Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the results presentation for discoverIE Group plc for the financial year ended March 2023. I'd just like to say one or two introductory remarks before handing over to Nick and Simon, and hopefully, I won't take too much of their thunder in these introductory remarks. I suppose just reflecting on this last financial year, I look back and see that it really has proved the strength and resilience of the business model and strategy. Our strategy has always been one of compounding growth. What I mean by that is we're looking all the time to be generating that steady, better than GDP, organic revenue growth.
The way that we achieve that is by focusing on target markets, on target sustainable markets, which give that above economic growth, across the business cycle. Then compounding that organic growth, accelerating it, by making carefully selected, value-enhancing acquisitions. That in turn, focusing on bringing up the operating margin of the business, generating good cash flow to acquire those businesses, and constantly with a focus on return on investment. Those are the elements of the strategy, but as we all know, the strategy is only as good as the execution. Again, if we look back on this year, I think Nick and Simon and the team have really executed very well, and you can, and we can see that in the results. As we know, we've had some fairly difficult market conditions over the year.
We've had slowing growth, we've had higher inflation, we've had supply chain issues. Against that background, discoverIE has really produced some pretty good results for the financial year. Looking at those various elements, on the organic growth side of things, organic revenue growth, they generated 9% over the year, and that compares pretty favorably with the five-year compound annual growth rate of 10% per annum. Again, showing us beating that background economic growth rate. We've also had success in moving the operating margin up again. That's a major focus for us. That has given us the confidence to actually reset that medium-term operating margin target at the 15% level, which will show, again, a continuing improvement in that. Also, looking at the year's results, as Nick and Simon will go through, we've seen strong cash flow, good returns on investment there.
That's in a year where acquisitions have been a little bit tougher to bring through. That's not because of the pipeline. We've had a healthy pipeline of acquisitions, but we stepped back from a number of situations because we felt price expectations were too high, and that discipline is very important. The growth that has been achieved this year has been largely the organic growth. I think with those words of introduction, I'd like to hand over to Nick and Simon to add a little bit of color and detail on the results.
Thank you, Bruce. Good morning, everybody. Right, let's get these slides underway. Thank you for coming today. Excuse me. Here's the summary slide. Strong sales growth. We reported 15% constant exchange rate growth. Organic growth was 10%, with underlying earnings per share up 20%. We're very pleased with that. We talk about targeting sort of 10% organic growth through cycle, and, you know, we're continuing to do that. It's worth noting on the second point here, that organic sales have grown 10% per annum since first half '2018, which is the year beginning April 2017 calendar year. We're really pleased with that. And over the same period, EPS has grown by 25%, underlying EPS.
As Bruce mentioned, we've raised our midterm target margin, EBIT margin, to 15% from 13.5%. We're still on track for the 13.5% by March 2025, FY25. Additionally to that, we've now set this 15% for a period of around 5 years. You know, as those of you who've known us for a long time will know, that we came from a very low margin, well, loss-making originally, but, you know, we gradually, over the intervening years, set midterm targets to get the margin up, reached it, and then set a new one, and that's exactly what we're doing again here. As Bruce says, the standout number is the cash flow. Free cash flow up 51% to GBP 33 million. That's 95% of after-tax profits.
Really, really pleased with that. We've got low gearing, actually, we've got a good pipeline of acquisitions that we, you know, have plenty of firepower for, we'll come onto that later. Carbon emissions reduced by 35%. This is the absolute reduction since calendar year 2021, including the rebasing of the recent acquisitions. As you may remember from the interim results, we set Net Zero carbon emission reduction target of 2030 for Scope 1, Scope 2 Net Zero, we are sort of well on our way to doing that. New year has started well. We've got continued organic growth. I'll come onto that a bit later at the outlook at the end. This just sort of summarizes where we're at with our key strategic targets.
You can see there the 11.5% operating margin in the left-hand chart with the new target of 15% for around about five years. Beyond Europe sales, 40%. Target market sales up 1 point to 77%. On the right-hand side, you can see the carbon emissions reduction target. All sort of where they need to be and making good progress. This just gives a little bit more color on our ESG progress. You can see there, we're in a sort of transition year, if you like. Our original carbon reduction target was to have a 50% reduction in carbon emissions intensity, so that's carbon emissions per GBP 1 million of revenue, by CY25, March 25. We have exceeded that target two years early.
On the left-hand part of that left chart, you can see a 66% reduction in carbon intensity. As part of the SBTI Net Zero, we're moving to this absolute reduction target, which is what we're now referring to and what I described on the previous slide. The summary of all that is that we're making very good progress. Gender diversity, you can see there that the gender diversity for the group management team has now increased to, from 20% last year to just shy of a third. This is good stuff. You know, gender diversity in an electronic engineering business is not an easy thing to do, and we are pleased to be making good progress.
We are sort of seeking out, you know, one of our, you might say, ambitions is to try and get more diversity into the engineering side of the business. At the moment, it's more sort of skewed to operational and finance side. We're pleased with the progress we've made. Following the recent appointment of Celia Baxter to our board of directors, we now have 43% diversity on the board, in line with, you know, guidance and good practice. You know, just to summary, I used this slide before. I mean, as these results show, we're well positioned. We make essential products for our customers that are a small proportion of their spend. That makes them, you know, resilient in margin terms and gives sort of longevity of revenue streams.
