Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to the half year results presentation for discoverIE Group plc. I'm joined here by Nick Jefferies, Group Chief Executive, and Simon Gibbins, Group Finance Director of discoverIE. As I take over as Chair at discoverIE, having sat on the board for a few years, I'd first like to just thank again my predecessor, Malcolm, for handing over the company in such good shape. I also, just as an introductory remarks, I'd like just to reassure Nick and Simon that I'm not gonna steal all of your thunder and present the half year results and then hand over to you.
You're very welcome.
Good. What I'd like to do is just take a few minutes to reflect on some of the key themes that I see as underpinning the long-term performance of the discoverIE group. The first theme that I would pick on is resilience. I think if we reflect back over the last five years, we've seen some pretty tumultuous times in world economies and markets. Over that period, the discoverIE group has actually put in pretty solid performance of 10% per annum organic revenue growth over that period, which I think is pretty impressive. I think when you reflect what is it that's allowed them to achieve that, I think it's a clear business model where we are focusing on the target markets which themselves are showing long-term growth.
Some, within that, a lot of hard work as well. It's not just the markets that we're supplying into, but it's a real focus on design wins, making sure that we're supplying those essential products to customers and over the long term, being their preferred partner of choice. Resilience is a theme, and I think you'll see that coming across in the half year results. Second theme would be compounding. This is something which I've been involved with over many years, but it's that ability to actually accelerate the growth of the group by finding these selective value-enhancing acquisitions, which actually contribute to the group, and start getting some of those cross-selling opportunities and clustering opportunities within the group.
What I would say is that it may, from the outside, seem to be a very easy trick to pull off, to continually bring along these acquisitions, but it is hard. You've got to be very selective. You've got to pull back from the market when the conditions aren't right. You've got to take the opportunities when they're there. That's only the start of the journey. You've then got to put in additional investment. You've got to help make sure that those entrepreneurial teams still are enthusiastic about continuing to grow their businesses. That's what discoverIE has done very well over the years. The third theme I would pick out is just the clear strategic direction that the group has had.
I always feel that strategy doesn't really have a value unless that is translated into some real strategic objectives that you have, that you're tracking and monitoring and just making sure that you're following that course. I think that's been impressive over the years with discoverIE. They've set ambitious and stretching KSIs, key strategic indicators. I think what's been impressive is that they've not been afraid over the years to actually recognize they're getting quite close to achieving one of those, whether it be operating margin, target market sales or whatever, and then actually pushing it forward and stretching the management team even further. You'll see that today in terms of the movement of those KSIs. The final theme that I would pick up on is sustainability.
I think that's very much what everyone is talking about, but there's a lot of lip service there. What I see in discoverIE is a real commitment to that, a real feeling that this is something which is of value to the community, it's of value to the employees, but very importantly as well, if you get that right, it's of value to all of the stakeholders, including the shareholders. Again, I think what you'll see today, again, as I was talking about the KSIs moving forward, there's a more ambitious target there in terms of net zero. I think what people are very much realizing is that that doesn't have any value unless you have specific actions along the way that take you to those targets.
That's really all I wanted to say just in terms of introduction. Now let me hand over to Nick to bring it back down to the half year's results and the near-term outlook.
Thank you, Bruce. Good morning, everybody. Great, great to see you all. Thanks for coming. Well, you know Bruce, you know Simon, many of you know Lily. I can't see where Lily is at the back. I'd also like to introduce Paul Hill, who is our Group Commercial Director. Paul joined us just over a year ago as the CEO of Antenova, one of our acquisitions. When we reshuffled the business at the beginning of the year, he became the Divisional Director for the Sensing & Connectivity division. He's your man for difficult questions. I'll move on to the summary of the results. Very strong, set of results this period. We're very pleased with them, needless to say.
Sales up 23%, of which 14% organically, order book up 21%. I think, you know, almost more importantly than the growth is the efficiencies that we've been able to eke out of the business. The EPS is up by 37%, and that's really on the back of, you know, strong margins and operating leverage. As Bruce said, sales CAGR since 2018 now is 10%. You know, we always talk about trying to achieve 10% through cycle organic growth. We're now, you know, we've now got to the position where we're doing that. Now the challenge is to keep that going. Carbon emissions have reduced by 40%. This is our carbon emissions intensity.
We announced a 50% reduction plan in 2019, and we're making, you know, very, very good progress on that front to the extent that we've announced our net zero plan this morning with a separate press release, which I'm sure you've seen. You know, finally, on this slide, H2 has started very strongly. We're, you know, still seeing very strong growth. We're on track for expectations as we would expect to be. We're in good shape. These are the four key strategic targets that we have that Bruce referred to. Operating margin on the left, we reported 11.7% operating margin, which is up 1.4 points, 140 basis points from last year. Sales beyond Europe is now 41%. Our target is 45%.
That's really about internationalizing the business to serve our international customers. Good progress there. Target market sales. We'll show you some more data later on this, but target market sales is now 77% of total group revenue and carbon emissions I've talked about. We're continuing to make progress on the key directional strategic targets. Net zero. We are announcing an Science Based Targets initiative aligned net zero plan. We're committing to Scope 1 and Scope 2 net zero by 2030, and a 65% reduction by 2025. Additionally, Scope 3 net zero by 2040. This is obviously a big commitment for us, but as Bruce said, a very important one.
