Good morning, everybody. Nice to see you. We're pretty full room in the building, great to see everybody this morning. I'm Scott Fawcett, Chief Executive of the new Essentra, if you like. Took over for the business from the 1 January 2022. Plan today, we'll give you a quick overview of what's been going on, some of the highlights of the year.
I'll hand over to Jack to walk through the financial performance. I'll pick up on a strategic update, talk about many of those themes that we raised in the Capital Markets Day back in November. Talk about the outlook, how we're seeing trading and our positioning for this year. Let's make a start. Clearly a big year for Essentra, 2022. We're now a pure-play components business with a very clear strategy for delivering growth. We talk about two or three things that are key critical to the components business. We're a manufacturer and distributor of low-cost bill of material products.
Those low costs, which means typically service is the most important decision-making criteria for our customers. Being hassle-free, being easy to do business with is how we position the business, and we'll talk during the presentation about the things we're doing to continue to improve customer experience and service. Our products are essential. If they don't turn up, we can stop our customer's production line, so it's really critical that we have that high level of service capability. We have a unique model, which we think is great. It differentiates us in the marketplace.
We are uniquely a manufacturer and a distributor of product. We bring together both the expertise and the flexibility of being a manufacturing business, but also that broad range and service capability from being a distribution business. We've built this across a wide range of different product portfolios, different product categories, all in this low-cost bill of material space. We have this very broad range, which is unique in the marketplace.
We talked about our strategy for delivering organic growth, so getting more customers, keeping them by being hassle-free, and probably most important, cross-selling to them, getting them to buy an ever-increasing broad range of the products that we have from across that product categories. We continue to improve the offer through digitalization, so using digital technology to improve our customer service, improve our customer experience, and also think ab out sustainability.
How do we make the offer more sustainable? How do we help our customers achieving their sustainability goals? Fundamentally, given the nature of the business, given the broad range of customers, broad range of products, the low cost, but critical nature of the products, we are in a great position from a margin point of view. We generate good levels of margin, enables us to then invest in the business.
We can have a solid margin position, lots of opportunities to continue to expand margin, and then invest both organically and inorganically in the future of the business. As we set out at the Capital Markets Day, our ambition is to double the size of the business and to triple the operating profit over the next five years. A quick summary of 2022.
As I say, a milestone year for Essentra as we simplify the business, the disposals of the filters and packaging divisions to become a pure-play components organization. This has left us with a strong balance sheet. We've announced the return of GBP 150 million of capital to our shareholders. Jack will give a little bit more details of that later. Even after that return, we're still in a strong position, enabling us to have room for investing in organic and inorganic growth. An example of that is the Wixroyd acquisition. I'll talk a little bit more about this later, but we completed that in December of last year.
In terms of performance last year, a good level of performance, 12% revenue growth, 12% operating profit growth, good levels of margin, pre-central costs are 18.9%, and post-central costs, and again, Jack will explain the central cost allocation, a 12.7% margin position. We continue to work on pricing, clearly more important in this high inflation market than it has been historically. I'm pleased to say both last year and coming into this year, we believe we have pricing actions in place to offset inflation, and we continue to look at the cost base of the organization.
We've talked about the business being resilient through the economic cycle. Clearly, we're in a slightly more difficult economic cycle right now, and we have been managing the cost base very carefully through the back half of last year and into the first half of this year. Underlying, I always say the most important metrics for the future health of the organization are our customer satisfaction and our employee engagement. I'm very pleased to report that both of these made significant progress during the year, NPS plus 11% and employee engagement up 5% through the year.
We've also established a new ESG framework, and I'll talk later again about some of the progress we've made in achieving our goals in an ESG sense as well. With that, let me hand over to Jack to take you through the numbers.
Thank you, Scott. Well, I'm very pleased this morning to demonstrate a very strong set of opening numbers for the new Essentra going forward. The focus of this presentation is going to be about the continuing operations, the group that's going forward. The information around the old group, the packaging, the filters, disposals, that's in the RNS, and of course, it will be in the annual report. A very strong set of opening numbers. Revenue up 12%. Strong growth there, and we'll talk about that in some detail.
The adjusted operating profits, again, up from GBP 56.9 million, up 12%. Operating margin 12.7%, good in, given the circumstances. Operating cash flow 80%, so progressing to the metric that we set at the capital markets, which was 85%. Scott's already said that we're in a very strong cash position.
We've got 2.33x surplus over our EBITDA at the moment. Our return on invested capital is 13%, which plays against our WACC of 11.8%. Moving into some of the detail, you can see that the progression on the revenue comes across both from the acquisitions that we've talked about in the Capital Markets Day. Wixroyd and Hengzhu are chipping into that. We said that's gonna be an important part of our growth. It comes from organic growth. Within that organic growth, it's split 10% pricing positive and 3% volumes negative.
Obviously, we're gonna talk about the destocking. Again, you know, strong growth, we're able to keep our pricing well above the cost growth we've seen and increase the margin thereby. We're driving cross-sell.
This is where we take, you know, products from our existing companies, spread them across the network, either them coming through acquisitions or through our developments, and therefore add to the customer experience in terms of how many products they can take. That's an important part of our growth, and we're continuing with that. The revenue position is strong in 2022. From an income statement, we've got an 18.9% operating margin at the components, sort of the operational level.