We have a broad international-based footprint, which enables us to react to customers moving their production internationally. Again, particularly relevant in today's more politically sensitive world. Our supply chains are efficient. We buy a lot of raw materials and base components rather than other products, so we've been less affected by supply chains than others, although not entirely immune. We have a low energy production environment, so we haven't been, we weren't clobbered by the energy price hikes. Our business model is very resilient in what have been, over the last three years, some pretty tough conditions. We're therefore confident that this bodes well for, you know, whatever the future throws at us. With that, I'll pass over to Simon.
Great, thanks, Nick. Yeah, thanks, Bruce. Okay, first up for me is the financial headlines. As you can see, it's been another year of strong growth. Sales up 18%, profits up 25%, and that's driving EPS growth of 20%, you know, same level that we delivered last year. You know, despite, you know, and Bruce mentioned this, I think despite the supply chain and inflationary headwinds that we've seen, you know, we still, you know, upped our margin to 11.5%. As Nick mentioned, you know, really strong cash flow, we're really pleased with that. 95% conversion rates, which is pretty good. All of those are helping, you know, bring our gearing down.
It's down from a half year to 0.7. We've had a really nice uplift in ROCE, up, you know, 1.2 percentage points- 15.9 percentage points, as you can see there. You know, all of these sort of, you know, reflect our model, so it's, you know, customized critical parts. You know, it's selling, you know, into long-term growth markets. It's accretive acquisitions, it's a capital light model, and that's generating, you know, lots of cash, and we'll see that later. Okay, you know, next up, you know, revenues. I said, you know, revenues are up 18% to GBP 449. You can see the split down the left there. You know, 10% organic growth, you know, 5% from acquisitions.
There's five acquisitions over a two-year period contributing to that. 3% from sterling weakness, that's principally against the dollar. I would point out that, you know, within those sales, there's GBP 5 million, which is an exceptional, you know, pass-through of semiconductor costs. You know, which, you know, have to be accounted for as, you know, as GBP 5 million sales, GBP 5 million COGS, you know, no profit. In terms of modeling for next year, you know, frankly, that won't be there, so you can factor that into your modeling. Sales are, let's say, 18%, and that's, you know, with sales up, you know, 19% CAGR, you know, since FY18.
That's sort of splitting, you know, 10% organic CAGR, 9% acquisition CAGR. You know, that's quite a neat split as far as our model is concerned. You can see that, you know, even, you know, since the pre-COVID period, the FY 2020 period, you know, sales are up 50%. You know, strong, you know, consistent, you know, momentum is what we're trying to be about. Next up, you know, profit and operating margin. Yeah, profit up 25% on the back of those 18% sales growth. You've got, you know, it's rising from, you know, 10.4% up to 51.8%. That's sort of building in with the whole growth model.
32% CAGR growth, in profits, you know, since FY 2018. If you look at the operating margin, I'd say that's up, you know, 0.6 percentage points- 11.5 percentage points. You know, it's good mainly operational leverage, which we're pleased with. We'll see that on the next chart, and it was 11.6 in the second half, so a little bit of pickup there in the second half. Again, you can see the growth picture we've delivered. It's up, you know, 4 percentage points since FY 2018. It's up 8 percentage points since FY14. You know, we remain on target for the 13.5% target we set ourselves, you know, for FY 2025. Nick referred to the new, and Bruce, to the new 15% margin.
You know, if we're looking back, the first target was 10 years ago, and that was sort of 5%. It's a good reflection of how we've moved on since then. I think this is a really useful bridge, and it sort of sums up the year, you know, quite nicely. It takes you from last year's profits, GBP 41.4, this year's profit of GBP 51.8. The four bars on the left, that's the organic performance of the group. You know, 10% sales growth in profit terms, you know, improving gross margins, I'll come back to that. You know, we've invested 9% in OpEx over the period. That will support our longer-term growth.
Overall, you're looking at 19%, you know, drop-through of organic sales into profit. You know, we're really pleased with that, and it really shows the operational leverage of the business. I think just coming back to the gross margin, I think, you know, as well as the cash flow, I think this is a really key point for us. You know, not only have we maintained our organic gross margins, we've actually lifted them by, you know, 1 percentage point. I think in these inflationary times, we're really, really pleased with that. It, and again, it's, you know, it's our model, you know, so it's critical customized parts.
You know, it's a small fraction of the cost, of the overall bill cost of the OEM, and it's, ultimately, it's a, it would be a difficult product to replace elsewhere. It's, you know, our model lends itself very well to sort of pass those costs through. And, yeah. Yeah, I think so overall, I suppose the other part of that chart, again, it sort of summarizes our model, you know, very well. It's about the sort of the combination of organic growth, this operational leverage, and accretive acquisitions. You know, the acquisitions are a bit lighter there this year, as Bruce mentioned, but, you know, we're, we'll be hoping to have a bit more impact this year.
Divisional, you know, divisional performance, so you can see the performance of our two divisions there versus last year. On the right, you can see the growth in sales and of EBIT. If you look at M&C, both divisions have had, you know, good, strong sales growth. 16% sales growth in M&C, so it's 11% organic, you know, 5% from acquisitions. Some really good operational leverage in that division, driving that 25% growth in their constant exchange rate, you know, profitability and a 1% pickup in margin to 13.7%.
