Morning all. Thank you all for joining. I'm Scott Fawcett, Chief Exec of Essentra, and delighted to be here with Jack Clarke, our CFO, to share with you the results for the first half. We'll go through the usual agenda. I'll give you a quick summary to start with. Over to Jack for the financial performance. I'll come and talk a little bit about strategic update, and then we'll cover the outlook. We'll also in the strategic update cover the regional performance as well, give you a little bit more color on each of the three regions within the business. So, in summary, the word we're using to describe performance in the first half is encouraging. Again, it's a difficult market context. It remains challenging out there, but encouraging overall for the group.
So, we've managed to get overall revenue growth and profit growth on a constant currency basis. We, Jack will talk through the revenue bridge in terms of like-for-like impact of acquisitions and impact of FX, but delighted to see some momentum in the business, with growth from Q1 to Q2, leading to us being in a like-for-like growth again in quarter two. So we have reached that inflection point, which is really important for us. Europe's performance is very solid. We'll go through the European details later. But the diversity of the region continues to be its strength, although the external market continues to probably be the most challenging around Europe, in particular, the German economy, as we know. America's showing some good signs of improvement, some good progress, from the start of the year.
Obviously, had the poorest performance last year, but we have now seen some stability in that distribution and customer segment. So that destocking phenomenon that we've had for much of the last 18 months has now come to an end, from the data we're seeing. And from an APAC point of view, we're seeing good growth in APAC, but it's driven by APAC export markets. The China domestic market continues to be quite soft and challenging. Not getting any worse for sure, but not recovering as many of us would have hoped. But overall, within that external market, continuing to be quite challenging. Very pleased with the results we managed to achieve, and that return to like-for-like growth in Q2 really is an important point for us. The acquisition of BMP very much on track, and we've got a slide later that will cover the highlights there.
Probably doing slightly better than we'd expected in terms of commercial opportunities. Good progress on sustainability. And I think the important thing for this half year on sustainability is actually now starting to lead to some meaningful commercial wins. We are doing sustainability for a whole host of reasons, partly employee engagement, partly it's the right thing to do, partly because it seeks commercial opportunities, and those commercial opportunities have now really started to come to life in the first half. And, Jack will then cover the dividend, which again is in line with our stated policy. So, overall, encouraging set of results, difficult end markets, but the business is performing well in the context of the end markets for sure. Over to you, Jack.
Thank you, Scott. Yeah, so I'm gonna present the financial results this morning. I think it's important to preface by saying these are a clean set of results. You know, previously we've had, sort of a little bit of noise from the discontinued businesses, the packaging, and the filters businesses. That's all now cleared through the system. So these are a proper, clean set of results where you can really measure the underlying, growth and sustainability of the components operation. That being said, Scott has prefaced it very well by saying that, you know, this is an encouraging set of results. We are seeing growth from quarter two to quarter from quarter one to quarter two, and that is an encouraging sign after a long run of low PMIs, difficult end markets. We're now seeing that growth. So revenue-wise, in constant currency, we're up 1.5%.
I'll go through the bridge in that in a moment. Operating profits again in constant currency, 7.6%. Obviously, 90% of Essentra's business is overseas. 30% is in the U.S., over 60% is in Europe. And those both the euros and the dollars have, obviously, developed dramatically against sterling in the last year. So that's why you've seen that currency effect. The operating margin is up again in constant currency perspective. Cash conversion is down at 80%, but I'll explain that that's to do with the working capital and the investment we're putting into the business to fuel that growth that we're now seeing. Net debt to EBITDA has gone up to 1.1. This is the new business. That's within the guidance levels of the 0.5-1.5 that we've given previously, for the ongoing business.
Last year we were sitting on a pile of cash that's now been distributed, hence the net debt to EBITDA has gone up. Return on invested capital, 11.9%. That's tracking in line with our overall strategic plan of getting to 15 in the next 5-6 years. Obviously, the 2 acquisitions we've made, they will only be fully accretive after 3 years. Adjusted EPS, that reflects the interest charge that we've now got that we are, operating as a standalone business and we've distributed, the proceeds of the, divestments. The dividend, we've said that it'll be a progressive dividend. It'll, it's up 4% this time. We're gonna carry on with that at the 3 times cover. Overall, good set of results.
The key metric is that actually, despite the difficult end markets, despite the PMI being low, we have improved our revenue slightly over the year. Constant currency, 1.5% up, but within that, we've got 2.2% organic decline. We've got 3.7% from the acquisition of Tappi, and we've got a 5.5% significant effect from Forex. Within that, most of the growth has come through volume. We've had very little pricing increases in during this last year. However, on a materials perspective, we've seen decreases. So when we come to the margins, you'll see we're actually improving the margins in that as well. I think it's important to point out that in Europe, we were pretty much flat on revenues.
