Good morning, and welcome to the Trifast plc full year 2024 results presentation. Throughout this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and can be submitted anytime by the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just click Q&A, type in your question, and press Send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Iain Percival, CEO. Good morning, sir.
Good morning, and thanks very much for that introduction. Good morning, everybody. I hope you're all keeping safe and well, and thanks very much for taking your time to dial into this meeting. Let me first start with some introductions. My name is Iain Percival. I'm the Chief Executive Officer for Trifast plc, and I'm joined today by Kate. Kate?
Hi, I'm Kate. I'm the Chief Financial Officer. I've been with Trifast since September and in this role since February. My background is KPMG Audit, and I've worked in many industries, but I'm really very much enjoying the challenge of working with Trifast.
Great. Thanks very much, Kate. Welcome. We're gonna spend the next hour briefly start by touching on our FY 2024 highlights, and then I want to spend some time with you all, taking you through our new business strategy. Then I'll hand over to Kate, and she'll walk us through the financial part of the strategy, and also then a bit more detail into the FY 2024 financials. Let's start with the summary of FY 2024 and the key points. First of all, as we highlighted back in January, we expected our revenue to be slightly lower than FY 2023, and that's how it turned out.
Principally driven from two main drivers: a lower Asia economy, driven fundamentally by lower China GDP growth, impacting the wider Asia economy, and impacting our business. And secondly, the global distribution channel also seeing a slowdown in demand, partly due to weaker economic environment and partly driven by continued customer destocking. Despite that, we're very pleased to see the growth in our light vehicle sector coming through. 22% growth, again, partly driven from new business wins that we declared during FY 2023, coming through into revenue in FY 2024, and partly driven from the recovery in the automotive sector as the supply chains recover from some of the challenges like microchip availability.
Despite the slightly lower revenues, our underlying profit was in line with our guidance, and importantly, we made a slight improvement in the guidance for profit before tax of GBP 6.5 million. So we're pleased to see a slight improvement in that, and really proud, I have to say, we're really proud of all of our teams for their efforts in helping us strengthen and reposition our balance sheet by their focus on reduced inventories, more than GBP 15 million improvement in cash coming from reduced inventory work, and that really helped strengthen our net debt to EBITDA position to 1.3 times and reduced our net debt significantly. We completed several projects that we highlighted we would deliver.
Importantly, we completed the Project Atlas, so that was the implementation of Microsoft D365 ERP platform to replace outdated legacy ERP platforms. Our final location, Houston, went live at the end of March, as we committed, and so that project is now completed. We also completed the consolidation of our UK footprint, as we said we would, slightly behind our original schedule. The last location completed in June, but nevertheless, we're very pleased to have completed that complex operational footprint project and now have an excellent platform for growth here in the UK with that new national distribution center. We said in January that we were resetting the organization design and model, and that as part of that, we would be making some restructuring of our non-operational or administrative headcount of 10%.
We've completed that, and again, with the benefits of that, and the operational savings from the NDC, we expect to come through in FY 2025 at GBP 3 million. I was very pleased to be invited to join the opening ceremony of our Chinese joint venture, T&E , in Guangdong Province, earlier this year, and that operation is now fully in place and producing products for our Chinese customers, in that facility. And importantly, we'll be spending some time, in a minute, talking you through our refreshed business strategy, through which we will deliver the double-digit margins that Trifast has achieved in the past over the medium term.... go on.
So as part of the strategic review, we took a hard look at the purpose of our business, and this statement, I think, reflects really a good direction of where we see both the value proposition and our position for our customers. You know, Trifast has been in business for 51 years. We're very proud to be a very customer-focused, customer-centric business, and recognize that as part of our place in the supply chain. You know, we're a B2B business, and therefore, the purpose statement, the first half says, "Our purpose is to sustainably drive our customers' success." That's all about the focus on being a customer-focused business.
And how we do that, you'll see in a minute as we reflect on the value proposition, three key statements: simplifying their fastener supply chain, removing complexity out of their, their supply chain and their administrative load for managing often several tens or hundreds of components, and supporting them in their technical requirements, adding value to our customers through our world-class engineering and manufacturing capabilities. So we believe that purpose statement really crystallizes what we do and how we do it, and why that should drive success both for ourselves and for our customers. In terms of the strategy, it's important to reflect. I said when we met in November, that I was going to take time with my team and the board to redesign and develop the business strategy, and you can see the timeline laid out there.
