over to Q&A, don't we? Yeah.