The Americas were slightly down, but against some of our peer performances, not, not pretty, a pretty good performance. And APAC was actually up a little bit. Scott's gonna go on and explain that in some detail, the regional performance. So revenue, good performance in difficult end markets. The income statement, the standout number there is the gross margin, 46.4%. We've managed to, really, despite the lack of revenue growth, so there's been no drop through perspective, and that will come as the revenues return. We have managed to do very good efficiencies both in procurement and in cost savings. We guided on the central cost that they would be at GBP 13 million going forward. They are at GBP 13 million. Despite the inflationary pressures we've seen, we've maintained it at GBP 13 million.
We've now got a normalized net finance expense, so we do pay interest on the debt that we carry. Last year we didn't have any finance cost purely because we were carrying all that cash and we got that, we got income off that cash in H1. So this is back to a more normalized effective kind of interest rate going forward. The effective tax rate is at 24%-26%. This is based on the fact that both the UK and Turkey, which is a significant operation for us, are now up at 25% corporate income tax rates. And in addition to that, the old tax effective tax havens that we had through the packaging and filters, they, they've now gone.
That being said, despite the ETR having increased, our actual cash out is minimum because we've got tax losses that we can offset against that. So the cash out isn't that great. In adjusting items, our ERP that Scott will talk to, it's going well, very well now. That came in, in budget at 4.8. We've got a total cost of GBP 10 million for the year. Restructuring activities, 0.7. Relating to acquisitions, it's a T, Tappi primarily, 0.4. The defined benefit charge is significantly down this year, because of the, increase in interest rates. Our future liabilities on the pension scheme have shrunk significantly. So there's actually a, a pickup in the valuation of some GBP 11 million, which led to a, a lower pension charge.
In terms of operating free cash flow, as I say, we're at, 80% from a, an OCC, operating cash conversion. We're actually at 90+% from a free cash flow perspective. We have invested in our inventories. We are seeing growth now. We are, positioning that we have our fast-running products ready to go to the customer.
That service and that availability of stock is key to our customer proposition. We're trying to steal a march here and get some market share. So we've invested in both in the Americas and in Europe in some additional stock. We've also got some receivables growth, based on the fact that our revenues are starting to pick up. So that working capital outflow is actually a positive thing from our perspective. Net capex, we've invested heavily during a period. We brought in some new dip mold, which is a very high-running product line, both in Erie. We've put a new plant in, and in China, we've invested in significant capex there to upgrade their facilities. We put some new machines in Europe. So that, that carries on that investment in our core business.
Working capital, as I said, is going up to the top end of our guided range, which is 20%. It's now 21%. That's a good thing because we're investing in the business for future growth. On our return to capital shareholders, it's very pleasing to see a number of the banks here this morning. Thank you for coming. We've just renegotiated our RCF. We've renewed it for another 5 years. We got it on some very favorable rates in working with our relationship banks and with some new banks as well. So that's very pleasing. Our core debt is the USPP that's secured out to 2033 at a 3%-3.5% interest rate. That's very low. Our ordinary dividend has gone up by 4% in line with our profits increase, and that'll be paid in October. The share buyback continues.
We've had guidance from a number of our investors that they're really looking for us to deploy the capital primarily around acquisitions and accretive. We've done that with Wixroyd. We've done that with Tappi. We'll continue to do that, but we are committed to maintaining the share buyback, and it'll probably go beyond this year. So, just coming to our capital allocation policy, this is a slide I always show. Capital investment remains the key. It's the number one priority. We are doing that with our Capex as demonstrated in some of the investments we've made this year. Innovation is core to what we do. Scott's mentioned our sustainability credentials. They've been enhanced during the year, and we're gonna carry on investing in that.
The digital journey continues. We've made significant upgrades, both to our ERP platform, but also to our online offering. The acquisitions, Scott will talk about where we're, where we are with that, but again, we've done two and we're committed to progressing in line with our strategy. The dividend is maintained at three times cover and has progressed in line with earnings. So the capital allocation remains on track. Revenue growth was still showing as negative, although we're seeing some in laterally, you know, the Q2 to Q1 progression is positive, which is good. Profitability, we are increasing that margin, as we said. The gross margins are increasing quite rapidly, and that's all without the incremental drop through that we'll get through the operational gearing with additional revenue.
So that's the cherry yet to come. Cash flow was shown as yellow. That will improve during the second half of the year. Leverage is within our guided range. The ROIC is at 11.9%. It's progressing. It will be improved with the acquisitions over time, and the dividend is at three times cover. So a strong set of financial results. Scott said it's encouraging, the revenue growth that we've experienced Q2 to Q1. So with that, I will hand it back to Scott.