Importantly, this is not only a piece of work that we've carried out using internal knowledge, experience, and resource, but also, you can see in the middle of the top section, we used some external insight, analysis, and in fact, independent voice of the customer survey, to make sure that we were gathering really good challenge and data to build a robust business strategy for the future. And so we're delighted to be able to be in a position today to share that with our investor community. As backdrop, you'll recall that I highlighted, again, back in November, that I was very encouraged with some of the strengths that I'd seen with Trifast. You know, we're very proud of our 51-year heritage.
We have in our business just over 1,200 employees, very loyal, very experienced, and very knowledgeable, and skilled. Many of our employees have been with the business for more than 20 years, and we're very proud of that internal capability, and something that we can draw on. I mentioned that we are a very passionate, customer-focused business. That's part of the DNA, cultural DNA, and again, you'll see that in a few slides' time when we talk about voice of the customer, something we should retain and build from as a strong platform. We have an excellent reputation for quality and service, and again, that's something that we hold ourselves accountable for each and every day, and that our customers recognize.
We are positioned globally to support our customers with our geographic spread, both from an engineering and manufacturing and distribution capability. In terms of some of the areas that we identified that Trifast needed to develop, the operational efficiencies have some gap to industry best performance and best practice, and something certainly as part of the strategic review that you'll see later, we're addressing. Margin management and the commercial contracting hasn't always been aligned to supporting the growth of our business with the larger contract customers, and I think it's fair to say that we've seen through the history of Trifast, over the previous five years, actually, margin erosion as a result of that.
So very much a key focus for us in this strategy is rebuilding the margin through a much more robust set of margin management actions. Organization has been heavy and complex, and obviously, part of what I announced in January was part of the simplification and taking cost out of that heavy non-operational headcount. And finally, manufacturing footprint, not always aligned to the global sales ambition, and what we mean by that is we have manufacturing and distribution capability in most of our regions, in Asia, in Europe, and in the UK, but we don't have the manufacturing capability in our North American region. And so certainly something as we move forward in execution of this strategy, given the macroeconomic and macro drive of localization of supply chains, something that we will need to address through this strategic plan period.
In terms of voice of the customer, I mentioned that we'd, we'd done some independent external voice for the customer work, and you can see that from the interviews that were conducted, basically five key requirements highlighted by our customers. Cooperation in design, our customers need and want their suppliers to add value to their design capability. You know, our customers are not fastener experts, nor should they be. They need their fastener suppliers to be able to bring that technology, application, and innovation engineering to their business. They need high quality and reliable products. They want, of course, a good price.
They need proactive customer service, not only to—this doesn't only talk to delivery on time in full, it also talks to responsiveness, being responsive to needs, requirements, challenges, problems, but also being proactive in helping customers through things like line walks, value engineering activities, those kinds of service proposition. And then finally, supply chain simplification toolkit, and especially increasingly, the technology solutions that remove time and administrative cost from the supply chain. So those are the five criteria that our customers highlighted were critical. And you can see where Trifast's position is at the bottom of the screen. You can see we position really well when it comes to cooperation in design, high quality products, and proactive customer service. We're in the right place, in my mind, when it comes to pricing.
I don't wanna be, and we shouldn't be, the lowest price. We want to be value priced, not cost priced. And from a technology perspective, I think it's fair to say that compared to the very best in our industry, who offer high technology smart bin-type solutions, there's a gap between the capability that Trifast has today. Having said that, what we have in place to deliver supply chain solutions to our customers is more than adequate for the vast majority of our customers' needs today and in the near future. So this is much more a mid to long term strategic gap.
So reflecting the voice of the customer into our value proposition, we've highlighted three key drivers of our value proposition: engineering, having that capability to add value to our customers through our engineering capability; supply chain simplification, being that supplier that can service the customers with all of their fastening needs. You know, often, as I said, many of our customers have tens, if not hundreds, of fasteners within their bill of materials, and being able to consolidate and all of that spend into few suppliers is part of their strategic demand. And finally, manufacturing, having the ability to support our customers with complex cold form technology, manufactured products, reliably and with high quality, is a core part of our differentiated value proposition. So voice of the customer into value proposition, three core drivers.
In the same way, we've taken a hard look at the markets that we serve, and it's fair to say that historically, Trifast has been fairly agnostic and quite different, quite disparate in its approach to the market sectors. Going forward, what we've identified are three market sectors that offer not only the opportunity to from mid- to high-single-digit CAGR growth over the strategic plan period, but importantly, also, the customer profiles within those three market sectors fit very nicely to the value proposition that I laid out earlier. So the three sectors we're gonna focus on as we go forward are going to be automotive, which today is, as you see on the left-hand side, already a key part of our business.