You can see here at this pie chart on the right, you can see that 78% of our emissions come linked to our electricity sources. The primary focus of our Scope 1 and Scope 2 plans is changing the sources of electricity. We are installing solar panels in various plants around the world. We're switching to renewable grid sources, et cetera. You can see in this chart, you can see this is our sort of planned reduction, and we're committing to 65% reduction of Scope 1 and Scope 2 by 2025, so two years out. Pretty ambitious, but we believe, you know, certainly doable.
Just to recap, really, I mean, many of you know this already, but just to recap it, you know, we think that we are very well positioned in this changing world and global environment. The products that we make are essential for customers' applications, but they're a small proportion of their cost. That means we're able to retain stable gross margins as things like raw materials and FX change. We've got a very broad geographic footprint internationally. As customers, and we've been seeing this for several years, sort of regionalize and localize their production away from just sort of one single base of production, we're able to follow that production, and make it locally and supply them locally. We're well positioned to move as they move.
We have efficient supply chains, as you've seen through these results, or you'll see through these results and last year's results. You know, we have some turbulence from the supply chain, but we, you know, we're, we've done pretty well relative to, you know, to some other, to some others. That's because we buy raw materials. Most of our product is based on raw materials and base materials base components that we buy in. We don't buy in loads of semiconductors, for example. We buy some, but not too many. Finally, sort of topic, very topical point, you know, we, our production is low energy intensity. We have a high proportion of manual, skilled and semi-skilled labor, with some automation, but, you know, we don't have big energy intensive production factories.
Therefore, the rising cost of energy is not a major problem for us. Our energy costs overall are less than 1% of group revenue. With that, I'll hand over to Simon to take you through the numbers.
Many thanks, Nick. Many thanks, Bruce, as well. You know, good morning, everybody. First up from me will be the financial highlights. You know, as you can see from the chart, it's been a really, you know, good, you know, period of progress, another good period of progress. You know, strong growth in sales, growth in profits and EPS. EPS, as Nick said, that's up 37%. Operating margin, you know, also up strongly. That's up 1.4 percentage points to 11.7. You know, and that's driven on the back of stable gross margins and operating efficiencies. I'll talk about those more on one of the next slides.
You know, operating, you know, in terms of cash flow, our cash flow has been good again. You know, that's, you know, given the conditions, you know, given the strong growth, given some of the supply chain headwinds. I'll talk about that. Balance sheet, you know, we're strong balance sheet. We've got gearing, you know, less than one, so it's plenty of headroom for acquisitions. As you can see on the chart at the bottom, you know, the ROIC is now above our 15% target. You can see a trend that we're achieving, you know, back over the last five or six years.
I think all of these, you know, actually, you know, show our strategy at work. You know, we're about selling, you know, it's bespoke differentiated product to industrial customers. It's good organic growth, you know, into our target markets, which Nick will talk to. You know, it's, you know, it's about, it's a capitalized model, and it's about cash generation. You know, it's very much our model at work. On to sales. You know, sales GBP 220 million in the period. That's up, you know, 26%. You can see that's driven by 14% organic growth. You know, that's, that sort of follows on from what we delivered in the previous periods.
That splits between 8% of that is volume growth and 6% is price. You can see this is very much building on the strong growth and momentum that we've achieved in the last period. We've achieved 19% compound growth over the last five years, and it's up 31% since H1 2014. All of this growth is continuing to drive, you know, strong profit growth and margin, which you can see on this next picture. Profit's up 42%. That's up GBP 7.6 million, up to GBP 25.8 million. It's, you know, continuing that growth trend that you're seeing. We've delivered 30% compound growth over that five-year period.
Look at the operating margin. Again, that's up now to 11.7%. That's a record for us. That sort of building on what you're seeing in the previous periods, is up 3.6 percentage points in the last five years, and is up nearly around 10 percentage points since H1 2014. We're well on track to deliver that target that we set ourselves to 2025 of 13.5%. Next, this is a bridge. I think you'll find this helpful. It will walk you from last year's profit of GBP 18 million through to GBP 25.6 million this period. The first three bars that you can see, that's the organic performance.
You've got strong sales growth, you've got stable gross margins, and you've got operating efficiencies. We've invested 9% in OpEx, but we're delivering 14% of sales growth. That translates into a 19% drop through. That's 50% of the gross margin. We're really pleased with that. That's a good target to achieve. GBP 5 million coming out of organic growth, that's more than two-thirds of our overall profit growth from the organic performance. That's really good to see. Importantly in there is the gross margin. I talked about that at the start. It's stable, and that's very much about the products that we're selling. You know, we're selling, it's bespoke products. They're smaller products, but they're critical parts to the customer.
That's helping the customer differentiate its products, but it's small cost relative to the overall build. That puts us in a good shape in terms of maintaining those margins, as you can see. Added to the organic performance, we've got GBP 1.9 million from acquisitions. There's four acquisitions in there. There's Antenova, Beacon, CPI and CDT, which we acquired this year. At the end, you can see we, you know, there's some benefit we've got from FX, and that for us is the impact of the weak sterling against dollar, as pointed out in there. It's a good performance. I think you can see again, it crystallizes what our model is about. You know, it's about good organic growth, operating efficiencies with complementary accretive acquisitions.