In terms of S&C, you know, 14% sales growth, you know, 8%, so that's 8% organic, you know, 6% from, I think it was about four acquisitions across the two-year period. You know, a lot of the businesses in that division are quite new. We've invested a fair amount in sales resource, you know, back office resource, and that sort of held back the EBIT growth. It's sort of still 7%. The margins clipped down to 15.2%, I think going forward, we'd see some good growth in that division. As you can see, it's still our highest margin division. This just gives a, you know, a summary walk. Underlying profit, GBP 51.8, down to EPS of GBP 0.352.
I think the key standout is the interest, you know, the finance costs as you'd expect. They really, as you guys know, started, you know, racing up in the second, you know, from the second half. It's up roughly about 50%. You know, obviously expect the annualization of effect of that to come through next year. Do build in, you know, some higher finance costs, you know, for next year. 20%, you know, 25%, sorry, 20% EPS growth, and that's sort of building. You can see the chart there. 25%, you know, CAGR growth since FY 2018. Again, it's just good, solid, you know, momentum.
Cash flow, yes, Nick referenced that. We're really pleased with that. The chart you can see there at the top, it takes you from GBP 61 million of EBITDA down to free cash flow, GBP 33 million. The two bars on the left there, that's our capital investment, working capital and CapEx. In terms of working capital, GBP 6.4 million invested in working capital to support 10% sales growth. That's sort of down from, I think it was sort of GBP 10.5 million in the first half, we made some good strides as supply chains have improved and our inventories have come down. What you'll see.
you know, working capital reducing from, you know, 16.5% of sales in the first half, down to 15% at the end of the year. Yeah, really, really pleasing. I think in terms of CapEx, it's five, you know, GBP 5.6 million in CapEx. That's covering, you know, capacity expansions. We've got, you know, line expansions, we've got ESG projects and ERP projects. It's ultimately still only represents, you know, 1.3% of sales. I think from a planning point of view, you know, we're looking around more like 2%, you know, for next year, 2% of sales.
Overall, you know, those two combined, it's only sort of 3%. It is a very sort of capital-light model. If you switch down to the middle graph, you can see, you know, operating profit of GBP 49 million, and free cash flow of GBP 33 million. Both of those are up around 50% on last year, and they're converting into cash at around 95%. You know, really, really pleasing conversion rates. If you look at the table right at the bottom, you can see, you know, we're delivering, you know, real consistent delivery of cash flow. That average is around about 100% cash conversion over the last sort of 10-year period, it's really pleasing. You know, that cash flow has reduced gearing.
It was 1.1 pro forma gearing. At the half year, it's come down to 0.7 with net debt of GBP 43 million. You know, we've got a decent facility there. Our range, you know, it remains. Our gearing range is 1.5x-2x, and that gives really good funding capacity. It's around about GBP 60 million. If we took it up to 1.5x gearing and another GBP 40 million on top to get a 2x gearing. Plenty there for us to use for accretive acquisitions. Capital allocation, we, you know, we started sharing this chart last year, and it's, again, it's a good summary of what we're about. Ultimately, you know, it's a very simple, you know, simple model.
You know, we'll invest in, you know, organic capital opportunities, you know, as and when they arise. You know, we pay a progressive dividend, and the rest of free cash that we put into acquisitions. If you look, free cash flow over the last six years, around GBP 174 million, 75% of that has gone into acquisitions and CapEx, you know, and 25% back to shareholders. That's quite a nice split. And you can see how we've funded, you know, over GBP 340 million of capital spend in that 6-year period, and half it is coming out of that strong cash flow. We've got a disciplined approach to funding.
You know, as you can see on the chart below, you know, we haven't actually taken that gearing over that two-time limit we set ourselves. You know, there's really no need, you know, for us to stretch our balance sheet. Dividend, this is quite a, quite a simple one. We've increased it by 6%, which, if you look back, that's our average growth that we've delivered in the last 12 years. That's really, you know, we've taken the cover over 3. It's the highest cover we've had, but actually, we're just gonna continue, you know, moving that upwards. You know, we'll keep paying the progressive dividend, really free up more and more cash to help self-fund those acquisitions and really get the EPS accretion motoring.
Finally, you know, finally for me, it's that summary. You know, we're pleased with this. We've been sort of showing our KSIs and KPIs, you know, over the last, you know, 10 years. You know, Nick talked about the KSIs and the progress we've made on those. In terms of the KPIs you see at the bottom, you know, we're hitting the targets, so we're hitting and beating the targets. You know, good, strong sales growth, you know, good, strong EPS growth. We, you know, dividend is up, and we're beating targets on both ROCE, you know, and operational cash flow. I think with all that, I'll pass over to Nick for a review of the operations.
Thanks, Simon. Okay, just a brief overview here, really. There's a lot of data on this chart. The bar chart on the left shows the organic growth rates going back to first half, FY18, which is the period starting April 2017. I think most of you will be sort of familiar with that history. On the right-hand side, that bar chart shows the organic growth of the group by country over the last year. You can see strong organic growth everywhere except Asia, where China slowed. That's really a reflection of two things. Firstly, slowing wind energy demand in some of our Western customers over in China.