That comes down to a 12.8% margin after the central costs, and GBP 43 million is our pro forma adjusted operating profit. The difference between 2021 and 2022 is that in 2021, we had GBP 4 million of central cost VAT and PAYE net credits that were released. That won't recur.
The operating costs were actually, the central costs were very similar to what they were in previous years. Going forward, we will have a central cost this year of GBP 23 million, which is comprised of the core GBP 18 million that we outlined in the Capital Markets Event, i.e. the GBP 13 million central cost plus the GBP 5 million that was already in the components division. This year in the first half, we'll have about GBP 5 million of kind of, you know, as we transfer into the new group and the new structure, that won't recur.
We're very confident that our GBP 13 million central costs going forward will be the number. In terms of the detail around the adjusted operating profits, clearly, we've seen an interest charge increase this year from GBP 14.8 to 17.8 million.
That is driven by the increase in interest rates on our RCF, obviously, but also, it's the first full year of the USPP, and therefore we've got a full year's charge. That explains that. That being said, importantly, with the proceeds, we've now repaid the debt, so our interest charge going forward will be between GBP 5 to 6 million, so considerably lower, which strengthens our cash flows going forward. On the tax side, 2021 was an odd year with a 3.2% ETR, effective tax rate.
Again, that was because of the release of some provisions in the US, and also the anticipated change in the corporate tax rates meant that our deferred tax assets had to be revised. You've got a normalized 21.5% this year, which is what we guided to.
With the change in the tax rates going forward, our ETR will increase to more like 24% to 25%. In terms of the adjusting items, well, you know, Scott's gonna talk at length about the ERP and how we're developing that and how it's been successfully implemented. That has a charge of GBP 12 million. That used to be something that you would capitalize. The accounting rules changed. It's now expense, therefore, we show it as an adjusting item. We did have GBP 10 million relating to the ongoing business that won't recur.
It was about restructuring and preparing the group for the life as an independent company. That was the majority of the adjusting items. You've seen a very strong revenue growth. You've seen good operating profits coming through to the bottom line with a strong margin.
How does that translate in terms of cash flow? Well, you know, you've seen the operating profit, the stated operating profit. You've got your depreciation to add in of some GBP 16 million. There was a right of use assets of GBP 5 million. Our working capital was progressed really well in the second half. We got it down significantly, our OCF in the second half went from 62% in the first half to 92% in the second half. CapEx is running at 4%, which per the Capital Markets day is what we said it would do. That all translates into a year of an 80% operating cash flow.
Clearly, we're guiding to 85%, that progress between first half and second half, we're actually at over 19% currently. That shows that we are hitting the mark on that. Again, what we said in the Capital Markets Day, we're actually achieving. Clearly, there's been a big shift in our funding position this year. We've disposed of filters and packaging. We paid down the RCF. We've now in 2023, paid down the majority of the USPP.
We started the year with debt of GBP 230 million, and we've ended the year with a net surplus of GBP 113 million, which we've used to pay down the debt and we're going to use to fund the return of GBP 150 million that I'm gonna talk about in just a moment. Scott's absolutely right. We are so well-positioned in terms of a strong balance sheet to fund our stated strategy that we outlined in the Capital Markets Day of growth, both organically an d through acquisition.
We're in great shape from that perspective. Talking about the use of the disposal proceeds, I've said that we paid down the RCF in 2022, I see a couple of our bankers here this morning. Thank you for your continued support. It's really welcome. We have taken out a new RCF that we have not drawn down on, but we have the liquidity there. The USPP we've paid down such that it's only GBP 101 million now. It's a good long-term debt. It's at 4% fixed coupon, that's very cheap money in today's parlance.
Again, we have the balance sheet to support the growth that we desire. We've announced the sizable capital return, GBP 150 million. It'll be GBP 90 million special dividend. I'll come onto the dates on that in a second.
A GBP 60 million share buyback program that is being executed now. It started today. That's good news. As I say, we've got the M&A firepower to support us. Scott will talk about the prospects that are in the pipeline, I'll just mention we do have a very active pipeline, we would like to do something this year again, which is in line with our stated strategy at the Capital Markets Event. The specifics on the return of special div will be paid on the 27 April 2022. It is ex-div. Just to point that out, it went ex-div last week. That represents GBP 0.298 per share. In addition to that, we are going to pay our final ordinary dividend.
It'll be GBP 0.01, bringing it to GBP 0.033 for the year. This is going to be a three times cover going forward. It will be progressive as earnings rise. We are very much a growth-type stock, but we will be paying an income, and it will be three times cover. That's the firm commitment to the board, and it's proven out with this announcement today. Our GBP 60 million share buyback, we anticipate that will take nine to 12 months. That's what we've been guided towards, and we're entirely comfortable with that. That's the use of the proceeds, and that's the reward.
Clearly, what's driving our strategy over the next five to six years is our capital allocation policy. We have a very clear set of priorities, and it is in order. Our number one objective is organic growth. We're targeting 5% CAGR over the next five to six years. We're very comfortable that can be done. This year, we've spent 4% roughly of our CapEx on the business on organic growth. We've invested in the USA, in our operational capability, in Turkey, which is a major area of growth for us, in Spain. We've also put a new distribution center into Eastern Europe. I've been out there. It's world-class. It's fantastic.