Next, on to the two divisions. You can see both. What you can see here is, you know, revenue, profits, and margin for both divisions on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side, you can see revenue growth, you can see the order growth, and you can see EBIT growth. You know, both divisions are performing well. In terms of orders last year, if you remember, were very strong. They're up 68% last year, up 36% against the pre-COVID period. Actually delivering orders broadly in line with last year is a great result. They're well ahead of sales in both divisions. We've got a book-to-bill in M&C of 1.06 and 1.11 in S&C. Both those divisions exited the half with record order books.
In terms of M&C, sales up 26%. That's driven by 17% organic growth. That's, you know, widespread growth, particularly across India and across Europe. You know, 9% from acquisitions. That's the acquisition of Beacon we made last year. That's driving some really, you know, strong, healthy profit growth. That's up 35%. That's GBP 4.7 million, up to GBP 18 million, with margin lifting up nearly 1 percentage point to 13.2%. If you look at S&C, that is, you know, higher margin division, another good performance. Eleven percent organic growth, augmented by this, 8% from those, the three other acquisitions are in that division. Nineteen percent growth at a constant exchange rates. Again, that's delivering 20%, you know, profit growth and a margin.
We've held so the margin's slightly up at 16.3%. Good performance from both divisions. If you recall last year, I'll echo it again, we think both these divisions are capable, you know, have the opportunities to grow, you know, both organically, you know, and by acquisition. You know, we'll see how that develops over the next few years. On to PBT and EPS, and here you've got a walk from the underlying operating profit of GBP 25.6 down to the EPS of GBP 17.8 and shown versus last year. If you look, the interest rate is 10% higher in the first half. You know, that's going up. I put some guidance there in terms of interest rate sensitivity.
I sort of see the base rates being overall, and we sort of borrow in, you know, we borrow broadly evenly in sterling, euros and, and dollars. I see the average sort of base rate for those three going up by 2.5 percentage points in the second half. I see that looking forward to next year will be another 1 percentage point above that H2 rate. Interest rate's going up, so need to be factored into your models. I think you guys are doing that. You know, after interest rates, PBT, you can see that's up 46%. Below that you're seeing slight increases in tax rate.
You know, we're making more profit in some of the higher tax territories like Germany, like India. Shares are up, they're up 6%. That's on the back of, you know, looking back, it was a share issue we made at the time of the Beacon acquisition. Taking those into account, EPS up 37% at 17.8. You can see on the graphic, that's sort of, you know, helping again drive up our EPS, which has seen us deliver 25% compound growth in the last five years. Just at the bottom, you know, reported EPS, that's EPS including acquisition amortization and acquisition costs. That's making great progress as well. That's up 65% on last year. Okay, on to cash flow.
The chart at the top, you know, gives you a walk. It's the last 12 months. We always show last 12-month at the half year. A walk from the EBITDA for that period down to free cash flow. You can see that we've invested GBP fourteen and a half million in working capital during that period. GBP eight and a half million is to support that strong sales growth I've talked about. GBP 6 million we've invested into inventory. You know, given the supply chain constraints that, you know, the market is seeing. You know, I'd expect that to start reversing out in the second half.
If you look at the chart below, you know, despite that, we've delivered operating cash flow GBP 37 million, free cash flow GBP 24 million, and they're both up 11% on last year, you know, despite the working capital. If you look at the bottom, the line at the bottom, we've got a good record here. It's a capital light model and we're delivering capital cash conversion rates up at the sort of near 100% level over the last 10 years. We hope we can sort of continue those sort of that level of momentum. If you also look at the top chart, capital expenditure, GBP 5.7 million over that period.
That's about 1.4% of top line. you know, our guidance is around 2%, but either way, it's a low level of investment, you know, making a capital. The nature of our model allows it to be a capital light model. You know, in terms of balance sheet, GBP 45 million of net debt on the balance sheet. That's a 0.8 gearing. Our target range, you know, we're 1.5 to two times, so plenty of scope for acquisitions there. you know, we've got a large credit facility, so plenty of funds to be able to support acquisitions. I've added a slide here on, this is on capital allocation.
I hope, hopefully, you find this useful. You know, our policy is pretty simple really. You know, we invest in organic, you know, capital projects, you know, as they arise. You know, we pay a progressive dividend, and any sort of the remaining free cash flow is allocated into acquisitions. You can see on the top chart, which that shows capital we've utilized over the last five years. GBP 350 million of capital we've used in that period. Nearly half of that, you can see, is coming out of free cash flow. The balance is coming at GBP 130 million out of equity. The balance is coming from debt and the proceeds of disposals.
If you look on the left of that chart, you know, GBP 27 million into capital, GBP 40 million into dividend, and nearly GBP 250 million into acquisitions. There's 11 acquisitions we've made during that period. If you look at the bottom, the bottom chart, you know, we're well-disciplined in terms of the balance sheet. You know, I talked about our range. You know, we've had it for a number of years, 1.5-2 times gearing. You can see on the chart there, you know, we keep nicely below that level. There's no need for us to overstretch the balance sheet. Finally, onto dividends. You know, we've increased the dividends. You'd probably not surprised. Up 6% again.