Also there's a, you know, a move afoot to, at least amongst our, in our sites, where production is moving from a sort of China for the world to a China-for-China production environment. We still have a very significant manufacturing footprint there, and we will continue to do so. Indeed, around about 2/3, maybe a little more of our customers in China are Western-based multinationals, but the manufacturing there is, you know, for demand in China rather than for shipping around the world. Whereas we're growing our footprint and production footprint in India and Mexico, for example, we're not growing at the same rate in Asia. Yeah, good, strong growth across the board.
Germany is very strong because we've had a few particularly large OEMs, led by a large medical, German medical customer. That's why that's so strong. U.S. is a combination of strong underlying demand across the base and a bit of production relocation by some customers, as I just referred to. This slide outlines really, you know, we do lots of acquisitions, obviously, and we build a footprint with, you know, a very high count of operations globally. And whilst we're not a heavy integrator per se of our businesses, we do actually integrate stuff over time and optimize it for efficiency purposes.
What this chart's trying to sort of outline is that as we go along, we do tend to integrate facilities and make the operations more efficient. The best recent example of that is in North America. You can see there with the different colored dots, we've got a number of operations. The orange dot or the pink dots are the orange dots are the acquisitions that we've made. The gray dots are where we've consolidated sites. For example, over the last five years, we've bought something like six businesses in the USA, and we've consolidated three of those sites into manufacturing in Mexico. We used to have production in Los Angeles, Tempe, Arizona, and Toronto, in Canada.
Now those three sites have been closed and integrated into predominantly the Mexican facility, which we significantly expanded last year. That has enabled us to move more production onto the Americas, rather than having to ship it around from Asia, and we've been able to do it with a lower cost footprint than by having it purely in North America, in the US. We've done similarly in Europe, and we're doing similarly in Asia, where we're expanding Indian production. There's an ongoing kind of efficiency program that underpins everything that we do operationally. This is a really important slide. You see this every time. This is our target markets.
On the left-hand side, you can see that target markets now account for 77% of our revenue, up 1 point from the prior year. On the right-hand side, you can see that the organic growth in our target markets in the year was 12%. You can see that below that, the growth in our other markets, organic growth in the other markets, was only 3%. Overall, for the year, organic growth of 10%. Perhaps, you know, sort of more relevantly, over a 6-year period, the lower shaded bar against each of those bars is the 6-year CAGR. You can see that over a 6-year period, our target markets have grown by 12%, whereas the other markets have grown at just slightly less than half that.
That really sort of bears testament to the importance of those target markets for us in delivering that top line growth. It's interesting to see, you might remember that in the other markets, in the first half results, we put reported double-digit growth in the other markets as it bounced back post-COVID. You can see that by these full year results, that those other markets, the non-focus markets, has dropped back again very, very quickly. As I always say, those other markets are lower growth prospects and have much higher volatility of much higher cyclicality than the other markets, which is part of the reason we don't focus on them.
In the target markets, still, the renewable sector, was -6%, as is consistent with the first half. That was wind energy, again. The other markets more than compensated by being up by 15%. Again, we're not unduly concerned about the wind energy sector sort of slowing a bit. You know, one of the benefits of having four target market areas is that there's always gonna be one up and one down, or one weaker or one stronger. For us, it's all about having an overall decent, you know, growth rate that doesn't oscillate too much, and you can see that's indeed the case. Target markets are, you know, a really strong driver of the organic performance.
Very briefly, the two divisions, I mean, there's a lot of detail on here as well. I think the important thing to say is that both divisions, as Simon said, are performing well, both similar levels of organic growth. Magnetics and Controls has delivered greater EBIT drop-through through the period, kind of you could say it needed to because its margins were a bit lower. This is the region where the wind sector exposure is. That's why Asia is down there, Asia being China. On the Sensing and Connectivity division, you know, similar profile. The only real difference there is that Asia has grown by 15%. That's because the renewable solar business sits within this division. That continues to grow well.
Design wins, you'll all remember that design wins are an important driver of the organic growth. They are the organic growth driver. I mean, over, well over 90%, probably over 95% of our revenue is pure designed-in revenue, so without a design win, we don't get the revenue. It's very important that the design wins continue to grow, and you can see here that the estimated lifetime value of design wins during the year was GBP 273 million, up 11% on last year. Of those design wins, 89% were in our target markets, so that's, you know, great performance. What always happens in a slowing cycle is that customer design activity increases, and actually we saw that, particularly in the second half, a very strong increase in customers' project activity.
We expect that to continue to drive design wins through this new year. Order book. It's a great order book. I mean, it's down on the interim period, but it's flat year-on-year. It still represents something over five and a half months of revenue, which is well above the pre-COVID historic norms. It's normalizing, and it'll continue to normalize in the first half this year. You know, the global supply chain crunch is ostensibly over. Supplier lead times throughout the industry are coming back to norms. Customers therefore no longer need to place six, nine-month orders, and therefore, their order windows are shortening, and therefore, our order book is, you know, just pro rata adjusting.
You know, it's entirely as we would expect it to be. It's doing it, I should say, I mean, it's quite a measured adjustment. It's not a very steep adjustment. More broadly, what we're seeing is, you know, little tweaks to the order book rather than any kind of fundamental change, which I think is quite reassuring. Acquisitions, this is our acquisition return slide. You can see there the EBIT ROI for this is the EBIT for the year just gone over the fully loaded investment costs.