Thanks, Jack.
Thanks.
Okay, so quickly covering regional performance. So looking at Europe first, we know Europe is probably the most complicated from an external market point of view. PMIs still remain suppressed. They are yet to recover above 50. I think we're now 26 months or something. So difficult external market. Having said that, we did see that overall, like-for-like revenue only 0.1% down. So broadly flat total revenue and growth given the acquisition of Tappi, all sits up in the European numbers. And overall, very much momentum from Q1 to Q2, with 3.7% growth like-for-like in Q2. I'll come on to talk about Tappi in more detail in a couple of slides' time, but we are seeing good flow through to gross margin and gross profit. As Jack said, probably only around 1% pricing so far this year.
We are expecting a little bit more in the second half, but we are being quite selective with pricing. It's clearly more difficult in this low, lower inflationary market to, to achieve that sell price benefit. In part, that's because we're seeing some reasonably significant cost price reductions. So a lot of our raw materials are falling, both in terms of market rates, but also good work by our procurement teams to reduce those input costs. So the combination of those two things, a little bit of pricing, certainly not giving away any input cost reductions, and those input cost reductions driving our, our gross profit quite, quite nicely. And finally, talk about the ERP. It still remains the biggest single project that we have as an organization.
When we set up at the, the full year results, we said we'd just gone live in Eastern Europe. That's been a very successful go-live, as well as an ERP ever goes. We returned to sort of BAU levels of service and resourcing probably within three or four months. So really pleased with how that's gone. It's proven that we now have a working template that we are now looking to roll out across the rest of Europe. We're busily working through Germany, Austria, and Benelux right now. So we've done the gap analysis. There are not many gaps as you'd expect. Local tax, local configuration. So just working through that currently with a plan to start testing late summer, go-live probably early Q4 for that next set of markets.
We're then expecting two further go-lives in Europe next year. So there'll be two further waves going through next year. And then by the end of the next year, we're expecting this to be a BAU program. So we may do some further rollouts in some Asian markets into the US. We're still looking at options, but it will be BAU by the end of next year because we've got confidence in the template now working very well for us. Within Americas, so Americas showed an improvement from Q1 to Q2. Actually, from a momentum point of view, probably one of the larger improvements that we'd seen, although we're still in decline in Q2, likely to come back into growth into Q3, certainly in H2, as they had a poor second half of last year.
And we've got that ongoing momentum underneath the business as well. As I mentioned, the destocking trends have eased. We are seeing less of that. In fact, the last couple of months, it's looked like it has stopped, but, again, eased for sure, in recent months, which is, taking away one of the headwinds that the business had through last year. Margin improvements have been encouraging, tooling improvements improving efficiency. Some of those procurement drivers we've talked about helping support margins. We've got Chris in place now, as I said at the start of the year. Chris Brooks joined us in February, very much focusing on the commercial execution in the region and continuing to drive up service for the region.
So, we're definitely heading in the right direction, the right way. New business wins starting to improve quite nicely. So service looks good. Looking at the product offering groups, good, good levels of stock availability in the region, and supporting that, that new business. We've also got Mexico, which went live about this time last year. So that site stabilized very nicely. Again, gives us lots of growth opportunities as the market starts to recover and will give us further margin opportunities. We take advantage of that lower labor cost as we return to growth. Within APAC, again, probably the highest level of overall like-for-like growth across the three regions, so 1.8, somewhat based upon weaker comparisons last year when China was still in lockdown at the start of the year, but good, solid first half for APAC.
As I said at the start, much of this driven by the export opportunities in Asia Pacific. We bought a business at the end of 2021. This is an access hardware business, similar to the Turkish operation that we have. The export of that business across Asia is really the area that's driving most significant growth for us right now. It was always part of the plan. Turkey's been a good driver of growth across Europe. We expect the Hangzhou business to be a good driver of growth across Asia, and that's really starting to bed in now, which is great. And that's been a big driver of the gross margin improvements as we've seen volumes increase through that business as well. We also have a new leader in Asia, which I talked about back in March.
So Richard has taken over the Asia region. He's reviewed how we're going to market in Southeast Asia. We're actually pulling the P&L back together rather than having commercial and ops separately. Pulling a Southeast Asia P&L, brought a new person in to lead that as well. So a lot more sharp execution in the region, which is gonna help us drive through the second half as well. Probably most noticeably, we've also got some insourcing and nearshoring activities going on in the Ningbo facility in China. So we've put a new dip molding line in place, which is enabling us to manufacture locally rather than ship goods in from the U.S. or from the U.K. And we've also insourced some projects that were previously third-party source goods that are now running through our own facilities.