We also put a solar project into Thailand. On innovation, you know, it's key that we actually drive the future here. We've set up a center of excellence in Kidlington, in Oxfordshire, for sustainable new product developments. That's gonna be key to our growth going forward, and we're investing hard money into that. Digitalization, obviously, that's key to the customer experience. Scott will talk about it.
Again, we've established a center of excellence in Istanbul, which is a real center for that sort of expertise. Acquisitions is our third priority. Scott's gonna talk about it, we've got a strong pipeline of acquisitions. We've already proven since the Capital Markets Day with Wixroyd that we will transact this, and we're capable of transacting it. There's a proof there. The ordinary dividends is clearly in our capital allocation policy.
It will be progressive, and it will be at three times. Very strong set of numbers. I want to take us back to November to our Capital Markets Day. We said that we would drive 10% growth. We have. We said that we'd have our net working capital at circa 18%. It is.
We said that we'd have our operating margin for the business at 18%. It's at 18.9%. Obviously, the central cost we talked about, but Scott will show how that 18% will come even with the central costs over the next four to five years. Net debt to EBITDA, clearly, we're within that guidance. CapEx, I've already said we're at 4%. Adjusted operating cash conversion, well, in the second half we were at 90+. We are very confident on getting to that 85%. The ROIC are marginally below that at the moment, but we're driving towards it. Very confident we're very, very close, and the effective tax rate will be between that 24% to 26%.
What we said in November about delivery, this is the first scorecard, and we're going to give scorecards every presentation going forward to show that our commitment to what we said will be followed through upon. With that, I'll pass it back to Scott.
Thanks, Jack. Okay. As I mentioned, we also talked about in November a number of strategic themes, the ways we're improving and developing the business. Let me give you an update on some of those over the next few slides. I've touched on this already but delighted with the progress on our core leading KPIs. customer satisfaction, employee engagement. Customer satisfaction up 11% points to 34%. We believe anything above 30% typically is market share gain territory in a normal world. again, we're feeling positive about that. Still room to go, still improvements to be made from a service point of view.
At this point of view, our service to the products we're manufacturing is in very good shape. Our service to the products that we're sourcing still has some room for improvement. Supply chains are still not operating as smoothly as they were doing pre-pandemic. Behind that, you can't have good levels of customer satisfaction if you don't have good levels of employee engagement. Delighted with the progress on employee engagement, up to 83%, so well above industry norms.
Again, lots of good work going from around the organization to help communicate and motivate the employee base of the business. Lots of good progress here. Part of the improvement around customer experience also links to digitalization. How do we continually try and improve how customers interact with us? We talk about digitalization of the front end and of the back end. From a front-end point of view, this is about our web technology, which we've now rolled out into 27 countries.
The use of AI to try and help us present products and information to our customers and to our own staff in a better way. We now are very pleased to report we have a new digital center of excellence, digital hub in Turkey. I was out there last month. We did some research around the globe of places where we could get good digital talent. The UK has been a real war for talent, especially around digital, we identified Istanbul as an area of great talent. We have a big manufacturing site just outside Istanbul, we've created this digital office now.
As I delighted when I went to visit them last month. We've got 14 people there now. I've challenged us to get to 50 in a cost-controlled fashion, clearly. Great skills in the organization. Product information skills, user development skills, website product ownership skills. The team are working on ways to help our customers find our products. As we go forward, as the ERP rolled out, how do we interact the ERP to the website and offer more My Account functionality? Really excited about the digital hub.
As I say, the ERP remains our biggest single project across the organization, rolling out Microsoft Dynamics across the business. It will underpin the future of the organization. It will give us one platform to make better decisions, to improve operational efficiencies. Big opportunity to improve how we execute pricing. We do a good job on pricing.
We're covering our cost inflation, but we're not doing pricing in a hyper-targeted way, which the new ERP will enable us to do. We've recommenced the go lives of the ERP. We had a successful go live in France in November. That's certainly the upper end of our expectations. Anybody who's been involved in ERP system go lives will know they're never pain-free. There was as about as little pain as we could ever expect in France, so that was great.
Huge effort from both the team running the ERP system, but also the French team really leaning into this. We've got a proven template that's working now, and we're now in the process of rolling that out around the group. The next sites to go live are going to be Eastern Europe.
Poland and the surrounding markets will be going live at the mid-year. As Jack showed, we spent about GBP 12 million last year on the ERP platform go live. We expect to spend the same this year. Again, that's in line with the numbers we previously guided. From a footprint point of view, we continue to make progress and continue to optimize the way the organization's working. Couple of examples, one from last year and one that we're now currently working on.
Jack mentioned the new hub in Poland. We were lucky to go in September to the opening of that. Really good facility. Enabled us to close one of the smaller warehouses in Eastern Europe, bring it all together, improve service, better use of our working capital.
Gives us some contingency with the German hub, which is our second continental European hub. I think in the pre-pandemic world, we probably would have put all our eggs in one basket. Lesson from the pandemic, let's make sure we've got some supply chain resilience and the Polish hub is giving us that level of resilience as well. Great new facility there. This year, we are in the process of launching a new site in Monterrey. We have a small business in Monterrey today. Again, it's proven to be a good site for us. We did a lot of research around where would we put a new larger facility into the Americas.