But within automotive, we're going to be more selective on the systems and the customers that support those systems, that have the highest growth opportunity. So over the plan period, things like electric vehicle, hybrid technology, battery systems, as well as those kind of systems in automotive that are agnostic to the power source. So things like seating systems, instrument clusters, those kind of complex system build requirements, tier one automotive supply, that require often tens or hundreds of fasteners within their bill of material. The second key growth sector is we've called smart infrastructure, and you can see the five subsegments within that that we've highlighted.
This is all about, if you think about the macroeconomic trend of interconnected cities, this is all about, the services and the systems and the solutions that are required, within those interconnected cities. So things like air conditioning, heat pumps, HVAC, things like lighting, power, water, as well as data communications and, connectivity. So a very clear, second growth segment. The third growth, area is medical equipment, so medical technology, robotic, medical solutions. Those kind of, long-term macro, growth drivers, again, significant opportunity for Trifast. It's a relatively small part of our business today, but high growth and a very good fit with our value proposition, and has, again, very high, single digit CAGR over the plan period.
So increasingly, we will be focused on our resources, our capital, and our time and effort on driving growth, focused growth into those three market sectors. This is just an illustrative slide to show that in one of those three, we've done an awful lot of mapping of the supply chains and the potential customers, as well as understanding the customers that we serve today within our portfolio, and identifying where we have growth opportunities, both with existing customers and with potential new customers, and this is one example for smart infrastructure. Over to you, Kate.
Right, it's on to me. Trifast has a goal to reach double-digit EBIT in the medium term. We see the way of doing that is by looking at three different parts of our journey. First of all, we have the recovery, which we commenced in FY 2024. Then we have rebuild, which is FY 2025 into the midterm, and then resilience, which is the longer term, where we aim to have sustainable returns greater than 10% and in well into the double digits. In FY 2024, we did really well to have an improvement on our EBIT margin, to return to margin growth. We've done that, and now we accelerate into FY 2025, and the ambition there is to build on the margin that we've created in FY 2024 and, and proceed further.
With the right decisions and focus on market choices, we firmly believe that these targets are achievable. This is a bridge that we've prepared from a lot of the modeling we did on our strategy. You can see the starting point is FY 2024, where we had EBIT margin of 5.2%, and these are the building blocks that we believe can get us to in excess of 10% EBIT margin in the midterm. The key blocks are margin management, focused growth, organizational effectiveness, and operational efficiency. In terms of margin management, we intend to address our low margin customers. We have not always been great with pricing, and we've not always been great with the terms that we've engaged with our customers, and we plan to look at these.
We've based the work on our True Profit, work that we've done in previous years and identified which customers we feel we can get price increases for. We know that there's a lot of work to do this, but it's certainly achievable, and we have data, robust data, to support it. In terms of focused growth, this is about building share of wallet of our existing customers. Again, we've looked at the data. We have divided our customers into customers where we can improve the share of wallet by 25%, by 55, 50%, and 75%. And then we've done the analysis to determine where we can get that additional revenue growth.
We've also looked at the segments in which we should be focusing more, and as Iain mentioned in his presentation, there are three key segments where we believe we could do a lot more, which really match our value proposition. These are automotive, smart infrastructure, and medical equipment. In terms of the organizational effectiveness, we've already done a lot of work in improving our organizational structure. We are now reporting in regional segments instead of individual entities. This means we can streamline a lot of our processes, and we can therefore manage our strategy a lot better. We are also embedding the strategic initiatives into the performance objectives of our teams to make sure that we are actually focused on our strategy and can deliver. In terms of operational efficiency, this is about driving labor and asset utilization.
We are embedding these KPIs and metrics into our day-to-day business, and we're using our D365 platform in order to help measure and monitor what we are doing there. We see that we have the capabilities now to drive these strategic initiatives. As I mentioned before, in terms of commercial excellence, we will improve our pricing and our sourcing, and we can better negotiate with our customers. In terms of operational excellence, again, we'll be using KPIs, metrics, and some of the tools we already have, such as True Profit, to help drive the business forward and our strategic initiatives. People, culture, and safety, again, is about embedding that organizational structure that we've now got in place. In terms of finance, we'll be looking to improve our reporting and also the accuracy of our forecasting.
We'll also build a better control environment, where we can help monitor our strategic initiatives, such as keeping safeguards or guardrails around what we do on pricing and discounts. Technology, again, on the basis of the platform that we've put in place for D365, we're looking to improve the tools that we use in terms of measuring our margins and actually identifying our pipeline opportunities. We'll also look at AI and also machine learning to see how we can enhance the customer experience. Innovation, we have several innovation centers or centers of excellence. We have them in the UK, Sweden, and Italy. We're looking to drive these out and to build these out in other areas to ensure that we can really enhance our engineering capabilities and be ready for the future.