So that's been good progress in the first half as well. So improving the supply, improving the gross margin at the same time. So nice driver of some of the GM benefits you're seeing. So in terms of strategic updates, just to summarize back about the quality of the business, we continue to drive this positioning of being the world's leading responsible hassle-free supplier of essential industrial components. So everything that we manufacture, everything that we supply is a low-cost bill of material items. The market is massively fragmented. There are thousands of competitors. There are probably a million potential customers out there who are having to buy or manufacturing this type of component.
So we're taking a position of aggregating in this very fragmented market. And because the items we sell are critical to our customers, we can stop their production lines, but fundamentally they're very low cost. We have this unique proposition of being service differentiated in a peace of mind type proposition.
So very nicely positioned business drives good margins, generates good cash flows, and then we can invest those cash flows back into M&A to consolidate in the market. So the fundamentals of business remain extremely strong despite this being a very sort of challenging external market that we've been operating through. Ambition remains to double the revenue and to triple the profit as we set out, when we launched the standalone components version of Essentra. However, since we launched, we've gone through somewhat of an economic turmoil with PMIs being at 20-year lows for much of that period, and in Europe still are at that level of low PMI performance. This is a view of our internal volumes on the gray bars. It shows all the same old customers buying the same old products, if you like.
So it takes out any impact of price. It takes out any impact of new customers or customers lost. This is just customers that we've always had, always buying the same products. And this is effectively a rolling 12 view of their volumes. So you can see coming out of the pandemic, the volumes significantly expanded. Supply chains weren't working very well, our own included. I mean, nobody could keep up with demand, and you had this huge peak of volume activity, which sort of peaked around the start of 2022. What you then saw coming through the back end of 2022 and into 2023 was the unwind of that peak, both the unwind of the supply chains improving, but also the end customer demand not being there, given the sort of more challenging PMI markets that you can see.
We actually hit a low point in terms of volumes in September 2023. So encouragingly, since September, as PMIs have started to tick up globally, driven predominantly by the U.S., but since that point, we have seen our own volumes now, now moving back towards that point of parity. So that's, I think that's giving us encouragement that there is some underlying volume momentum in the business that we'd expect to be coming back into positive territory everywhere over the course of the next, next six months. So what we're trying to do, obviously, as a business, is trying to reduce the cyclicality, and we'll talk later about some of the new markets that we're trying to drive more new business wins into to have less cyclical impact.
Although it should be noted, we've not lived through a cycle like this in the last 20 years. It has been exceptionally cyclical. We've not had that level of volume movement up or down, but, but it has been a unique cycle for us to, to try and run through for sure. In terms of some of the product movements and the, the winners and losers from a product point of view, from a general protection point of view, the, the addition of BMP Tappi has grown our general protection range, and that's now becoming a more important part of the pie. Access hardware is the, the business that we have in Turkey and the acquisition I talked about in China, both going, both being the key, drivers of organic growth for us, outperforming other product ranges.
And then the area which has reduced most is the electronics and cable management. From the end customer point of view, we still see the electronics market as being the softest of end markets, and clearly we have a lot of electronics products going into the electronics end market, which is why that's reduced a little bit. But encouraging that acquisitions over the last couple of years have been the key driver of the growth, both in protection and in access hardware product areas.
And what we're trying to do with our product offer effectively is to take these six, seven areas of expertise and sell them into multiple industries. You can see by the depth of color of the areas that we have the greatest exposure. And then these are the new market areas in terms of renewables and energies, medical, and more latterly defense as areas that we think we have good opportunities.
So we're starting to put more of our commercial effort into these, probably more structurally growing markets as we move forward. The big areas of growth in the first half have really been in some of our core protection products enabled by BMP Tappi and access hardware, again both Turkish and the acquisition in China doing that. This renewable and energy sector is all around heating, ventilation, energy, networks. There's a lot of products coming out of our access hardware businesses going into that type of infrastructure investment as well. But you can see there's quite a mix of ability to cross-sell our products into the different end categories and then the opportunity that we have in the new emerging categories as well. So I talked about BMP Tappi having a good first 7-8 months of ownership with us.
So, in line with expectations, which is great, we have now got the first 1,100 products launched across Europe. That happened during quarter two. In the second half, we'll take about half of those into the Americas offer as well. They'll be stocked physically in the US as the 1,000 or so products are stocked in Europe. We are also looking to improve their sustainability tests. They are dragging down our overall percentage of recycled content right now, but we'll look to address that in the coming months.
What's really encouraging is the early quick wins that we're seeing in the business, both in terms of business that we've landed, a few examples here of products that we didn't have in the Essentra range that we've now taken from the Tappi range and sold into either existing Essentra customers, or new customers to the organization. So that's nice to see those cross-sells coming in so quickly. We also have about GBP 500,000 worth of pipeline for BMP Tappi products. And given we actually only launched this a few weeks ago, it's a really encouraging start. It's a similar size pipeline compared to Wixroyd, but it's nine months ahead of Wixroyd from a timing point of view.