Really the talent was one of our key decision-making criteria. Where can we get good talent to help us run a larger scale manufacturing site in the Americas? Monterrey was the winning location. Luckily, I had the opportunity to go in February to visit the facility. It's 10,000 sq meters, very large facility.
Will be one of our larger facilities when it's fully operational, but we will have the go live of that at some point around the mid-year, giving us the opportunity to help grow the Americas region, capture both our own nearshoring and our customers nearshoring of production into the Americas, which we know is a global trend. Very exciting that that's coming along. Despite these big footprint projects, we're still within this 4% to 5% of CapEx guidance.
These are not going to see us breaking that CapEx ceiling that we've set out. One of the questions we've been asked a lot since the Capital Markets Day is how do we see the margin enhancement, the margin growth of the organization? Jack talked about the central cost impact and the fact that we're then growing our way forward. This is our bridge of how we're bridging from the current level of margin to the 18% post-central cost margin that we've declared as our, as our midterm five-year target.
Effectively, 150 basis points coming out of benefits from the new ERP system. Half of this from price optimization, half of this on pure efficiency plays, so being able to run the business better, being able to run the business more smartly.
There's a smaller element coming from optimizing the footprint. The fact that we have closed the Bratislava warehouse as a result of opening up the Polish warehouse. The fact that we can use the Monterrey with a slightly lower labor cost to drive the business forward, will help us do such margin expansion. Procurement is one of the areas which we're working actively on now. Rob's at the back of the room, Rob's brought in a new procurement team as we brought what was a group procurement function and a divisional procurement function together.
We've got some new talent running our procurement operation. Again, we're seeing some good opportunities to drive procurement opportunities and gains through the P&L in there as well. Broadly, half of the margin optimization comes from sheer operating leverage. Just the fact that we're getting bigger, a number of the costs, the central costs that we talked about, much of our SG&A is fairly fixed. As we grow the top line, that will flow through from a margin expansion point of view. Again, very confident in our ability to get to this 18% margin in the midterm in that five-year time horizon.
Moving on to talk about acquisition. We announced the acquisition of Wixroyd early in December. A very good business here in the UK. Initial consideration, just under GBP 30 million. Has a new range of products for us to effectively cross-sell to our existing customers. As with most of our acquisitions, we like to find business that have got interesting products. They fit our criteria of being typically low-cost components used by manufacturing business on their bill of materials. Wixroyd has this additional range of hardware products that are new to us.
Cross-sell is the key strategic aim for most of our acquisitions, and Wixroyd is clearly the case. I'm delighted to say we now have the first cross-sell activities happening in Europe of Wixroyd products. We've done the product training, we've set up the supply chain to enable that to happen, and the first transaction took place last week. Before everybody adjusts their model, it was GBP 100.
Room for it to grow, but a great start and pleased that we got it over the line in the first quarter. Nice start. I think probably the best thing about Wixroyd and Marcus may well be listening, there is a really strong cultural fit between the way the former owners ran the business and the way that we're trying to run the business. They invested well in the business to ensure that they could deliver good customer service. They've got a good warehousing capability. They've got good manufacturing capabilities.
It is a business that was set up for success, and our job is really helping them grow. Really nice fit and very pleased with how that's going. Integration very much on track, and we are very much seeing what we expected to see from Wixroyd, which is really reassuring. On to the broader pipeline. We used this slide back in November. We have a very large pipeline of potential targets that we continue to review. We've built a number of relationships over the last decade with many of these targets. Probably 50-plus relationships in place now.
We have a set of priority targets who we think are a particularly great fit, that we'd probably spend more time and more actively engage with from a relationship point of view. Typically, at any one point, there are a handful of conversations underway. I said this in November, and it's absolutely true right now.
We have a handful of discussions, which are active at this point in time. I said in November, they can be between 50% bilateral and 50% process conversations. At the moment, they're all bilateral, which is probably helpful. We typically have a greater percentage probability of being able to make a transaction with a bilateral conversation. Again, we're probably more able to control pricing expectations in a bilateral conversation.
Pleased that we have active pipeline and pleased that it's biased towards bilateral discussions. Again, typically looking for businesses that will give us that product extension, the ability to cross-sell to existing customers.
Whilst we are fairly geographically neutral, at this point in time, given the newness of the business and the wanting for certainty, we're probably biasing our efforts towards Europe and North America rather than some of the higher risk territories in Asia. likely to do things which are closer to home in the next year or so. Increasingly looking at ESG considerations. How would we ensure that this business fits in with our ESG goals? How would we ensure that we can see that route to decarbonizing the business over time?
Obviously, having financial metrics in there, and the considerations continue to be that 8x to 10x window, with us reducing that to 6x to 8x post synergies. Probably given the nature of the market and given our general sense of the market and obviously what's happening in the wider world, we're probably more 8x to 9x , maybe 7x to 9x in our conversations today versus where we were six months ago, recognizing, the market is slightly tougher, the macroeconomic environment is tougher.