That's in line with the progressive policy. That's sort of seen us double the level of dividends, more than double the level of dividends in the last 10 to 12 years. That, you know, that policy will continue. The cover that we achieved last year was approaching three. We expect to sort of take it up and beyond that three times level to allow, you know, both the dividend policy to continue, but also to have more self-funding of acquisitions. It's, you know, it's been a good year of progress, you know, for us. You know, strong growth in, you know, sales, profits and EPS.
You know, a good firm, you know, a increase in operating margin that's on the back of.
Stable gross margins and operating efficiencies. We've got a record order book. We've got a strong balance sheet, and as Nick will talk about a good acquisition pipeline. Hopefully we're well set for the future. With that, I'll hand over to Nick for the operational r eview.
Okay. Just a bit of a recap. This is just a sort of summary of the group. We've got 31 manufacturing sites now in 18 countries. The you know, the important thing within that is that, you know, the world and our customers are regionalizing and localizing, and our international footprint is very much geared towards that. You know, we're really positioned well to take advantage of customers as they move stuff around.
20 acquisitions made since 2011. You know, we're always expanding capacity somewhere, production capacity that is, and we're currently expanding one of our two sites in India with a greenfield site just around the corner from our current one. We're doing a greenfield expansion of a business in Germany, about an hour and a half west of Munich, a business that we bought 11 years ago. We're also doing expansion in the U.K. in, up near Newark. One of our businesses there is expanding its electronics production facility. I won't go through the attractive financial profile, partly 'cause you know it and partly 'cause Simon's covered it, but I will just touch on these two charts at the bottom.
The one on the, on the left here is a bar chart of organic growth over the first half, and really two things to say is, firstly, most regions are in sort of strong organic growth, 10%-20% range, with two exceptions, China, -3%, and India, +53%. Actually, the two aren't related. The China slowdown is partly the effects on the Chinese market of some of the COVID lockdowns, but also it's the effect of production starting to move elsewhere. For example, one of our large European-based multinationals has really recently moved a proportion of their production to Europe, for reasons of speed, of availability, and supply chain flexibility. India, on the other hand, is all about the growth in India, Modi's India First program.
Our customers are Western-based multinationals. They're making there, and they need components that are made there to qualify for the India First program, so we're seeing strong demand on that front, hence the 53%. Really coming up strongly. This chart on the right here is the organic growth record going back to H1 fiscal 18, and you can see the organic growth by period, and then the COVID period and then the recovery since. You know, pretty stable, but not perfectly stable, good levels of organic growth. You know all this. We focus on selling into sustainable markets. The reason our organic growth is strong is because 3/4 of our revenue are in these high-quality structural growth markets: renewable energy, medical, transportation and electrification of, and industrial connectivity.
These are great markets with fantastic short, medium, and long-term prospects. We focus intently on getting design wins and creating new revenue streams organically in these markets, and it's paying off. To the extent that if you look at the six-year organic growth here on this chart on the right, you can see that our revenue organically in the target markets has grown 12% CAGR over that six-year period, whereas other markets have grown by 7%, giving a total of 10%. Some interesting data within it. If you look at this year, this half the pointer isn't working. The first bullet point below, consistent growth in target markets in this period, they grew by 14% organically.
Renewables slowed by 6% for the first time in some time, interestingly, offset by the other target markets, which on aggregate grew by 20%. Renewables slowed. We saw it predominantly in the wind sector, where all of the manufacturers seemed to slow to some degree. We think that's a, sort of a consequence of them changing their production priorities and, you know, perhaps in light of their sort of, well-publicized difficulties that they've had more recently. Also the other markets grew by 17% organically in the region. They, they are the markets that dropped off very sharply in COVID, and they're rebounding sharply. Much more cyclical, but you know, there's a been an element over this period of all ships floating on a rising tide.
This is just a little recap of the divisions, really. Magnetics & Controls Division. I mean, the key points are it grew 17% organically as Simon mentioned, with a 13.2% operating margin. This is where the effects of the sort of slowdown in demand in China are most felt. Asia and rest of world, where China's a big part of that obvious, has slowed, so pulling that down. You know, very, very strong U.K. and European growth. The Sensing & Connectivity Division, similar in many respects. 11% organic growth, 16.3% operating margin, but strong growth in Asia. Here, predominantly, actually, China has been fairly resilient here because that's the predominantly Chinese solar demand.
Most of the solar equipment in the world is made in China, whether it, you know, whether it's a Western-based multinational or a Chinese-based multinational. Design wins. Obviously this is a very important driver of our organic revenue. We put an awful lot of focus on this. In the period, we achieved design wins with an estimated lifetime value of GBP 154 million, which represents a little under 20% of our current revenue on an annualized basis. You know, very simply, if we're aiming to go 10% organically, we need to be generating design wins and new business to at least that level, plus a bit more to allow for end of life of existing projects.
Achieving a level of around about just shy of 20% is a very high level. 85% of the design wins are in our target market. You know, this is a super important parameter. It's what's created the strong organic growth over the recent years, and, you know, as we head into slower growth environment over the sort of year or so to come, having a strong base of bank of design wins is very important. It also drives a strong order book. The order book continues to strengthen GBP 257 million, up 21% organically, representing approximately seven months of sales. It's a record high, both in terms of the absolute value and in terms of its proportion of sales. Very strong indeed.