So, I think just the closeness of the BMP product offer to other things in, within our wheelhouse just makes this such an easy cross-sell for the commercial teams. Wixroyd a little bit more complicated. It's a different product area. So Wixroyd's still going well, still going on track, but BMP's starting to outperform it, given how close it is to some of the core business areas, which is really nice and really encouraging for the second half as well. From a sustainability point of view, I mentioned at the start the thing that's really taken hold in the first six months is we now have, not millions, but a few 100,000 GBP worth of business wins or business protection driven by sustainable products.
So this is customers who are demanding that they have recycled product offers, in order for us to win business or to retain business that we already had. So it's becoming a meaningful commercial driver for us now. We always knew it would come. It's still the right thing to do even without this, but now the cherry is on the cake in terms of it being starting to be commercially meaningful as well. We continue to trial new materials in our center of excellence. So lots of new material trials going on apace in 2019, during the last six months. One of the more interesting is this one, which is a bio-based material, seaweed-based material. Again, it doesn't have exactly the same characteristics as the resin-based material, the oil-based materials. So we'll probably launch it as a separate range, but it is carbon-free effectively.
So we now have the option of getting to a carbon-free range that we're partnering with this manufacturer of the seaweed-based materials. Then across the rest of our environmental metrics, renewable energy consumption's increased over 60%. Renewable energy is the biggest single lever we have on our Scope 1 and 2 emissions. So very encouraging that that's continuing to make good progress. Our zero waste to landfill and actually a waste management overall also being very positive, being one of the drivers behind the gross margin as well for sure. Scope 1 and 2 emissions are reduced by 50% on intensity basis versus our 2019 baseline. Recycled content slightly down versus this time last year. So BMP is diluting slightly. We do expect that to head towards 25% by year-end. So again, still in a very strong position. So our ESG credential still remains strong.
It's still seen very positively within the organization by our employees, which is important, but also now really starting to be seen as a competitive differentiator by our customers, which is excellent. So onto the outlook, how do we feel about the coming period, the rest of the year and into the future? So I started by saying we feel encouraged, and I think that remains the truth, here on the last slide as well. Momentum is building. So we're seeing the sequential improvement from Q1 to Q2. We're seeing the return to growth in Q2. I think what's encouraging about that sequential improvement, as I showed before, our internal volumes are trending up, which is pretty much the market impact.
Also, our new business wins are trending up, which in part is the market's getting better, but in part is we're getting better as well. So both those things coming together gives us confidence that we should continue that momentum into the second half. We're investing in growth initiatives to make sure we can take market share. So it is important that we put some stock into the first half. It is important that we're investing in insourcing and nearshoring to help drive margins and help improve service, and new machinery to continue to give us good levels of quality as well.
Balanced approach to cost control, driving efficiencies and margin expansion. We clearly have had to have a good view on costs for the last 18 months, and we make no apologies for that. I think you'd all expect us to do that. However, it's worth noting we haven't removed any physical footprint from the organization. So we've managed the flexible elements of cost base.
We have all of the capacity still in the organization to turn it back on when the market returns. So while we've been very carefully managing costs, we've done it with an eye to the future. So we're well positioned when the markets recover, we can turn that capacity back on pretty quickly and enable us to take advantage on the upcycle as well. So expectations for the year are unchanged. We do anticipate further modest recovery. As I say, the underlying volumes are improving, new business is improving. PMIs generally up and down a little bit, but trending upwards over the course of the year. So we're expecting modest recovery to continue through H2. We're well positioned. We've got the cost base under good control. Operating leverage, as those volumes do start to recover, will be very strong.
And we don't need huge amounts of volume recovery for that operational leverage to really drop down to the bottom line quite quickly. And we remain confident the business still is fantastically positioned to take advantage of its, of its characteristics in this very fragmented market and enable us to deliver those midterm targets. So it's been a, a challenging 18 months through this economic cycle. We do appear to be building momentum out of the low points of that cycle, not at the rate we may have wished for a year ago, but momentum is there, and we remain encouraged both for the, the end of this year and then for the delivery of the midterm targets as well. So with that, I think we'll hand over to Q&A. So we'll start in the room. We're going this way first. Adrian. Andrew.
Good morning. Andrew Nussey from Peel Hunt. A couple of questions, if I may. First of all, if we could explore the gross margin outlook in a little bit more detail. In terms of pricing, you obviously indicated you expect more price improvement in, in the second half. Is that driven by the improving service proposition or really increased sophistication around your pricing actions? And then second, from the input cost perspective, your thoughts around raw material costs maybe over the next 12 months, but also how much more do you think you can drive on the procurement side to, to improve gross margin is sort of the first question.