Some of these conversations are there because private owners are recognizing it's a more difficult place and maybe wanting to look at exiting at this point in time. We've probably taken one turn off valuations in the last six months as a result of that. Finally, we talked about ESG from an M&A point of view. Just let me give you a quick update on how we're doing with our ESG agenda across the entire organization.
This is the new framework that we showed back in November. From a planet point of view, we've reset all of our targets effectively for the new components business. We've actually made very good progress in terms of the percentage reductions versus the original target set for 2025, we're therefore going to set new targets this year using the SBTi framework to set those near and midterm targets for carbon reduction. From a cultural point of view, we put a new safety program in place. Again, something that Rob has been leading.
New safety commitment, lots of new training around the supervisor community in particular, helping drive safety culture and safety improvement. Diversity continues to be a key theme for us. We're going to use gender diversity as our measure for diversity. It's the easiest thing for to measure.
We can think we can get best data around. We set a target for our leadership team gender diversity. We've taken the opportunity to reset the group purpose and the group values as we brought the old components and group models together to give ourselves a new components-focused cultural framework. From a community point of view, we have done good work to support our colleagues and family and friends affected by the devastating impacts in Ukraine, Turkey and Syria.
We've done lots of work in the warehouses to support the aid requirements, and we've made a small donation as a business as well. We are giving everybody in the organization one day of community work per year.
I'll make sure we publish some pictures. Jack and I are doing some gardening next month in social housing in Oxfordshire. Again, I'll get Jack in a compromising position that I can share at some point in the future. From a components point of view, really great progress in terms of us achieving this percentage of recycled content in our components. Two or three years ago now, we joined the Circular Plastics Alliance. Their ambition was to get to 20% recycled content by 2025. We will be there this year. Again, we're gonna reset our ambition for the midterm to go even further than that.
Jack's mentioned the center of excellence we created in Kidlington to help us do more material tests, both recycled content but also bio content as it becomes available as well. Finally, bringing the whole ESG agenda together, we spent a lot of time as a team, and Emma's here, and Emma leads our ESG efforts, trying to understand our Scope 3 emissions. How do we measure the Scope 3 impact we have as an organization?
Our direct emissions are simpler. Scope 3 is a very difficult place to get to. The information that we can get from our vendors is very opaque. We believe there's a huge opportunity for us as a business to help our customers with their Scope 3 reporting.
We're going to be setting up a framework to effectively have a carbon impact per product and therefore by per customer that we can report to customers so they can accurately measure the Scope 3 impact that's coming from Essentra. Again, our roadmap to take that to zero, aligned with the objectives and the targets that we're setting. I think there's huge commercial opportunity in here. You know, we have an aggregation model.
Customers are looking for simplification. Emissions reporting, Scope 3 data is another area that aggregation and simplification can help, and I think our business model here will be a really winning, compelling proposition for our customers as we move forwards.
That's the progress we've made and the steps we've taken to improve the business throughout the year and a little bit in terms of where we are and where we're going. Let me now talk about the outlook. How are we seeing the market right now, and what do we think for the rest of the year? We talked about the business being resilient and a very diversified business, and our ability to manage and control margins through the economic cycle.
There are probably three macroeconomic events happening right now, which we're managing through, two of which are temporary in nature, one of which is probably going to be more ongoing. The first of those temporary issues is our China business. Asia here has a 14% of our group revenue.
It was actually the same in 2021, but we would expect Asia to be growing year-over-year, given it's the fastest growing region historically. The reason it isn't has been the impact of the China lockdowns on our business, and we talked about this through last year, and that has continued into first quarter. We are seeing post-Chinese New Year now a gradual recovery. We're seeing a week-over-week improvement on sales and order trends, which is encouraging, but we think it's probably going to be half year before we're back to a level of normality.
Again, relatively short term, but impacting through last year, impacting through first quarter, and now gradually starting to improve. The other short-term macroeconomic factor we've seen is a distribution destocking, again, we talked about this in our trading update, and particularly focused on the US back in January. I think when we showed this slide for 2021, distribution was 23% of our sales, that's fallen to 21% at this point in time, as we've seen distributor demand significantly reduce through the latter half of last year and again into quarter one this year.
The reasons behind this are somewhat obvious, also unique in terms of the situation we find ourselves in. We all came out of the pandemic with supply chain challenges, supply and stock shortages, and everybody was trying to grab stock for much of 2021 and the first half of 2022.
We effectively got to a peak stock position in the middle of 2022, the market started to soften, and our distribution partners have been reducing their stock position since around half year last year. That's continued through to today. We believe and our best estimate is that that destocking will stop in second quarter, that distribution business will return to a more normalized level. There are a couple of indicators that help us get to that conclusion.
Stocking positions now are lower than they were last January, so any stock they built through the first half of last year has clearly been taken out, and they're now back into a position somewhere around fourth quarter 2021. The best and most accurate data I have is our own data as a distributor.
We talk about as a distributor and manufacturer, our distribution business runs a stock model based upon the demand we're seeing effectively. From the half year last year, our stock model was telling us to reduce stock holding. You know, lead times were reducing. You can reduce your minimum balance, reduce your safety stock, and we've taken our stocks down through the back half of last year and into quarter one. Over the last month, our stock model is saying add more stock. The demand signals are there that we need to then start to rebuild those stock volumes.