This is order book based on confirmed delivery. This is what we confirm to customers we're able to do. These are firm orders. They're not cancelable. We allow very little bit of rescheduling, but not a wide amount of rescheduling because we're a build-to-order business. This is very, very, very solid order book. Indeed, as we have seen through recent or previous down cycles, such as COVID. That said, we expect that this is gonna come start to normalize back over the months ahead. We'll, you know, we expect to see that happening, and when we do, we'll report on it. This is the slide on our acquisition performance.
We've made 20 acquisitions, GBP 355 million in consideration, and this is the track record of all of the acquisitions over two years old. We're targeting a 15% EBIT return on investment within about three years, maybe perhaps a little longer in the U.S. This shows that, overall, we've achieved a return, EBIT ROI of 21% in the period. You can see, you know, how that has panned out. You know, it's kind of slightly probably obvious to you, but the two on the left are our first two acquisitions. They were small, they didn't cost a great deal, and they're performing on, very, very strongly indeed.
Our largest ever acquisition was, is the 43% one. That's very important that that, you know, it's obviously a sort of it's a bit like ballast on the ship. That one needs to perform well, and it is. These two here, NNO, are the businesses that are suffering from supply chain, semiconductor shortages. We have one, slightly problem child, which hopefully we'll be able to report more on in the full year. Overall, we're pleased with that. This is an example of one of those businesses. This is a business called Foss, which is based in Norway and Slovakia, that makes fiber optic components for the it's within the Sensing & Connectivity division. We bought this in January 2015.
You can see here that it's grown 6% CAGR revenue over that time, but operating profit has grown by 14%. The operating margin has increased from 12%-19%. ROCE has over doubled from 16%-36%, and the EBIT ROI from 19%-46%. Working capital has reduced. This is a very low figure. This business is very, very efficient and, you know, great progress. Not all our businesses are this efficient, but this is a great figure. It's got a very high proportion of revenue coming from its target markets. The way we achieve this, and you may remember we've shown similar examples for different of our acquisitions, in previous results presentations.
When we buy a business, pre-acquisition, we agree a three-year business plan with the business, which is basically 10% per annum growth plus operating leverage target. We aim to get more revenue coming through from the target markets. We invest in expanding capacity. We've expanded both the Norwegian facility, and we've moved them to a new Slovakian facility in this case. We've also made a small local acquisition of a local supplier, which is proving very lucrative. We've invested in that we often change or upscale the finance function, and we've done that here. We've invested in new sales resource, so we've got a very strong top tier in this business. We put a very strong focus on working capital. I think I'm right in saying that every acquisition we've made, we've made the working capital more efficient.
T hen we put in place all of the group risk and controls and internal audit procedures to sort of put the strong control framework in place. Now we're putting in place the ESG policies as well. Just to move to the outlook. Second half has started well. We've got strong organic sales growth continuing. As I mentioned earlier, the order book is a very solid order book, and we expect that that will drive the second half performance. We do think that the order book is gonna start normalizing. As we see supply chains internationally generally easing a little, we think that will lead to a little bit of easing in the order ahead period that our customers are placing.
That could naturally lead to a slight rebalancing or normalizing of the order book. The design wins are strong. They underpin our future growth. We've got a very good pipeline of acquisition opportunities. We've got somewhere between GBP 70 million and GBP 100 million of acquisition firepower. You could see that, you know, if we deploy a good proportion or all of that will, you know, that will make a, you know, meaningful contribution to next year's performance. Yeah, there's no doubt that we're, you know, as we're looking ahead, we're anticipating a slower organic growth period and a, you know, a greater contribution from acquisitions than we've seen in the previous year. Having that low gearing and firepower is very important.
You know, we're very confident in our, you know, delivering a good close to the rest of this year as well. We think the business is in great shape. We're very pleased with the performance, but, you know, we're focused on driving the second half and delivering further growth next year in a more challenging environment. That concludes the presentation formally. I think we'll now go over to Q&A. Perhaps, Simon, we'll take our positions for.
That's very formal, this isn't it?
Morning, Andy.
Andy from Jefferies. Is ESG now part of your LTIP and your general kind of bonus?
Yes.
That's always been the case, has it?
Well, yes, it's become increasingly so. They're not part of the LTIP measure, but they are part of all of the bonus schemes.
Right. Okay.
Yeah.
Then just two questions on the guidance. You talked about margins in the first half going up 140 basis points, which is a hell of a performance. Your second-half guidance implies a little bit of a slowdown in that margin. Is that just conservatism or is there something in that first half margin that maybe doesn't repeat or something we should be aware of?
Yeah, I think the former, hopefully.
Yeah. Good. Secondly, I know that we have a lot of moving parts in the debt line, but if you have GBP 5 million of interest on a net debt of GBP 40 odd million, that implies a pretty high interest charge. Have you got lots of kind of gross capital.
Well, yeah. You've got to sort of break.
You've got to take out the IFRS piece.
You've got to break it down. You've got amortized costs of GBP 0.6.