I'll make a start. So from a pricing point of view, our pricing is still not very sophisticated. It's still one of the things that we expect to get better at post the ERP program. So it's one of the benefits tagged to the new ERP program. But we are doing some selective price increases. We have done them effectively through Q2, which is why we're confident they're going to have some benefits. So areas where we think there was opportunity for us to increase prices, we have done. The service definitely helps that. The service is very strong. It means customers don't have an argument to complain about service for sure. But I think it's really just targeted areas where we think we're underpriced versus market opportunity.
So some customer groups, some product areas, and the US probably one of the markets where we've taken more action in Q2 than others. I think in terms of our look forward on raw mats, I was chatting to our resins purchasing lead a couple of weeks ago. There is some upward movement and upward pressure on resins right now, but we've actually done a great job of negotiating away from it. So we've done a couple of vendor switches, which have enabled us to effectively not be penalized by that upward pressure and actually see a, a further reduction.
Now, we, we have done a lot of the low-hanging fruit in procurement. We put the new procurement team in place almost two years ago as we started the, the journey as a, as a new Essentra. So we, we definitely through the majority of that, but they continue to do good work and continue to find good opportunities to, to, to either consolidate demand or offset inflationary pressures. So I, I was, I was actually really encouraged by the conversation I had with, with our resins lead recently, recently, two or three weeks ago now.
And sort of the second question, just in terms of when volume recovery starts, or starts to come through or further momentum in terms of recovery, how quickly can you get that capacity back online and where do you think you are relative to competitors and your ability to rescale?
So predominantly it's going to be adding direct labor. And what we've done in our operational sites is effectively we've retained the more technical skill set and lost the less technical skill set through sites. So we probably have overqualified people doing tasks which they would prefer not to do right now. But it means when the market recovers, we can bring in reasonably unskilled labor, train them pretty effectively within a couple of weeks and have them adding value. So it can come back quite quickly. I, I think the whole world right now has fairly low levels of capacity and the opportunity to improve.
What they don't have is that investment in stock that we've made over the last 12 months, and we're probably getting up to GBP 8-9 million in total between the second half of last year and the first half of this year. We've put ourselves in a very strong place, because actually the stock will catch the demand before it then hits the factories anyway. We'll be able to react, pretty much instantaneously.
Again, if you think about the type of products we're selling, these pretty low cost items in, in customers' minds, the desire for customers to switch suppliers is very low unless they can't get them. If there are service failures, there's a great opportunity for us to win business. And that upcycle, certainly the last upcycle, which was horrific for everybody, but the upcycle is probably the best opportunity to win new business as other people suffer for service. So we think we're going to outperform on that upcycle.
Great. Thank you.
Adrian Kearsey, Panmure Liberum. Actually, Scott, do you mind if sort of follow on from your comments on investments in inventory? You said about adding 8-9 million into the inventory. Has that sort of uplift, have you, is that investment finished or is there more investment to come? And also which product categories are you investing most into?
Do you want to take that one?
Yeah. So in terms of the initial investment, it is about GBP 8-9 million. We'd said somewhere between GBP 5-10 million in terms of stock investment. So that's being paid. As that stock depletes and some of that stock is depleting, we will renew it. So we're going to carry high levels of that GBP 8 million-GBP 10 million additional stock. We're going to carry that for the foreseeable future because we believe, and there's some evidence of this, that it allows us to steal a march. Our products, you know, the customer will typically stock up, and then when they're out, they need it straight away. So that ability to serve us, if you get a call in and you don't have the product, they're going to go elsewhere. So having that available as the market returns is a key to taking some market share. And we've got some small but growing evidence that this is a, is a successful tactic.
It's across all product categories in reality as well. We've got about 30-40,000, depending on which region you're in, of standard parts that we want to have on the shelf. And it's across all product categories. More depth in some than others. I mean, access hardware, for example, as much as it's a growth area, there's probably only 1,000 standard parts, and a lot of that is then configured.
So it's less about the stocked offer. It starts with the stocked offer, but it's more about having flexible lead times from the factories to then meet that configured business, which again, we're down at three-week lead times in most factories now to capture any configured or customized items as well. So service is in a strong position. I'll, you know, if the ops team are listening, I'd always like it a little bit better, but, but we are in a good position right now.
Morning, guys. Henry Carver from Davy. Just a couple for me. First of all, maybe Scott, one close to your heart, Net Promoter Scores. It might be a bit too soon in the half year to sort of update us on it, but any sort of color around that would be, would be great. And then another one, maybe for Jack, just help us with the bridge as you see it to full year revenue expectations, just in terms of the organic, the contribution from BMP Tappi. And, and obviously FX was quite a big swing in the, in the first half and just how you're looking at that. Thanks.