You can see that well over half of the acquisitions are now delivering over, ahead of our 15% EBIT ROI target, some of them are really, you know, knocking the lights out, doing a really, really super job. Couple there on the right are, or a few there on the right are lower. The sort of the L, M, and N are the more recent acquisitions. O and Q are the two businesses that were affected by the supply chain crunch on semiconductor shortages during the year, which are now over. The supply is back to normal. Those figures will come back up.
P is a business that was slightly negative last year, and, you know, we took some corrective action last year, and that is starting, just beginning in these results, but in the year ahead, should show some significant improvement. Overall, we feel that the ones to the left of the chart are performing, you know, obviously very, very well indeed, and the ones to the right are all sort of on track, and we feel we'll get to our 15% target. The key point, obviously, here to make is, that this is where the real value creation is in discoverIE. It's buying a business, getting a decent business that we believe we can invest in and grow, and then growing it year in, year out for, you know, 5, 7, 10+ years.
When we do that, the returns we make are really rock solid. We believe that there are, you know, huge future opportunities for us in this space, and we will just keep applying the same model. Buy decent businesses, invest in them, and grow them, and it'll keep coming. This is an example of a little more detail of how we build a cluster. You know, we have now, actually, we have 3 clusters. Variohm is the second cluster we created. It's all built off the back of a sensing business that we bought in January 2017, based in the U.K. Since then, we've made 5 further bolt-on acquisitions that you can see. You can see the logos down there at the bottom of the chart.
Positek in the U.K. and Cheltenham, Phoenix in the U.S., Limitor in Hungary, or Germany, Hungary, CPI in the U.S., and Magnasphere in the U.S. What that's done is that we've bought a whole series of complementary sensing and switching products. They operate as bolt-ons under the Variohm management. The Variohm management team comprises the managing director of Variohm and the cluster, who was the sales director of Variohm, when we acquired it. He is now the managing director, and then we've recruited, or he's recruited a top team around him, the finance director, sales director, and marketing director, that lead and manage that cluster. The individual businesses operate under that, reporting into them.
That enables them to sort of cross-sell and train each other on each other's products, but still retaining their, you know, their individual discrete identity. We find that works very well. The numbers in the table just sort of support that. The revenue growth of 24%, that's growth of top-line revenue. That's not organic growth. You can see the operating margins as we bought these sort of small, higher margin businesses, the operating margins almost doubled to 20%, 19%. ROCE, 23, has gone up to 23%. EBIT ROI of the cluster is 18%, and bear in mind that Magnasphere is a very recent acquisition.
working capital has gone up slightly because of the supply chain challenges in the year, still pretty good at 18.2%. We've internationalized the sales, predominantly through those US acquisitions. We think that's a really good way of building a sort of niche sensing business that keeps the individual businesses and the entrepreneurial dynamism sort of close to the close to the customer, whilst enabling us to build a bigger, more effective, and efficient business. you know, really good, really good arrangement. just to finish with the outlook. The new year started well. We're obviously lapping pretty tough comps, but I'm pleased to say organic growth is still continuing. We're kind of in the mid-single digit sort of range at the moment, but, you know, things are continuing to adjust.
Our order book is normalizing as expected, we're still well above pre-COVID norms for order book coverage. We feel that that's. That'll continue to come down a bit, at the moment, it looks as if it's gonna still stay a little bit higher than the pre-COVID norms. Design wins are in very good shape. We have a strong pipeline of acquisition opportunities, with, as Simon said, you know, around about GBP 100 million of acquisition firepower. Whereas the, you know, this year just gone was predominantly about organic growth and efficiencies, you know, and three quarters of our profit growth came from the organic development. In the year going ahead, there'll be lower organic growth with more contribution from acquisitions. We think that we're in good shape.
The business is performing very robustly, and we're, you know, pretty confident that we should have a good year ahead of us. With that, I'll thank you for your attention and open the floor to questions. Should we, Simon, should we go up here? Yeah.
Morning, Luke from Investec. Just a quick question on vendor price aspirations, and are they coming down, and what number of prospective deals are you seeing out there, please, Nick?
Price expectations, they came down a bit earlier in the year, and I think they've gone up a little bit, to be honest, but they're back within our target range, which is obviously good. Yeah, I think it's still quite an active environment, although the, you know, the market generally isn't doing a whole, we haven't seen a whole lot of transactions across the industrial space recently. I suspect there's a lot of activity going on, not just with us, but with others as well. The things are back in the range.
Hi, it's Andy from Jefferies. Just following on from that, given that interest rates are a lot higher than they were 12, 18 months ago, do you guys think about M&A in any different way? I mean, your IRR clearly is a lot harder to achieve at 6% than nothing. I'm just wondering your thought process or anything that changes there. Clearly, you're also looking for higher margin acquisitions than you were previously, or in order to get to your target. Again, thoughts there, because by definition, you have to pay more for higher margin businesses or don't you? That's the first one.