Okay. Yeah.
You know, IFRS of, you know, 0.6 as well.
Yeah.
You've got the commitment charge.
Okay
On the unutilized balance. That's at sort of roughly 0.5% on the unused balance. As you sort of take that out.
Yeah
What you're paying is 1.25 percentage points.
Yeah
Margin plus base rate.
Yeah.
You know, whatever, you know, the equivalent SONIA or whatever.
Yeah, yeah
On the thing. That's how we. That 1.25 slightly ratchets up depending on your gearing.
It does, yeah.
Sub one, it's 1.25. If we got up to, you know, sub two, it would be 1.75.
Gotcha.
There's a little bit of ratchet up in there. If you break it down into that, of course, within the. You've got the net debt, you've got a level of what we call sort of, you know, trapped cash, we call it. You're probably running around GBP 60 million drawn facility with GBP 15 million of cash. It sort of sits in places like China and things.
Yeah, okay.
That you have to get out, and you're not netting off against.
Yeah.
It's slightly higher than the, than the pure, if you apply the interest rate against 45.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Absolutely, 100%.
Okay.
Thank you.
Mark Davies-Jones from Stifel. If I can start on your closing comments around M&A. What are we looking at in terms of valuation expectations from sellers versus higher financing costs for you? Is that net balance moving more positive, or is it still people waiting to squeeze more money out?
Yeah, it is moving more in our favor because there's been quite a big readjustment to more normal levels. The reason we haven't done many acquisitions over the last year is because they were way off in our view. Way too high valuations. You know, there were some quite well-publicized sort of transactions in spaces allied to ours that were going at sort of 18, 20, even multiples, which is, you know, not.
Yeah.
Doesn't work for our model because we don't make a whole bunch of immediate operational synergies to, you know, justify that. We're still. You know, we're seeing valuations coming down in, you know, to the 8-10 range typically, which is sort of, you know, where we're comfortable operating.
Excellent. Can I just ask on supply chain, clearly still tough, but getting a little bit easier. Where do you think you are both in terms of your own working capital and sort of inventory through the wider system?
We built GBP 6 million of additional inventory in addition to the. You know, there's the pro rata increase in working capital in relation to the higher sales, and then there's this extra GBP 6 million. We think that that will just gradually unwind, just burn off, through the second half. Our expectation is that around the end of the second half, that will have burnt off completely, interestingly. There's no rapid adjustment. It's just that we will just adjust the incoming rate of inventory to allow that to burn off.
Okay.
Which is what we think customers are doing with us and what our order book says. We're kind of behaving in the way we expect our customers to behave.
Okay. Thank you.
Hi there. You talked about organic revenue growth, and you split it out by volume and price, and I think you said price increase was 6%. Just wanted to understand how much of that is just mix related and how much of that is pass-through of cost. How easy is it to pass through higher costs at the moment?
Well, it's never easy to pass costs through, but I think, you know, a lot of it is passing our costs through. You know, we're, you know, you can see in our gross margins that, you know, we've achieved that. You know, gross, if you look at that chart, the waterfall chart, you know, our organic gross margins were pretty flat. That sort of demonstrates we've managed to pass that cost through. It is definitely, it's definitely not, you know, the businesses will say it's, you know, not easy, but they have achieved it. They've done a good job. I think it, as I spelt out, it's very much the nature of our products that allows us to do that.
That price, the 6% contribution was purely the cost through, pass-through.
Yeah.
M ix related?
Yeah. In fact, the semiconductor shortages that we've had relate to some of the higher margin things, so it's the areas, and higher priced units. In fact, there's probably been a little bit of a headwind on the price for, you know, the underlying price might be a little bit more than 6%, but it is, it's 6% basically related to inflation pass-through.
Okay.
Yeah.
Just looking at your revised ESG targets, so the kind of tougher targets that you've set yourself, how does that influence the M&A pipeline, you know, the companies that you're looking at?
Well, there is an ESG diligence stream now. We've got lots of due diligence streams these days. We've got IT ones, we've got you name it, we've got. We've got one of those and we will. You know, there's a lot to do, but actually it's quite clear what needs to be looked at. We have a, you know, it's not too onerous to do it. We, as we go through the DD process, we form a view as to how we're gonna deal with that aspect and what we will do.
When, with every acquisition we make, we have a pre-acquisition completion pack, which summarizes all of the, or lays out all of the initiatives for the business, and everyone has defined areas of responsibility and an action plan, and ESG is one of those now.
Okay.
Also, you know.
It's not reducing the pipeline at all then, it's not. There are companies.
No, no.
Okay.
No.
Also where that's one of the nuances about the new S-ESG target is that acquisitions will come in. Previously, our previous target was sort of a baseline in 2019 of the existing business. You know, the net zero is all about, you know, including the acquisitions as they come in. We've gotta make them work as well.
Okay.
Sure. David Hawkins, Panmure Gordon. Good morning. I'm gonna actually re-refer to a couple of the previous questioner's questions in a way. Firstly, on the inflation story, I mean, obviously, as you pointed out, many of your products are actually made of sort of base materials, the price of which, in many cases, have been coming down recently. Are we sort of shortly gonna be facing a situation where you are having the, almost the reverse conversation with customers about what the right price for your product is, rather, disinflationary rather than inflationary? Question one.