Our data is showing that we've reached that point of inflection, and we believe our third-party distributors will be somewhere close to us as well. Again, we expect this distributor destocking phenomenon to come to an end in second quarter. The final macroeconomic movement we're seeing, which is probably more ongoing, but less dramatic from an impact on us as a business, is a switch in business away from consumer markets.
When we presented this slide, which actually was a half-year view, and since in November, there was 3% more sales going into this automotive and consumer electronics business than there are today, and the business is getting picked up by renewable energy, telecoms, and I think a little bit into the ConAg market. The consumer markets, which again, very well reported, post-pandemic boom in consumer spending, which has come to a halt with the cost of living crisis, again, that's impacting our supply into those markets which are more consumer-oriented.
Less of an impact because we have other markets which are growing to offset that, compared to the impact we're seeing in China and the distribution business. Hopefully that gives you a feel for the macroeconomic movements we're seeing, partly geography, which we expect to normalize or is normalizing already, partly channel, which we expect to normalize in second quarter , and partly end market, which we expect to be a continuing trend, but there's a equal and opposite offset in growth markets from an end market point of view.
What does this all mean? From an outlook point of view, I'd say distributor destocking under way. Europe continues to perform robustly. China showing early signs of recovery. We expect to be totally recovered by half year. If you look at industrial production forecasts, again, they're expecting growth back into second half.
I think most interestingly, our new order intake is currently 8% higher than it was for the total of last year. Again, we've seen a significant pickup in order intake versus the slowdown that we're witnessing through the latter part of last year. As ever, though, in an economic cycle, we talk about the resilience of the business. We have strong margins and we've demonstrated our ability to manage our margin position through cycles, and we're doing that right now.
We continue to take pricing action to make sure we're offsetting inflation, and we are managing the cost base of the organization very carefully, managing discretionary spend very carefully, and unfortunately, we have had to take some heads out of the organization as a result of that volume slowdown.
Again, showing a careful and considerate management of the P&L through the cycle. With all this together, our expectations for 2023 are unchanged. We believe we're going to have a good year. It will be a year which sees progressive growth through the year as we've talked about as these short-term factors normalize, our expectations for the full year are unchanged. Very much in line with our midterm targets, we continue to have that strong balance sheet supporting the opportunity to invest in the business, both organically and inorganically.
To summarize, 2022 is a real milestone year for the business. The completion of the strategic review, the simplification to be a pure play components business. Components business had a good strong year, 12% growth, 12% operating margin growth, good trading, levels of margin as well. We've continued to invest in the business, made good progress against those targets, investing in digitalization, investing in sustainability, improving customer service, seeing those important metrics of net promoter score and employee engagement come through.
Very much confident around the delivery of this year, our expectations remain unchanged. We do expect progressive growth through the year, we'll continue to manage the cost base accordingly, through this more difficult first quarter. Overall, our ambition hasn't changed. We're still very much here and very much on track for doubling the revenue and tripling the operating profit of the business over the next five years. With that, I will close and open to any Q&A. I will invite Jack to come back and take all Andy's difficult questions.
Thank you.
Thanks, sure. Yes, Henry Carver from Peel Hunt. Just a couple from me, slightly broader ones. With the ERP sort of system and integration stuff, how does that impact acquisitions and integration of them? Is there anything to consider or is it, can you sort of run deals alongside ERP?
Yeah. There's a great opportunity in the future to be able to fully integrate acquisitions more quickly. In reality, for the last four years, we haven't integrated acquisitions into the old ERP because the old ERP was so clunky, it made new businesses life more difficult than they already had. We effectively treated them as a third-party vendor in many ways. We actually get great value in the future from being able to put them onto the new ERP. We haven't been putting them onto our old ERP for the last few years because it just hasn't been worthwhile. Opportunity rather than any complication in reality.
Great. Thanks. Just on the CapEx guidance, obviously, you're putting through Poland and Mexico at the moment. Will that 3% to 4% potentially of sales reduce in time, or is that, do you think, likely to stay?
No, I think sustainably, we're targeting 4%. As we said in the Capital Markets, that's about right to maintain our efficiency and also to drive the improvements we need. That is the guidance, 4% medium term.
Yeah. We get to 5% when we do these big footprint projects. We'll be at 4% normally. Lots of investment in sustainability, for example, retooling new machines. That 4% level is a good level to help us continue to grow the business. 5% will be the top when we're doing bigger footprint work like Monterrey.
Yeah.
That's great. Understood. Thanks.
Thank you.
Yeah, sure.
Good morning, gents. Andrew Douglas from Jefferies, the obligatory three questions. Can you talk about the order intake numbers that we've got year to date as 8%, which is good for the future? Can you just break that down between volume and price for us just so that we are aware for our models?
Yeah. Majority of it is going to be pricing, probably 7% circa that type of level of pricing, and then a small amount of volume.
Great. If you think about the next five years in line with your targets, the manufacturing and distribution footprint, is that where we need it to be now for the long term? Or do we need something else in China or India, Far East or anything else in the US/Mexico? Or are we planning now for the next five years?
We've got continued work to optimize. There are a couple of projects which I talked to, like I mentioned in the Capital Markets Event, one of our US hubs is getting close to being full, Louisville, so we will move Louisville at some point in the next two to three years. Again, well within that 4% to 5% of CapEx. The other challenge we've got, which I think again we referred to in the Capital Markets Event, is we run a 3PL hub in Singapore.