We buy high quality businesses that are gonna grow over 7, 10, 15, 20 years. That's what we're looking for. That's our starting point. Yeah, the, in higher interest rates makes it more difficult in the short term, and that, you know, we have to be mindful of that. With the pricing that we, levels that we think we're at, we're still able, we should still be able to get to our kind of returns targets within a sort of 3-4-year period. It puts a bit more pressure on it, but we still feel as though we're kind of, you know, within the operating target range.
Yeah, you know, we've obviously, you know, moved, you know, whack up, you know, to take account of that. You know, these are, you know, these are good accretive acquisitions we're looking at. You know, it may nip a bit of the accretion, but, you know, they are still decent acquisitions. You know, at some point, you know, rates will come down a little bit. I mean, they'll never come back where they are. You'd never assume that, but they're going to probably, you know, dip a little bit.
Just on the margin target, I think two-thirds of the margin targets is from M&A and one-third organic. Is that for both the 13.5 and the 15, or is that more the 15? Okay, fine. Good. Then just last quickly from me, if we think about pricing this year, we've got the GBP 5 million surcharge, if that's the right word, to drop out.
Yeah.
Positive pricing this year, negative pricing from raw materials earlier, what's your, what's your thought there, please?
Yeah, I you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, raw material costs are coming down. We've, you know, we've got other costs that are, you know, still going up, so, you know, they obviously, you know, wage inflation, you know, energy costs and things like that. In the round, you know, we'd be looking at keeping our pricing, you know, where it is. You're not going to get these sort of surcharges. Equally, you know, growth that you see going forward is going to be volume growth and not price growth.
Yeah.
To be clear, the surcharges won't continue.
No, surcharges.
That, that's, that was a semiconductor related.
Yeah, yeah.
Correct.
Thank you. Can I pick out the two slightly weaker numbers in a very good set of numbers and ask you about wind and China, which are obviously related, I think, previously you've said that orders were picking up a bit on the wind side, it hasn't come through to sales yet.
Mm.
Is that still what you're seeing? Equally on China, is there any benefit from the sort of reopening momentum there, or is that much more sector specific?
The wind is sort of flattened out a bit. We did see a pickup in orders, and the order book is, you know, is kind of, you know, pretty good actually. We're not seeing sort of a strong recovery yet, and we're not entirely clear on just how, you know, when exactly we're going to start to see a sort of return to growth. You know, we're well aware of all the macro drivers for wind, but I think the, we're not yet seeing that growth come back. We've seen the whole thing stabilize and the order book rebuild, but it's kind of, at a revenue level, it's kind of pretty flat. Whereas solar is very strong, it's a smaller proportion than wind.
In terms of China, we weren't badly affected by the slowdown. We didn't feel the slowdown with the lockdown closures last year, too significantly, and we haven't seen a great change in the reopening, to be honest. We don't feel as though we've been affected very much by that, actually.
Yeah, I think just to add to that, you know, wind is, you know, clearly, you know, it's going to be a, you know, it's a long term, you know, there's going to be a lot of growth, momentum market. You know, there may be a blip at the moment, but that market is undoubtedly, you know, going to grow. And I think yes, at the moment, you know, the guys who, you know, building it, the investors and things like that, you know, the pricing has obviously brought their own, you know, profitability into question, and therefore, they're looking at, you know, some big capital market projects, but they'll get it right. And, you know, over the next, course of the next 10 or 20 years, it's going to be a super growth market, I think.
Sure. One unrelated one. On the incremental investment you've put into S&C, which has held back the margin a bit there, is that effectively done now? Can you give us a bit more color about where you've been spending that money and what sort of program that is?
Yeah, well, you know, it, you know, never say done, but I think, you know, a lot of that is that there's, you know, still, you know, some ERP upgrades and things like that, you know, we'll have to push through. If you looked at that chart that Nick put up in terms of S&C, you'll have seen the, you know, those eight acquisitions that we've done in the last couple of years. It's really about about those businesses. They, you know, we, you know, we do that, and, you know, when we, when we make acquisitions, you know, we factor in the costs that we're gonna put into those businesses, obviously, into our modeling.
We also make sure that the, you know, the sellers who are likely on an earn-out, you know, where we're going to put those costs in, and we don't penalize them in terms of the earn-out. It's an important factor for us.
Sure. Thank you.
Morning, guys. Henry Carver from Peel Hunt. firstly, just around on the, on the debate around the order book. Obviously, I think you said normal, you know, it comes back to sort of 4.5 months, something like that. I just wondered if I heard that right, and that is where you're seeing it come back to, or any other color around, you know, how that might look and whether it might actually be a bit more than that close to where we are now? Following on from that, you know, how you see your own inventory levels at the moment?
You know, obviously, probably don't need so many on the shelf as you did last year, but just any thoughts around sort of where you see that ending up at the end of the year?
The order book, pre-COVID, the order book was normal, steady state market conditions. Order book was 4 and a half months. We're currently, something over 5 and a half months, and we don't see it yet. There aren't any signs in our forecast of it going back to the 4 and a half months. We're kind of, at the moment, it looks like it's more likely going to end up at around about 5 months. You know, why is that? Why is it going to end up higher? Well, I think there's a, you know, there's a more fragmented supply chain now. You know, the, you know, many customers are now making at multiple sites rather than just one. That leads to a sort of certain duplication or a little bit of overlapping of order books.