Yes, there will be some of that. Yeah. Don't know how much yet. Certainly copper's down. I mean, it's recovered a bit in the last month. Copper, aluminum, some of those base raw materials are down, and some of our customers will want some of that back. You know, what we don't really have a clear view on yet is how widespread that will be.
It also, you know, you're netting off also against other things that, you know, are still going off. You know, Nick talked about, yeah, the energy cost is not a big part for us, but we'll also look to put that on. You know, there may still be some residual wage inflation that comes on, so we'll be looking to pass those costs on as well.
Yeah. Yeah. I almost feel as though I'm your customer at the moment.
Yeah.
I'm listening to your explanation.
No, you're not.
For maintaining prices.
Yeah.
I'm jumping around a little bit here. Sri Lanka. In the statement, you're talking about putting solar panels on the roofs there. In of itself, did I misread this? That could contribute 15% improvement in your figures towards the 65% number?
No, I think that's.
Well, it's around.
I think it's 50%. I think it's.
Of .total
Percentage of our.
Yeah
energy bill.
Yeah.
You know, it's a big, it's our biggest plant.
Yeah.
You know, we've already done, you know, we've completed. It's a three-stage process.
Okay.
C ause it's three buildings, and we did, we did one last year, and we've got two that are in progress. Yeah, that's correct.
Thank you.
It's not such a big bill. The overall bill, as Nick said, it's not a massive cost, you know, for us compared to others.
It has a very good payback.
They do.
Yeah. Very good.
We're doing another one in Thailand.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Okay. Last one from me. I think you talking about the sort of the design wins and it's a good story. Did I pick up in the statement that you actually mentioned the words very good about three lines later, about the-?
What was that?
T he pipeline?
Yeah. Well, it's not bad. Yeah. Yeah.
What's the difference between good and very good?
Well.
From our perspective?
Beauty's in the eye of the beholder. Yeah, I mean, it's a 6% increase, which is okay, but it's a lower proportional increase than some of the other figures where we've seen very big increases, which is driven by, largely by customers have been extending some of their project existing production life cycles because of concerns over component availability. You know, why launch a new product if the existing one will do, if you can get the products for it? There's been a bit of that which has delayed things. But the very good relates to this, it's about 19% of estimated, bear in mind these are estimated numbers, but of estimated annual value. If we're trying to grow 10% and we're generating design wins with, you know, 19 or so %, that's very good.
But that's what we need to do. We just need to keep layering that up and that's what'll keep the engine going.
Sorry, being greedy. A couple more from me, if I may. Interesting figures on China and India and the shift there, and you've been talking about that for a while and it's interesting to see it come through the numbers. Can you give us any indication of absolute scale? Because obviously, that's coming from a rather different starting point, so how big is India for you now?
Well, India's about 40% of China now.
Okay.
Which is a proportion that almost roughly doubled over a year.
Thank you. On your comments around renewables, obviously, those wind companies have got themselves in a bit of a mess on production and profitability.
Mm.
That doesn't look as though it's being resolved in the short term. When do you think that picture might improve? I guess the concern is the more cyclical bits have been driving quite a chunk of growth. Those may slow. When does renewables come back?
Yeah. Hard to say. It changes quickly within the wind sector, surprisingly quickly the situation changes sometimes. We've just won a very big design win in one of our customers, we're feeling that it's more, the risk is more to the upside, but I'm not sure really. It's hard to get a really clear steer.
Okay, thanks.
Hi, James Bayliss from Berenberg. Two questions I think from me. On India, if we just pick that up a bit further, obviously coming off a low base, you're investing quite a bit of production capacity into the region. Where do we think that gets to kind of on a medium-term basis in terms of sustainable growth rate? I guess kind of, you know, holistically relative to some of the other regions. On the M&A pipeline, can you just elaborate a bit more on the kind of the sourcing you're seeing? How much of that's coming from customer referrals or existing companies kind of going out doing the work or even inbound inquiries through your website?
Yeah. India growth rates, yeah, interesting. I mean, where will that settle at? I don't know. I suspect it feels a little bit as though India is really getting moving. You know, what we've seen in China over the last good number of years is sort of we saw sort of circa 20% organic growth or high teens to 20% each year. I wonder whether perhaps, you know, we've got high growth rates now from a low base, but I wonder whether that might ultimately settle off in the sort of the healthy teens rate. We'll see. Certainly, you know, the underlying, we're supplying customers that are.
It's a Western-based multinational customer base, but they're installing in India, it's got, I think in the sort of broadest terms, it's related to Indian infrastructure build-out. I suspect that's probably got a good few years to run. On M&A, well, we source them everywhere. We've got a page on the website for entrepreneurs, which always pulls in, you know, we get a couple of inquiries a month coming in there. We have advisors, we have all of our opco management are incentivized to identify targets, we have stuff that just comes in through, you know, auction processes and the like. We have a very clear framework of what fits the discoverIE acquisition model, both in terms of geography and product and the like.
When these opportunities arise, we're able to screen them very quickly, you know, in a matter of minutes really. Yeah.