We probably don't want to do that for five years, we're likely to move that probably to Thailand. We'll look to talk about this right now. Again, we're likely to move the Singapore hub, the Southeast Asian hub in the next two years. All very much within that 5% of CapEx. Yeah, a couple of shuffles, but not any great uplifting.
The last thing is on M&A. Clearly you got a few things going on. Can we just talk about size of potential acquisitions kind of in the pipe? I'm assuming that a couple of the ones that we talked about at Capital Markets Event drop out, a few drop in. What are you seeing in terms of the ones that you're not going for? Is that from a DD perspective or from a price perspective? What's causing you to withdraw?
Yeah. Diligence normally, either we don't believe it has the right product set for us to cross-sell. That probably the most usual reason is we just don't think we can turn it into a standard parts business that we can cross-sell to our customer set. We walked away from one in the middle of last year on an ESG basis. It was a product that was going to be very challenging from an ESG perspective, so we decided that wasn't going to help at all. I'd say that our confidence in being able to drive cross-sell is the reason we tend to walk away.
Again, given the nature of the market and the fact that private equity is quieter than usual, we're not losing on price or timing, which we may have done once or twice in the last two or three years. Yeah, it's our own decision to say, "This isn't the right fit for us." Size-wise, very much in that bolt-on category, you know, broadly GBP 10 to 20 million, GBP 10 to 25 million of revenue. That type of size.
You know, we've stated this ambition of wanting to get to circa 5% per year. That's what GBP 15 million, GBP 16 million, GBP 17 million of revenue, that type of level. We, you know, one or two transactions a year of that nature would be our plan for the next couple of years.
Morning. Adrian Kearsey, Panmure Gordon. Just one from me, if that's okay. Cross-selling varies in scale across the different geographies and product lines. Could you perhaps remind us... I know I asked a similar question at the Capital Markets Event, but could you sort of remind us of, you know, what are the high points and where is, where's the work in progress? Perhaps what are you doing to help those areas that are slightly lagging?
We're measuring this category per customer, so across those highlight, highlighted hero categories that we've got, how many categories does an average customer buy? It's less than 2% in total. Our best markets are at about 2.3%, 2.4%. They are European businesses, typically, Finland, Poland, those type of places do an incredibly good job. Our lower end of the scale actually is the US, in part because we have this big distribution dependency in the US and therefore less control of our own cross-sell activities.
Again, we're looking to do more with that. We're doing a lot of training of the US, a lot of upskilling of the US team to help us really drive and focus on that cross-sell. Lots of pieces in play with cross-sell. Adding to the product range, obviously Wixroyd being an example of that. Product training, a clear example of that, and again, we've done that well with Wixroyd. Some of the tools we're using, we are using AI tools to prompt cross-selling, both on the website and in our in our CRM solution, using a bit of technology.
A lot of communication. We have a big communication session every month. Hugues, who you may remember from Capital Markets Event, he or his team will present a great cost cross-sell story each month just to stimulate debate and celebrate the successes we're seeing and hopefully hold a mirror up to some of the people who need to do a better job. We are eeing progress though. Pleased to report after the first two months we're on track to deliver that 5% growth in cross-sell metric for this year. That's an encouraging start.
Morning. James Beard from Numis. Two questions, please. Firstly, on M&A, you obviously talked about the ESG overlay that you're now sort of assessing M&A opportunities on. Does that sort of imply that there's gonna be slightly more targeting in terms of the countries in which you're acquiring? Presumably in some countries it's going to be much easier to source a certain amount of recycled input product than in others.
Yeah, not necessarily. I think it's a good lens for us to look at. The recycled content market is evolving, and the reason the Circular Plastics Alliance was there was to help that market evolve. Bizarrely, we are buying recycled content in Europe now and shipping it ourselves to the US because we can't get as good a quality in the US. We're almost managing that evolution of the market ourselves. I think it will be rare that geography totally rules out an ESG angle. Green energy is a challenge.
You know, the Hengzhu acquisition that we made a couple of years ago, that is a difficult place to get green energy, it's a difficult place to get good waste management from. If our ESG thinking had been more progressed, I don't think I would've stopped the deal because of that, because strategically it is such a strong product area. We would have gone in with a greater view and understanding of that and maybe put some more CapEx costs around how we'd manage that process.
I don't think it's a, it's gonna be a black and white thing, but it's certainly adding to our thought process to make sure whatever we buy, we can see that route to decarbonizing over time. In some infrastructures, that's easier than others, for sure.
Thanks. Second question, I noticed that you've, I think, slightly increased the expected level of ERP spend in 2024, versus your sort of prior expectations. What's the sort of thinking, the reason, for that?
I guess we've got an ever-increasing understanding of it, a much better confidence and a clearer plan now, I think we probably have the best plan we've ever had. Jack, I remember probably three or four months ago, asked to see the level three plan. They showed it to him, which he was happy to see, but we have more detail than we've had historically. Now we've got into level of detail, we've got a much greater degree of comfort that actually says we're gonna run slightly later into next year, which then drives the cost up by probably a GBP 2 million versus where we were.