In terms of sustainability, we do have an objective to be net zero business, and we will implement programs to ensure that we reduce our carbon footprint, our environmental waste, and we'll also, of course, keep an ethical and responsible supply chain. These initiatives are built both on self-help and also market-driven. As you're aware, in FY 2024, we did do a lot of work on self-help initiatives, and that has helped maintain the EBIT margin as we have in FY 2024 results. Looking ahead into the future, in Q1, we are already seeing contract wins coming through from business that we closed in FY 2024. We're also seeing improvements in margins, which are coming through from pricing and sourcing initiatives and self-help initiatives that we implemented in FY 2024.
Of course, we're going to continue to drive down our net debt through working capital initiatives. We are confident that FY 25 is going to be a significant turning point. As I said before, you know, we have the recovery part of our journey. We have already contributed an improved EBIT margin from FY 23, and we intend to drive that through. We have a clear ambition in our strategy to reach the double-digit EBIT in the medium term. When we get to the half year, we would like to demonstrate to you, first of all, that we are one team, and that we are focused on the different initiatives that we have presented to you in today's strategy presentation. Again, that we can deliver. We would like to demonstrate that we are driving profitable growth, growth through our key segments.
Those key segments being automotive, smart infrastructure, and also medical equipment. We'd also like to prove to you that we have stabilized the NDC, and that the benefits of the NDC are now coming through in terms of real cost savings. Again, with the joint venture that we have opened in China, we'd like to see more profitable growth and revenue coming through from there, as well as delivery of our ESG initiatives, such as the solar project in Italy. This slide outlines the metrics that we plan to use to measure our performance against what we have already achieved in FY 2024. Again, as we progress through the recovery stage, we will look to improve and continue working on our working capital objectives, such as reducing our inventory and also reducing our working capital.
In terms of the rebuild phase, we will focus on different metrics, such as EBIT and underlying return on capital employed. The underlying return on capital employed is important to us as a metric for our operational efficiency and also our capital allocation. We have included revenue in our medium-term target. However, this is more a longer term objective, as the focus at the moment in the medium term is really to build on our margin and build on our efficiencies. We are prepared to sacrifice revenue for the sake of the margin, and that is why we intend to keep our revenues somewhat flat for FY 2025. In terms of the key financials, Iain mentioned before, we have significantly reduced our net debt by GBP 70 million to GBP 21 million, and this has mainly been through the drive to reduce inventory by GBP 15 million.
That has reduced from 28 weeks to 24 weeks. It's something that the team, we are all immensely proud of, and we'll continue to drive that down in order to manage our net debt and of course, our interest costs. We are especially proud that we managed to maintain our gross, our gross margin and slightly improve our operating profit, notwithstanding the decline in revenue. Of course, the increased interest costs did result in a decline in our underlying profit before tax. Interest actually increased from GBP 2.7 million in FY 2023 to GBP 5.4 million in FY 2024, which has effectively doubled. In quarter one, we renegotiated our debt, and we now have a facility of GBP 120 million, which is up from the facility we had of GBP 80 million.
And we now have headroom in addition of in excess of GBP 76 million, which we believe has set us up very well in order to achieve our objectives of exceeding the pre-COVID metrics, and also to drive further investment in areas such as footprint and customer enabling technologies. In FY 2025, we will see a great focus on these targets, and we are committed to meeting the metrics that we've put in front of you. This table here summarizes the key financials, and you can see where we have a, a corner, a green corner. That is where we've actually improved on FY 2024. So again, you know, most of our metrics, we've seen improvement, notably the EBIT margin, you can see that we have returned to growth.
The underlying profit before tax, again, has been impacted by those higher interest costs, which we have been working very hard to manage down. We currently have a net debt EBITDA ratio or covenant of 1.3 times, and this is comfortably below our, our limit, our margin limit, our covenant limit of 3. In terms of regional performance, we have varied performance, but we've got some especially good growth in Europe, where we've seen EBIT double to GBP 6.1 million. We've also seen revenue increase 6% to GBP 89 million. Most of this has been driven by the uplift on light and heavy vehicles as customers transition to EV technology, especially in Sweden. We also had the transfer of the European distribution business from the UK to Germany. Hungary has still been impacted by the Ukraine conflict.