Morning. Dom Convey from Numis. Just a couple of follow-up questions, if I may. You referred to residual wage inflation. I wonder whether you might give us a little bit more color there, the level of wage inflation you expect, not just in the sort of through the second half but into next year as well. To what extent does that prove just a little bit more sticky on the pass-through, particularly in a perhaps a more deflationary environment for other input costs? Then my other question would be around the design wins and obviously the ELVs, how you say a good indicator for forward business. Delving into that a little bit, what's driving that? Is that increased capacity, more design engineers? What sort of lead indicator could we look for within that number itself?
On the, I'll go first and Simon can then. On the wage inflation, I think we're going to see, you know, we'll see teens levels in Asia and the low-cost countries, but kind of that's, you know, that's a continuation of what we've been seeing there for a few years. In the sort of higher salaries, sort of Western based e-economies, we're probably. Well, we'll see where we are, but we're probably in sort of the high side of the mid-singles. That's on, you know, that's on a much higher base. The thing to remember is that our labor costs are a much smaller proportion of our component cost than the raw materials. I, we take a pretty just clear line.
Yeah, you know, it's almost a state of mind. If we have higher production costs as a result of higher labor costs or higher, even higher energy costs, we will pass those through. That is what we will do. We took that view very firmly on raw materials, and it was passed through and we will do the same on labor. I don't think it'll be more of a sticking point than raw materials actually. In terms of design wins, well, the early the leading indicator is design wins. I don't, I think, I think we're quite good at disclosing that data. I don't think we're gonna go one step further up the chain. It gets less and less.
I mean, the design win data is, it's not reconcilable, it's estimated data based on what customers say and what we think they will do versus what they say. The further we go up that sort of line, the less precise it gets. What we do internally is we focus very heavily on what the design wins are and then driving the activity that leads to the design wins.
The reason behind the question, I think if I remember rightly, some time ago, you were pointing out that you specifically invested in that design capability, and that was very clearly showing rewards. I'm just trying to understand to what extent of the increase going forward now is simply more throughput, or are you actually seeing bigger projects coming through and better quality design wins, if you like, on the same wins?
The makeup of the projects is, you know, at an overall level is broadly unchanged. You can't have three starters. You have lots of the sort of small to mediums, sort of the rump which is a sort of bank of good size mid-value accounts, then you get the few bluebirds every bit like one of the big renewables that we just got, but we get one of those every couple of years. That hasn't really changed much. Having said that, in some of the businesses, we've made our design win processes and our engineering resource more focused. Some of the businesses have analyzed the returns on the design wins that they've been generating, and they've cut the tail of some of the projects.
That's freed up, certainly in one of our businesses particularly, they took a very tough line on it. They basically freed up their capacity, their engineering capacity by about a quarter, maybe even a bit more, with the same resource. That is leading to higher ELV, higher lifetime value opportunities. That's yet to come through. We haven't. That's only really been done over the last 12 to 18 months.
Thanks.
Okay, we've got a question from the webcast. Given the decline in China sales and customers are relocating productions, what are your views on the long-term prospects of the China operations?
Yeah. I mean, I think you have to put China in context. 20-odd years ago, there was this rush to get everything made in China from the West. What we're seeing now is the end of that era, and it's kind of rebalancing back. That said, we've still got some very big Western multinationals based in China, and we've got Chinese multinational customers. We see that for demand in China and sort of in the locals in that region, that demand looks set to remain. We're moving from a, you know, China for the world kind of production and demand environment to sort of China for China and the region and a more decentralized region elsewhere. China will remain important for us for that reason, and indeed, we've got two plants and over 700 people there.
You know, it's a, it's a key market for us, and it will continue to be so.
Superb. A further question. If the market does enter a down cycle, what will be the core pressure on the company's business model, and how will you react to this?
Well, we've been through a few cycles now. Cash and cost is what you focus on in the down cycle.
Superb. No further questions, from the webcast just now. I'd like to pass back to you, Nick, for our closing remarks.
Thank you, Scott. I believe we've got one.
Katherine Thompson from Edison. Looking at your focus on the target markets, I just wanted to understand a bit more of how much of that is active versus passive. How much of the growth from target markets versus the non-target is just a kind of an attritional thing where the non-target markets grow more slowly, so they fall as a percentage? How much of it is an active rebalancing of the focus within each business?
Well, we focus the businesses on doing more in the target markets. We want them to get more design wins in those markets and layer up, and then you get an element of more, if you like, natural decay in the non-target markets. That's kind of the way it works. It's not that we stop doing anything in the non-target markets. We just focus more clearly on the target market areas. That's generating real growth. I mean, that's we do more design wins in more customers. The example we showed in this pack of FOSS, our fiber optics business, is the same across most, if not all, of our businesses.
After sort of three or four years of acquisition, you see that the proportion of revenues in target markets goes up, the organic growth rate goes up, and that's because we generate better revenue streams from those markets. I would say it's active. It's, you know, it's very much more about just putting more focus on those areas.
Thank you.
Okay. Well, thank you, everybody, for attending. We're obviously very pleased with the way the business is. Our focus now is on keeping it going as we move into a lower growth environment. We've got a good acquisition pipeline to add to that. We look forward to a good second half and a good year next year. We look forward to seeing you in six months' time. Thank you for coming.
Thank you.