The one thing I would add and something new versus the team presentation that we showed at the Capital Markets Event, I have recently put in place a chief strategy officer role. It is somebody who's been working in the old division for a number of years, and that chief strategy is about strategy execution, and her biggest task is looking after the ERP system implementation. It's something that I had previously and just don't have time to give as much concentration to, so Gabrielle is now picking that up.
We have an ExCo member now dedicated to focusing and delivering on the ERP system. Good progress, but in reality, once we've done all that work, got to that level of planning, it's now saying we're gonna be later into next year, hence that new guidance.
Thanks.
Hi there, James Bayliss from Berenberg. Two questions if I may. The first one on the ERP implementation, I think you guided the fact that you're rolling it out first in Eastern European markets. Just what's the rationale and thinking behind that as opposed to picking one of the say, more dominant territories in the group?
Then the second one on M&A, what's the appetite in terms of the pace at which you can move from a bandwidth perspective, i.e, you've got to bed down the Wixroyd and continue the integration of that. Does that mean you're fully focused on that or is there opportunity to kind of run multiple acquisitions at once?
On the ERP side, we had two choices to roll out. We are running in the US in parallel. The US will be going live, but probably slightly behind the Eastern European cluster. Our choice is either Germany, Netherlands and Austria or Poland, Czech, Slovak, Hungary, Romania together. The amount of effort was similar. We thought it was going to be a better idea to get all five of those markets together, in part driven by the Eastern European leadership team who were very, very keen to go next. This often surprises people. You know, putting in an ERP system is something which most people fear.
We are fortunate that our old technology is so old that everybody's desperate to utilize the new technology. Tom, who is a widely seasoned veteran of the organization, was really pushing hard to be next on the ERP rollout, which is a great testament to him and his desire to want to improve the business. We did that. From an M&A point of view, we obviously have the integration ongoing with Wixroyd, making good progress, product training in place, supply chain set up, as I say.
We probably would struggle to do more than one more in the next six months, but two more in the next 12 would be capable, certainly from a European point of view. Each geography is reasonably independent from an infrastructure point of view. We could run something in the US and Europe alongside each other. Having a small gap is a better way to do it. If we do see two really interesting opportunities that come together like London Buses, we always have the opportunity just to acquire and let it run for a period of time and pause the integration.
We actually did this back in 2011 when we bought Richco and Reid at the same time. We paused the Reid integration for six to nine months to work on the Richco integration. If there are two compelling opportunities, we can buy them and just let them run standalone for a period of time and delay integration, delay some of the benefit, but at least we've secured the transaction and have the platform for the future. It's always an option.
Thanks.
Morning. Sanjay Vidyarthi at Liberum. You mentioned in terms of the availability and on time in full delivery that where you're manufacturing product yourself, that the availability is better than when you're sourcing it. Can you explain partly why that is? Is it simply 'cause of your scale relative to who you're sourcing from? What kind of recovery trajectory you would expect on that?
It's partly scale, partly our ability to invest in the business and bring labor in where we've had to bring labor in to catch up. Probably the bigger issue is supply chains. Our sourcing tends to be China-orientated or Eastern-orientated, the supply chains out of China are still inconsistent. Shipping lanes are not running as smoothly as they once would, once did. US ports continue to be a challenge. Those inconsistency of delivery through US ports. US trucker availability then becomes a problem once it's through port.
It's really the movement of goods that's the biggest challenge, somewhat in the manufacturing goods, but the movement of goods is probably the thing that's damaging that supply chain for the bought-in products.
Sorry, in terms of the trajectory for improvement?
We effectively continue to try and improve it. The longer term solution, and again, Rob's working on two things right now. There's a make versus buy model. Generally, we'd like to make more and buy less. So what does that look like? Where are the big opportunities in there? We're starting to work those through.
Then there's a make where model which says that even for our own supply chains, are we making some products in the wrong location, or actually should we make some products in two locations rather than one because it would improve service, it would also reduce the carbon impact of shipping goods around the world. We're making progress on those. They are really the fundamental ways through this. None of them quick, though.
You know, we will do a Pareto, we'll get through the top end of that this year, but that's probably a 10-year program to get ourselves into a position of really where we'd like to be. Each year, we'll make progress through that make where and make versus buy dynamic. In the meantime, we're just putting stock into the system to try and buffer off supply chain inconsistencies, but it's still somewhat of a challenge.
Actually, if I could add another question please. In terms of number of customers, how has that progressed through the year? Is there still more to be done in terms of getting the right mix of customers, as opposed to kinda just growing for the sake of g rowing the number?
Yeah, there is and targeting those winning categories that have got great growth potential. We talked about a category management team who are focusing on things like electrification, renewable energies. We're still seeking to grow customers in that area. You know, all customers are good customers in some ways, but we are continuing to migrate away from the very small customers in a large way. The ones that don't have potential to spend, you know, only GBP 2,000 or GBP 3,000 , not GBP 10 million , but certainly that more private individual, we continue to try and discourage in some way.
We continue to work on that customer mix. Customer acquisition's always going to be important to us. Customer retention generally improving as service improves, that's helpful. We've put in place some win back programs where we've had service challenges over the last two years. We're now seeing some returning customers as a result of having stock back in place. Those things have been shared around the world. Thanks.