However, Italy is seeing good recovery in its legacy business following our investment in manufacturing, and we are also seeing improvements in plant utilization there. At the end of the year, we sold our non-core Norwegian business, which represented 2% of the region's revenue. In the UK and Ireland, revenue reduced around 10% to around GBP 77 million. This was caused by a blend of customer de-stocking, reduced demand, lower market pricing, but also the transfer of the European distribution business to Europe. This was, however, partially offset by new rents from FY 2023 contracts with OEM customers. As Iain mentioned before, we are especially proud of the consolidation of the NDC.
Although we were slightly behind our timeline, we did achieve it, and we now have a stronger platform with high levels of efficiency, and we are ready to benefit when the demand recovers in the short to medium term. In Asia, we had a 9.3% decline in revenue, which was driven by the distributor sector and softness in the market. The China demand remains subdued due to lingering effects of the COVID shutdowns and also the general macroeconomic climate. FY 2024 also saw, mainly because of the exceptional performance of our Taiwanese business in FY 2023, which is hard to compete with. There has been a significant uplift in the light vehicle sector, like other regions. This was especially noted in Thailand and Malaysia.
Light vehicles revenue increased 6%, but this was not enough to cover the decline in distributors and also home and health. In North America, we see a slight increase in revenue to $30 million, and again, there's been continued growth in the light vehicle sector, but this has been offset by declines in energy and technology and also general industrial sectors. However, the EBIT improved 23%, and this was thanks to higher margins on new contract wins in the light vehicle sector. We are particularly pleased that we've been managed to reduce our central costs from FY 2023, and this is because of the self-help initiatives that we implemented to reduce non-operating headcount, and also the considerable controls we've put in place to make sure we monitor, and measure, and control our overhead costs.
This bridge shows the movement and underlying profit before tax. You can see the decline from GBP 9.3 million to GBP 6.5 million, is GBP 2.8 million. And this is in line with the actual interest increase that we had. So had we not had the interest increases, we believe we would have been in line on underlying profit before tax through the management of overheads and our self-help initiatives, countering the decline in the revenue. In terms of the adjusted net debt, I'm especially pleased with this graph as it shows the decline in stock, in inventory, and all the work we've done to manage that down in order to reduce our net debt.
A lot of work has gone into the management of working capital through the year in stock and also into debtors, and we'll continue to do this to ensure that we have the investment to make into our manufacturing footprint and also our customer enabling solutions. Iain, should I pass back to you for summary?
Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Kate. So, look, hopefully what you've heard from us today is, FY 2024 has demonstrated that the business has started its journey on the recovery, rebuild, and resilience platform that I've laid out. Certainly, we're pleased to see that most of the metrics, as you saw earlier on that slide, have a green tick on them. Even if it's a small tick, it's a step in the right direction, and that shows that as a business, we're putting in place the right actions and the right focus to maintain that now positive momentum. And we're really pleased as a leadership team with the work that we've done on strengthening the balance sheet. This business is in a much, much stronger position than it was 12 months ago.
And we're really proud of the efforts of all of our teams globally in driving inventories down, generating cash, and as a result, paying down net debt. So, huge thanks to all the team in achieving that. Importantly, as we go forward, we've got a new business strategy that as a team, we've spent a lot of effort and time making sure is right, is fit for the markets and the customers within those markets, that plays to the strengths that Trifast has, that is differentiated and gives confidence to our ability to deliver the medium-term goal of double-digit margins. Our focus now as a leadership team, of course, is on making sure that we continue to execute on those four strategic initiatives of margin management, focus growth, operational efficiencies, and organization effectiveness.
And our intention, as Kate said earlier, is to be able to demonstrate each half year as we present back to the investor community, that what we've said we will do, we're doing, and we're delivering each step of the journey back to that medium-term goal. So a lot of effort, some pretty tough decisions, a clear and focused business strategy to deliver double-digit margins and returns to a level which, as an investor community and within the business, we know we can and will achieve for the future. With that, let's hand over back to you, Mark, to remind people how to ask the questions, and then we'll start to take the questions.
Fantastic. Iain, Kate, thanks indeed for the presentation. As Iain said, ladies and gentlemen, do please continue to submit your questions just using that Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just click Q&A, scroll to the bottom, type your question, and press Send. Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that the recording of the presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Iain, Kate, as you can see, we've had a number of questions come through throughout today's presentation. Thank you to all the investors for submitting those.
If I may just ask you just to click on that Q&A tab, and where appropriate to do so, just read out the question and give your response, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Many thanks.
Okay. Fine. Thanks. So thank you for those of you that have submitted questions, and we'll work our way through and try and answer as many as we can. As you said, if there are questions that we can't get to in the time that we've got available, we'll make sure that we publish a full response. Clearly, the discussion around margins and pricing is something that is central, of course, to our both the history and now the strategy and the execution of the strategy. So the first question is from Ben: Please, could you talk about the industry and how you go about increasing margins to over 10%?