So NPS first, we, we, we measure NPS in two ways. Effectively, there's a big survey that we do in Q4 every year, which is the number that we print into our annual reports and talk about at the full year. We do have a monthly pulse on NPS. Now, every month we get a few hundred responses, so it's not statistically significant, but over the course of the first six months, we've seen that much higher than it was over the first six months of last year and actually at record highs in various periods. So my hypothesis would be we're going to get an uptick in NPS when we get to the Q4 survey because to have six months constantly above last year and actually at record levels is a good place to be.
And that's obviously backed up by the service proposition that we've got in place and also some work we've done around customer service processes as well. So, no, it's in good shape. Again, customer experience team are listening. Could always be better, but, but no, it's in a good place and looks like we'll get a full year uptick as well.
And in terms of the revenue profile, I think the market's anticipating that full year will be somewhere around about GBP 330. That's what the kind of view is. Within that, organically, we are expecting growth in H2. Low single digit growth, but we are expecting growth in line with Q2, Q1. That's helped by the comparisons being somewhat easier on the prior year, but nonetheless, we're expecting real growth too.
In terms of Forex, we're not expecting any further deterioration, but you know, that's the vagaries of the market. We do hold net cash hedges on both euros and dollars. So in terms of the P&L exposure on that, again, in the H1, we had an upside. If there was to be a further strengthening of the pound in H2, we would have a net cash flow hedge for both the euro and the dollar. In terms of Tappi, Tappi is performing in line with plan. You've seen that it's added 3.5%, year to date. We would anticipate something similar in the second half.
That's great. Very clear. Thanks.
Thanks. Morning, James Beard at Deutsche Numis. A couple of questions, please. Can you talk about order trends in a little bit more detail, what you've seen over the course of the last few months and see anything, why that gives you confidence about where we are going into the second half? And just a confirmation question. So the GBP 25 million completion accounts outflow for the filters disposal, will there be any further cash inflow, outflow related to previous disposal?
So that one, so yes, that's confirmed. And that was in the accounts at the full year. That was what we provided for. However, there are two earn-out payments of GBP 10 million each for years one and two. And we would expect payments from certainly the first one during the foreseeable future. So there'll be an inflow rather than outflow.
And order trends, we saw a step up in order trends into Q1. That's held in Q2, which is positive because Q1 always tends to be the bigger order period for us. So we're expecting that to broadly hold slight improvements through the year. Sales trends have improved from the end of last year into Q1 and improved again into Q2. We're expecting sales trends in Q3 to be broadly flat to Q2, which is an underlying progression on a slight seasonality impact that we have in the business.
And then the same type of uptick in sales trends into Q4 as we've witnessed Q1 to Q2. So that's how we're sort of shaping the overall performance of the second half. So we're expecting modest improvements, but pretty much in line with what we've seen Q1 to Q2 to continue through to year end. So, yeah, I think it's a realistic expectation given what we're seeing in the underlying numbers, but, yeah, we are baking in some modest improvements.
Hi, Vanessa Jeffriess from Jefferies. First, you touched on this for Asia, but just wondering if you could go into the near-term areas of focus for the regional managers.
Yeah, so for Europe, unfortunately the focus is on the ERP program. So getting that in and done would be our biggest area. The Turkish access hardware business continues to be a real driver of growth. So that's the upside for the European region. Trying to read Germany right now is his biggest challenge. It does feel like we're through the worst of Germany. It's not got worse since Q1.
It's not got much better in Q2, but it feels as if we're trying to just read how the German economy may react into the second half. So yeah, understanding the shape of Germany and the associated markets, maximizing the benefit of the access hardware business coming out of Turkey and then really making sure the ERP lands and lands successfully. Very pleased with Eastern Europe again, but Germany, Austria, Benelux coming in Q4 is a big area of focus. For the Americas, it's really all about commercial execution. So having somebody back in running that business, you know, Jack and I did it last year. So there's only room for improvement on the back of that. So Chris has really landed very nicely. He's got the commercial teams focused very well on executing. We've got the team stable.
We're training. We're putting them in the right areas. So it is commercial execution, I think, is the key area for Chris. For Richard in Asia, China's two-thirds of the Asia region, so always dominates. But, I think we're actually doing very well and executing very well there. And then the area of improvement for Richard is the Southeast Asia cluster where we think we could do a better job in bringing the P&L back together and utilizing the Thailand facility to drive that region is a key part of Richard's focus.
And then just on your sustainable product ranges, you talked a bit about these 19 trials you're doing for new materials. Can you maybe talk a bit more about the applications for those and how they fit into those growth areas?