All of that drives to a slightly higher order book, perhaps, than in previous times. At the moment, it looks like that sort of five level might be about the new norm. Yeah, but just in, you know, in terms of, you know, the second part of your question, you know, the actual, our inventory levels. I think, you know, I think we've done a very good job at sort of bringing that down. I think, again, I think, you know, some businesses will, that we have, you know, will, you know, continue to hold a bit more higher stock because, you know, some of the orders they've got are really, you know, decent long-term orders, and so they're required to have that.
I'm not sure it will necessarily come down to the lows of where it was. You know, ultimately, it's always, you know, it's, you know, we have a, you know, I head up a working capital committee across the group, and it's, you know, it's a fundamental part of what we want the financial controllers to do. Likewise, you know, and we measure them on monthly average working capital. It's not just about half years and year ends, it's about, you know, the consistency of working capital across that period. What you want is that all to come down, and therefore you're getting real cash, real cash derivation rather than just sort of, you know, spiky bits. When we do acquisitions, again, it's a fundamental part for us.
We, you know, we've got best practice, and we'll typically help those guys, you know, reduce their own working capital. That's value.
Thanks.
Thanks, James Baden. Just a couple from me, please. On gross margin, that 100 basis point organic uplift that you talk about in the year, how does that vary across the two divisions? Because obviously, the operating profit picture is quite different at the divisional level. I just wondering if you can give some more color on that.
There's, there was certainly more in, you know, M&C, you know, more of a pickup in M&C than, you know, than S&C, you know, which is, you know, which again, is drive to that operational leverage point. Much higher, you know, profit growth you saw in M&C than S&C. I think, you know, both businesses, you know, they're tasked with passing that cost through. It's not, you know, it is not an easy job. You know, price is going up. You know, you've got to be on it all the time, you know, right from the start, you know, talking to the customers and, and, you know, reevaluating those costs. It, it may look easy for us sitting here, but it's a, it's a good, hard job well done.
Thanks. Secondly, Nick, I think you referenced organic revenue growth so far this fiscal year being mid-single digit. That's, I think, a bit of an acceleration from where we were in Q4. What's driving that?
Well, we have very... I mean, you know, the absolute we're still knocking out record revenue numbers, obviously, you know. Against very tough comps prior year, we're seeing very strong order books, very solid demand patterns. We're seeing a little bit more moving around, and, but, you know, it's pretty small-scale stuff at this level. We're seeing some of our very large customers who've grown very strongly, just sort of.
trimming their demand slightly. One of our very large customers has talked about just burning off a little bit of inventory. The growth rates with us have slowed a little bit, but they're still growing, and they're still able to adjust their inventories whilst growing their demand with us. They're obviously growing. You know, their growth rate is faster than the growth rate we're seeing at the moment. I think that's all. I mean, it all feels very, at the moment, like a very measured management of supply chains and inventories, and, you know, following a very rapid period of very, very strong growth. And it's built on very strong order books and very high-quality customers. I...
You know, that's a bit of a woolly answer, James, but I think that's what we're seeing. We're seeing good customers with good demand patterns, managing their inventories. In the same way that we burnt off inventory at the end of the year, they're doing the same kind of stuff, but on a backdrop of a pretty firm demand. You know, we've all seen some of the big global industrials de-deliver some very recent, very strong recent trading updates, and that kind of aligns with what we're seeing with some of our customers. So far, it feels very measured.
Thanks.
Sorry, another one, if I may. You talked about the lower cyclicality of the target markets, which is obviously a pretty key consideration at the moment.
Mm-hmm.
Can we push you a bit about the dynamics within those four markets, particularly the industrial and connectivity bit? There's lots of debate about whether the positive forces of kind of reshoring and automation offset the sort of cyclical and sort of confidence reduction in CapEx. What are you seeing there, and do you think that is the more cyclical end of your target markets?
Yes, that is the more cyclical end of our target markets, because the industrial connectivity segment has a greater proportion of smaller customers that are in this sort of IoT world. Whilst the prospects for growth are super, you know, we haven't seen the things like, you know, the effects of things like 5G data coming through. As that comes through, that plays very, very strongly into things like industrial automation markets, robotics, and, you know, and the like. There is a greater proportion of newer customers in that segment. We're sort of, you know, we see that as being a little bit more cyclical.
Whereas in some of the bigger, more established market areas, like transportation and transportation security, for us, we're seeing, you know, those as being, you know, much more solid. I mean, these are, I would say, nuances a little bit, but nevertheless, those are the sort of the trends that we're seeing. Sorry, just to add one final comment. I mean, we're seeing, for example, in transportation now, we're seeing we've got some very strong rail project demand in the US coming through, which, I'm sure is all sort of a consequence of the IRA act in the US and so forth.
Hi, Lydia Kenny from Investec. Just two quick questions. On price stickiness with your customers, we've seen some competitors have had to adjust. What are your views on that? The second one is, at the half year results, you use, like India, had standout organic growth, and it's not touched on in this. Could you provide some more color on that as well, please?
Yeah, sure. In terms of price stickiness, our prices are firm. We're not seeing any downward pressure on pricing. I think that's principally because raw material levels are still very high by historic norms. You know, you look at copper and steel, aluminum, and plastics, since the reopening of China after the lockdown, the raw material prices recovered very strongly at the beginning of this year, calendar year, and they've kind of stayed there, drifted a tiny bit, but they've broadly stayed there. That kind of underpins, you know, our pricing and needs to, because we buy those raw materials. In terms of India, Yeah, you're right. We had very, very strong first half growth.