Do you currently have any pricing power, and how do you go about improving your pricing power? So I think some of the content of, of the walk to 10%, we covered in the, in the earlier slides that, Kate talked to, the four key initiatives. So I think importantly, the, the sort of high-level, message would be, this is not only about, driving margin management. That's one of four important initiatives, and it's a key part of, what we need to execute and drive.
In terms of how we go about that, of course, improving margin is a function of both, making sure we're getting value-based pricing with our customers, using to give some examples, using the fact base of the great quality and service that we deliver to our customers across, you know, all parts of our business. That gives us a fundamental right to be at the table and make sure that we're having those value-based pricing discussions. It needs to be fact-based, so we're talking about recovering costs that are inflationary costs and making sure that we're fact-based, that we're professional, and that we're disciplined in doing that.
It's also about enhancing margins through adding value to customers, through value engineering workshops, through solving application challenges, and by supplying higher value-added products to our customers. So all of those are mechanisms through which we can increase the pricing and the margin within pricing. Just give one example. We had a customer, a water meter customer 3-4 months ago, launching a new product needed a specific application, a screw, specific screw, to support the development and prototype manufacturing of this new product. We were able to turn around the design and supply of parts to that customer within one week.
That allowed them to support their prototype and ultimately get that product into mass production within a short timeframe, and as a result, we secured that business with that customer at a, you know, a good value-based margin. So that's a good example of delivering a solution using the One TR engineering, manufacturing, and distribution capability to support margin enhancement. Another example is we talk about margin on the other side, which is about managing costs with the supply base, and there it's about also making sure we're doing some fairly basic stuff, aggregating spend, making sure that we've got the right suppliers, that we're spending with the right suppliers, and basically controlling and managing our spend with the supply base in a much more focused, controlled, and fact-based way.
So there are a number of, you know, dimensions to driving a healthier margin. So I hope that answers that question. A second question, also from Ben, is: Do anti-dumping tariffs or tariffs in general have an impact on your business? I think this is probably two dimensions I would talk to. One, clearly, where you've got big macro anti-dumping tariffs, things like, you know, for example, in the automotive industry, the European Union putting a tariff on imported Chinese vehicles, partly to protect the European automotive industry, probably partly also to reflect the state support for the Chinese automotive industry.
I don't want to get into the politics, but as an example, clearly that has an impact on the overall economic and market driver in the automotive industry. I would say a second example is a tariff that is being put in place called Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and that is effectively a carbon tax that is being introduced in Europe and the UK on a range of imported products from Asia. Now, in terms of A, being able to demonstrate that products that we bring from Asia into Europe and the UK are compliant with that regulation, that's something that our team is working to and has put in place to make sure that we are compliant. Secondly, we see that as an opportunity.
Not every fastener supplier has the capacity, bandwidth, and capability to manage those kind of regulatory requirements. We do, and that's a differentiator. Secondly, and we're very proud of our Italian manufacturing facility, and we're one of a few European manufacturers of fasteners with capacity that can be utilized to support as customers across Europe and the UK seek to localize their supply chains to avoid those kind of tariffs. So I think it's a multidimensional response to that particular question, but hopefully gives some color on what we're doing to manage the impact on tariffs. The third question from Ben is: How do you go about having better visibility to forecast your demand?
And I think this is a, you know, to be fair, this is a challenge that was put to us fairly when we came out with the announcement in January about the slowing and the impact of the slowing of the demand across Asia and distribution channels. Look, I think it's nirvana to be able to identify what demand outlook is. This is not a retail channel. There is not a point of sales data that you can buy or have access to, to be able to understand the end consumer demand, and therefore what you should expect in your business. What we can do, though, is use data insight and discussion with our customers on forecast, on schedules that we receive from our customers.
Of course, combined with general macroeconomic data, PMI data, economic, growth, GDP data, all of that, to try and guide us on what visibility and demand outlook we have. What we can say is that, again, based on the external, analysis and insight we did to support the strategy work, the, the CAGR growth in those three market sectors that we're focused on is, again, expected to be mid to a high single digit, and that's where we should be focusing our effort and time. Okay, moving on. So thanks, Ben, for those, series of questions. Hopefully, we provided the, responses. Peter, asked: How much will it cost to set up a manufacturing facility to serve the American market? Do we envisage that this can be financed from the company's, debt facility?
Yep. Would you like me to answer that one?
Sure.