Yeah, certainly. Most of what we've done so far has been on polyethylene products or the general protection range. That makes sense because it's the closest we get to single-use plastics. Much of that product range doesn't stay on end product. It can be used to protect in transit. So it's a B2B environment. It's not single-use plastics, but it's the closest we get. So that's been a key area of focus. The next area of focus for us is around polyamide products, so nylon products. That pretty much drives all of the electronics hardware cable management and fastener product ranges. It's a more technical product. There's less recycled material available because polyethylene tends to be used on packaging, so you get a lot of recycled material. But we've now got some sources for that.
So that's probably the key area that excites me in terms of if we can secure sources and prove out the process of this slightly more technical resin, that's a big step. That's another sort of 20%-30% of our opportunity ahead of us in that product area. So that's probably the one key commercial one for me that we've made some real progress in the first six months. The seaweed thing's fantastic and interesting and exciting, but the commercial reality of that at this point in time probably is lower. The nylon polyamide products is going to take us into market leadership again for sure.
Thank you.
All right. We just have one question from the webcast, please. Please, can you clarify your rough market share in each region and what do you mean when you say you are a market leader?
Okay, market share, we have a view on. You'll never prove it right or wrong given the fragmented nature of the market and most of the competition are privately held, but we have a view that we have 3%-4% market share globally that really translates from around 6% in Europe to about 3% in the US to less than 1% in Asia. So that's our perspective. It's down to looking at general industrial production and what we think our available market is within that industrial production segment. And then we try to back that up from our knowledge of competitors into different product areas. So it's going to be 80% correct, I suspect, but we'll never get it more accurate than that given the lack of publicly available information.
So 3%-4% overall, and anywhere from 6% to 1% depending on the regions in reality. In terms of market leading, two things there. We offer better service than anybody else in the markets. We are service differentiating on Net Promoter Score. We obsess about, we want to be the people who give our customers peace of mind because this isn't a world where product differentiation really makes a big difference. You know, these are small components. They're not going to fundamentally change whatever the customer is building. They're necessary. They're needed to make sure that cable doesn't get in the way of moving items. They need to make sure doors open effectively, but that they're not items which differentiate our customers' products. So product differentiation is limited.
We have no ambition to price differentiate, so we definitely focus on service differentiation and we have better levels of service than anybody else in the sector. The other thing that makes us market leading is all of our competition typically focused on one of those product lines or exclusively focused on one of those product lines. We've brought all six of those together under one proposition of Essentra to offer the customers this broad basket of goods in this low-cost, high-nuisance type product category.
And as we go forward from an acquisition point of view, there are other products which have similar characteristics of being bill of material items, but relatively low-cost than bill of materials that we think we could also bring into the proposition to build out an even stronger offer as well. So the market leading is service. We're the best in the business. The breadth of the product offer is totally unique compared to anybody else. One more mic.
Thanks for that. Rata from Santander. Can you tell us about the M&A pipeline and where is the focus? Is it geography or products next for you?
Yeah, so, M&A pipeline is very active at the moment. Although everything that's active is fairly early stage in development. So, there is a chance that we won't complete anything for the second half of the year. It may flow into quarter one. But we are very busy on some early stage conversations. Predominantly M&A pipeline is driven around product. So either product infill, product cross-sell like BMP, or in some places some new product categories.
Chris and I visited a business three weeks ago, which would be a product range extension opportunity for us. For example, again, very early, we'll probably do some commercial work with them first before we think about acquisition. But yeah, product tends to be the driver. There are a couple of examples where we're looking at geography currently, and there's a couple of examples in the midterm where we might look at geography as an opportunity, but 8 out of 10 opportunities would be product orientated.
Scott, just one more from the webcast. Given the increase in interest rates and presumably remaining ample opportunities for M&A, does it still make sense to allocate so much capital to share buyback?
Yeah, that's a very relevant question, and pertinent. I think we are definitely prioritizing the acquisitions where they're accretive, over the share buyback. However, the share buyback in a limited capacity does; it is quite an efficient vehicle for mopping up particularly small retail type investors. So I think we will continue with that. Now, the majority of our shareholders have expressed a desire to continue with it, but to prioritize from a capital allocation the M&A that's accretive.
Thank you. That's all from the webcast. So if there's no more in the room, we'll hand back for closing remarks.
No, thank you. Thank you all. Thank you for the questions. So, I guess to summarize, encouraging first six months. Market remains still very challenging. We are seeing progress. We're seeing progress in the market. The underlying volumes are getting better. We're seeing progress in terms of our own self-help. New business is improving. That momentum from Q1 to Q2, very encouraging. Back into growth on a like-for-like basis in Q2. Margin expansion. So we're doing everything we can do in what remains still a challenging external market, but nice to have some momentum in the business again, and back into positive territory. So looking forward to the second half. Thank you all very much.