It kind of, it didn't grow in the second half. That was principally due to, there was one customer adjustment. They had, they had a big inventory correction that they needed to make, and that product was made in India, but we supplied Western customer. India was flat for the year. So strong growth first half, bit of a decline in the second half, flat overall. But India, for us, will be a good growth market going forward. I mean, the key considerations are that the production costs, labor costs in India and Mexico are quite significantly less than China.
As China becomes a sort of China for China production environment, India and Mexico are kind of stepping in to provide, you know, regional alternatives at a very, from a very competitive position. They're, you know, they're good, they're, you know, operationally very good places to be doing that. You've got the whole India investment program, Modi's India First program, which is, you know, only going to provide a boost to demand for India as well. India and Mexico are gonna be good, strong growth areas for us in the future.
Morning, it's Ed Marovanica from Liberum. Hi, just, I have a question on new products. What % would you say, roughly, is from new products in any particular year or over a cycle? What sort of areas or what new product types or ranges can we look forward to in the coming years?
If I use as a proxy for new product design wins, then we are roughly generating around about 15% of our revenue in a year is coming from new design wins that are the first 12 months following the design win. Roughly 15% of the revenue is product design wins achieved in the last year. Sorry, I forget the second part of your question because I was trying to work out the answer to the first part.
It was more of just a quality question around maybe the types of new products we can expect if you're moving into new niches or anything interesting and exciting?
We've got some very exciting products in some of our businesses. The recent acquisition of Magnasphere in the US makes a very high performance sensing switch, magnetically actuated sensing switch. We're looking at acquisitions in the pipeline with some very interesting, super niche products. Generically, I would say it's kind of more of the same. We, you know, we, the bulk of our revenue is driven by, you know, the long-established acquisitions, and that they're just doing more of the same. They just keep churning out new custom designs of using the base technologies that they have, and that's great because it's a relatively low investment requirement to do.
Would you mind just going back to your comments on China and the shift from China to the world, to China for China-?
Mm.
How that impacts? I just want to make sure I don't misunderstand what you were saying. The China for China is more of an end market thing than a discoverIE thing, or does your manufacturing footprint have to evolve more going forward? Just want to make sure I don't misunderstand what you were saying.
Well, customers are... Our customers are moving from an environment where they had it all made in China and shipped to wherever in the world. The US is a good example of that. They want product made, not specifically, not in China, and they specifically want stuff made in America. Most of the movements that we see are more towards a US manufacturing base, with a little bit in other Asian countries, but that's very much of an overriding sort of trend that we see going on in Americas. In Europe, we see, you know, less accentuated version of that. We see more of an environmental aspect on it.
You know, long before the political sensitivities, we have customers in Northern Europe that were asking to move a proportion of production from China to Poland because they wanted to reduce lead times, and they had a, you know, concern over supply chain and environmental conditions. It's interesting to add that since we've signed up to SBTI, we can see all of the customers of ours that have signed up to SBTI, and there are a lot of them. As part of their Scope 3 plans for Scope 3 emissions reductions, optimizing their supply chain and taking car emissions out of the supply chain means moving production more locally. That's what's driving it in Europe.
Do you have the ability to repurpose a plant for China, away from China for export, or do you just move it to India, Poland, wherever?
Well, we keep the production in so what it basically means is that, you know, we were expanding our plants in China five and seven years ago, and we're not expanding them anymore because the shift of, you know, that shift just mean that we're doing more in India. And we're moving from, we will move from one of those plants to a new, much twice the size plant, we're expanding India, and we did the same in Mexico last year. All it means is that sort of China, we keep China as it was, but the growth comes elsewhere. China will become a lower proportion of the total over time, but it will still be... I want to emphasize that China will still be a very important market for us.
Yeah.
We supply, you know, Western and Chinese customers, Chinese multinational customers, so it will continue to be important.
That was, I was making sure I did business. Mm-hmm. Yeah, thanks.
Okay. Are we looking for any questions from the?
Webcast? Yeah, we've got one question from the webcast. It's from Tom Frain, from Shore Capital. Tom asks: Was the Q4 organic growth slightly higher than you initially disclosed in the pre-close update with the FY or the full year organic revenue growth reported this morning being ahead of the 8% you initially stated?
I think what was in the trading update was, you know, probably rise a touch higher. Yeah, don't forget, if he's looking at, you know,
differences in revenue, there was that GBP 5 million that was booked, that was just booked. It was sort of booked from an accounting point of view in Q4, but actually it spreads across the year. GBP 2.3 million of that was H1 related, and, you know, GBP 2 million, you know, was H2 related. It may well be because he sort of, he's loaded it all in Q4.
The 8% reported in the trading update finalized as 9% organic. That was because Q4 was slightly better. On top of that, there was another GBP 5 million that Simon's referring to, was an extra, created the extra 1% that gave us the 10% headline figure. If you like, if you strip out that, you know, the semiconductor purchasing adjustment, then you know, the real number, if you like, is 9%.
Which was marginally better than the trading update.
Okay, thank you. I think that concludes everything. Thank you, everybody, for coming, and have a great day.