Sure. So I mean, we have a couple of options, first of all. We have a significant headroom at the moment on our debt facility, so we do have capacity, certainly to make any acquisitions or set up any joint ventures there. I think the cost to set it up or to acquire something would really depend on the value that it brought to us. You know, we will apply price discipline, if we were to look at any acquisitions or to set up any joint ventures, and certainly look at, you know, what we would actually get back in terms of EBITDA, for what we purchase. So the cost, it would vary, depending on the capability of the target.
And certainly, we do have capacity from the headroom we've got in the facility at the moment, which I mentioned before was in excess of GBP 76 million.
Thanks, Kate. And thanks for that question, Peter. So, Gavin has asked a couple of questions here: What percentage of customers are small, the ones you want to pay more? How are negotiations going? So, clearly, we've got, you know, thousands of customers within our business, and also a broad range, as you saw from that market slide earlier, of customers historically. I think the first point to say is, this is—this strategy is not saying we're going to simply stop doing business with customers that aren't in one of those three focus market sectors. What it is saying is we're gonna target and focus our resources, capital, and time on customers within those three growth market sectors.
But where customers are, you know, profitable, growing, have a value-based approach, then for sure, we should continue to service and, and support, and we will continue to support and service those customers. However, we also need to look at the customer portfolio and take some tough decisions on those customers that don't fit. So whether they are low profitability and have no opportunity to achieve an acceptable level of profitability, whether they are more administratively heavy for the value of revenue that they do. There are lots of dimensions that we look at when it comes to managing the portfolio, and we will need to and have been active in managing that portfolio of customers.
In a similar way, Gavin's next question asks: "What is the customer tail, the top 20 percent, top 20 customers' revenue is what?" What we would say, Gavin, is that our top 200 customers represent about 70% of our revenue, and it's fair to say that therefore, as I said, there are thousands of customers, and we do indeed have a long tail, hence why managing the portfolio is important. Question from James: "Could you guide on your expectations on timing to hit the 10% EBIT target, please? Can you be more specific than medium term?" Thank you for the question, James. We're, we're quite deliberate in saying medium term. You know, I think we've seen margin erosion happen over 5 years.
We would certainly, and our ambition would be to accelerate return of margin faster than it was eroded. We've got a very clear strategy to do that, and, you know, we need to be cautious, though, that, of course, there's always something that could happen from a macroeconomic or geopolitical environment. So I think our focus is to try and drive, you know, a steady progress of margin enhancement year after year, through those four key initiatives, and we're confident in delivering that within a medium term and faster than the margin eroded. Next question is: "How will..." From Michael. Thank you for the question.
Mm-hmm.
Michael: "How will you develop your people to gear for EBIT growth?
Yep, which I-
Do you wanna take that one, Kate?
Yep. I think the first thing is that, obviously, you know, we need to kind of introduce a new culture, where we're focusing on the EBIT growth, and I think we're doing that at the moment. You know, we are changing the organizational design. We're changing the narrative with staff. We are also including, you know, the strategic initiatives into people's performance objectives, and we're also creating metrics, such as KPIs, to ensure that we are really measuring our performance on margin of growth, as well as the focus growth, so margin management focus growth. So we're certainly changing the culture, so this will become more of a focus, and I think that message is really getting through from the behaviors we're seeing in the team.
The other thing we're doing is, within finance, we are building a better control environment to make sure that, you know, we really do have guidelines for what the commercial teams are doing when they negotiate with customers. We're also setting everybody with the tools to make sure that, you know, when we go and negotiate with new customers, that we can negotiate better terms and conditions as well. So I think the answer, it's throughout the whole of the business. It's going to be culturally embedded in the business, that, you know, EBIT growth is the absolute, you know, number one priority in terms of, you know, strategy for the midterm. Yep.
Very good. Yeah. Thanks, Kate. Question from, Gavin: "Any intention of ceasing doing or making lower margin products?" I think the answer is linked to what I said earlier about customers. In the same way as we talk about customers, we talk about products. We need to be confident that, the products that we support are able, as a profile, to be able to deliver an acceptable level of margin. And so, yes, if there are products that, clearly are lower margin and have no scope, to be able to achieve an acceptable level of return, then, yes, we have to be prepared to take some tough decisions to stop or exit those kind of product or product families. There's a question. So thanks for the, that, supplementary question, Gavin.
Hamish has asked a question: "Why are directors not buying shares?" I think, yeah, my response would be, Harish, sorry, not Hamish, Harish, that the directors have been buying shares. And if you look at the annual report, you'll see that the board has been active. Clearly, that process continues, so I'm not sure why you feel the directors are not buying shares, but anyway, we are. And clearly, we've been in a closed period, and so one reason we haven't been able to buy shares in the last few months is, as we've naturally been closing the books and going through the audit process, as quite rightly, we're not allowed to buy shares.
So now that we're out of closed period, hopefully we'll see more activity. Okay, thanks for those questions. Couple of last questions. I think we've got just around five minutes left. "Over what time..." Peter has asked a question: "Over what time period do you think it will take to push through the pricing initiatives mentioned in the presentation? Is it dependent on existing contracts expiring?" I think what we would say, margin management, and whether it's pricing or sourcing activity, it's not emperor's new clothes. It's not a one-off piece of work. It needs to be part of the way that we do business. You know, costs move and change. We're talking about thousands of SKUs here, we're supplying something like 30 billion fasteners across our organization.
So, those costs and prices are changing, you know, every day. So margin management, pricing, sourcing needs to be part of, and, and needs, and will become part of just the DNA. And the benefit that we get from having tools like Microsoft D365 is the ability to have data in front of us in real time that allows us to execute those pricing initiatives and cost initiatives in real time, rather than having to wait for a specific report or time horizon. Of course, to the second part of your question, we do have contracts in place, and those contracts vary in the terms and conditions that we have. And we have to honor those, you know, where we've signed into contracts, we have to honor the terms in the contracts.
However, many of those contracts allow for cost inflation conversations, or indeed, for pricing conversations. So, the fact that those contracts are in place isn't necessarily a reason for us not to be able to have a conversation with the customer on a fact basis about recovery of value-based pricing. And then... Okay. A couple of other questions we'll try and get through these if we can. Why pay a... Sat has asked, "Why pay a dividend? Why not save money for a couple of years?" I think it's always a balance. Kate, would you agree-
Yeah.
It's a balance of approach?
Yeah, I would agree. You know, we do have a variety of different shareholders, and some of them, you know, invested with the expectation there would be dividends. So we do try to take a balanced approach, listen to our investors, and come up with what we think is the right thing. Of course, you know, cash is king at the moment, especially when we're looking to pay down our net debt, but we believe we've successfully done that to the point where we can still pay a dividend, which we did.
Thanks. Okay, so question from Anand: "How much % of your sales are value-added versus commoditized fasteners?" It's a, in terms of %, I wouldn't give a specific number, but clearly, we are supplying, where we supply, customers with all of their fastening needs, it's a range of products from, technically developed, specific or special, cold form products or plastic fasteners, right the way through to some what we would call standard products. However, it's important to state that all of the products we supply are specified engineered products. So they are on the bill of materials for our customers, even if they are standard fasteners.
Again, remember, our value proposition is about supply chain simplification, so our value to the customer is being able to support their full range of fastening needs. So it's not just about being able to supply only the special products. We need to be embracing and driving value from the contracts with customers across their range of fastening requirements.
Mm-hmm.
I think, given the time, we're almost at the end, if I'm not right, Mark.
Absolutely. You've, you've cut through an awful lot of questions, and thank you very much indeed for that. Of course, any further questions that do come through, the team will be able to review those and publish responses where appropriate to do so. Perhaps before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to you, Iain, can I just ask you for a few closing comments?
Yeah, thanks. Thanks very much. So first of all, again, thank you to all of you for taking your time to join our presentation this morning. I hope you found it useful and beneficial. It's a great opportunity for Kate and myself to virtually meet you and share the work that we've been doing, importantly, on delivering the first step of our journey of recovery, rebuild, and resilience. And we're very pleased to have been able to demonstrate that in FY 2024. A small step, but an important step in the right direction. I think we're pleased to have been able to share the new business strategy that drives the performance of our business back to being a double-digit margin business over the medium term.
It's very clear, 3 focus sectors for growth, 3 value proposition drivers, and 4 key initiatives that are gonna help move the margin over the medium term back above double digit. We, as a leadership team, together with our board, very excited to drive that strategy and implement it. And my final comment would be just to all of the 1,200 employees in Trifast, to say a huge thank you for all of your efforts in FY 2024, and we look forward to celebrating more success in FY 2025. So with that, thank you very much, everybody, for your time. Have a good rest of your day, and please, if you have any other questions, please do put them on the channel. Thanks very much, and have a good rest of your day. Bye-bye.
Fantastic. Iain and Kate, thanks indeed for updating investors. Can I please ask investors not to close the session, as you'll now ultimately, ultimately be redirected to provide your feedback in order the team can better understand your views and expectations. It only takes a few moments to complete, and it's greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Trifast PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.