Chemring Group PLC (CHG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the presentation of Chemring's results for the full year to 31st of October 2022. I am, as usual, joined today by Andrew Lewis, our Chief Financial Officer. I'll provide a brief overview of the group's highlights for the year. Andrew will then take you through the financial results and I will then comment on the progress made this year and the areas we are targeting for further growth in FY '23 and beyond. Starting with a brief overview of our performance during FY '22, a year in which we have continued to make strong progress, successfully navigating a number of operational and financial challenges, including supply chain disruptions, increasing energy costs, labor shortages and delays to customers' procurement processes. Despite these challenges, the group has again delivered a robust performance that exceeded our expectations at the beginning of the year. Our commitment to long-term sustainable growth and value creation through safe and ethical business conduct has ensured that we have satisfied our customers' critical needs. None of this would have been possible without the commitment and dedication of our people, and I want to acknowledge and thank all of them for their professionalism and hard work. Their efforts ensure that we continue to make good progress throughout the year resulting in our revenues being up 13% to GBP 443 million and operating profit being up 11% to GBP 64 million. Earnings per share was up 19% to 19.7p, resulting in the Board recommending a final dividend of 3.8p per share with the interim dividend of 1.9p per share. This results in a total dividend of 5.7p per share, an increase of 19%. Elsewhere, we continue to make good progress in both sectors and on our ESG sustainability agenda, both of which will be covered in more detail later in the presentation. Trading since the start of the current financial year has been in line with expectation, with 86% of the FY '23 expected revenue covered by our order book. And the Board's expectation for FY '23 performance remains unchanged. That concludes my overview, and I'll now hand over to Andrew to take you through the financial results.

Thanks, Mick, and good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to be presenting a strong set of financial results for 2022. We've worked hard this year to navigate significant macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges and have delivered a result which was ahead of our initial expectations. This was driven by continued double-digit growth at Roke and Countermeasures & Energetics showing another year of good improvement in operational performance, delivering increased output and improved margins. The key messages from this year's results. Revenue was GBP 443 million, which was up 13%. Operating profit grew 11% to GBP 64 million. Our operating margin was stable at 14.5%, reflecting the choice to invest operating expenses in the Roke Academy and Roke USA to support future growth opportunities. Diluted earnings per share was up 19% to 19.7p, driven by the operating profit growth combined with lower interest and tax. Operating cash conversion in the year was strong at 109% of EBITDA and this left net debt down GBP 20 million to GBP 7 million. And indeed, on a pre-IFRS 16 basis, the group is effectively debt-free for the first time since 1991. Debt peaked at over GBP 300 million in 2010 and we're still in excess of GBP 150 million 5 years ago. So the significant effort to focus on cash generation to derisk the balance sheet while still investing GBP 150 million in CapEx has been immense. The Board has declared a final dividend for 2022 of 3.8p, making a total dividend for the year of 5.7p, up 19%, which continues the progression of growing our dividend and moving towards the medium-term objective of 2.5x dividend cover. Operationally, the standout performance was at Roke. We saw order intake of GBP 168 million, revenue exceeding GBP 100 million for the first time and maintaining its margin in the 20s. In Countermeasures & Energetics, the benefit of capital investment programs delivered improved operational execution and the niche Energetics business saw a recovery after a COVID impact in 2021. The closing order book is GBP 651 million, of which GBP 403 million is expected to be delivered in 2023, which covers 86% of expected 2023 revenue. The revenue and profit bridges show the key drivers of the group's results this year. At a revenue level, Sensors & Information was positively impacted by strong market conditions and excellent execution at Roke, offset by lower HMDS revenue in the second half of the year as the program unexpectedly moved into sustainment earlier than the DoD had previously indicated. Countermeasures & Energetics saw good growth with improved operational execution, driving revenue growth in countermeasures and the niche Energetics business enjoying a stronger year against what was a soft COVID impact in 2021 comparator. Foreign exchange provided a 5% tailwind on. More detail on constant currency follows later. At an operating profit level, in Sensors & Information, we see strong growth in the Roke products and services business, where revenue dropped through to operating profit as expected. This was offset by the impact of the discretionary operating expense investment in the Roke Academy and Roke USA and a softer second half in the U.S. Sensors business, driven by lower HMDS volumes. Further detail on Sensors & Information follows in a later slide. In Countermeasures & Energetics, operating profit increased as the benefits of capital investment were realized in improved operational performance, which has driven increased output and margins. At GBP 1.8 million, foreign exchange was a tailwind in the year. Moving on to the impact of foreign exchange. The U.S. dollar strengthened materially against sterling in the last quarter, and this left our average translation rate for the year at $1.23 compared to $1.38 in 2021. The slide shows constant currency information with 2022 retranslated at 2021 rates. All metrics remain positive on a constant currency basis. With current rates at $1.20 and with approximately 50% of our business in the U.S., going forward, we will continue to see sudden translation volatility. Segmental constant currency data is provided in the appendix. Moving to the segmental results and starting with Sensors & Information. The results show revenue up 11% to GBP 162 million, reflecting the strong year at Roke, which delivered another year of double-digit growth and strong margins. As shown by the graph on the right, Roke's information security and data science business, operating primarily in the U.K. national security and defense markets has an impressive growth track record over the last 5 years. Revenue and profits in the U.S. Sensors business were stable in the first half of the year but significantly lower in the second half as the HMDS program moved into sustainment earlier than the customer had previously indicated. The full rate production contract for EMBD was mobilized in the year, and first deliveries were successfully achieved late in 2022, a further delivery order for GBP 16 million under the $99 million 6-year framework contract was received which secures expected volumes for the second year. The AVCAD and JBTDS programs progressed as planned, with the next customer procurement decision expected on these in 2023. Given there are a number of moving parts in Sensors & Information in 2022, I thought it might be useful to provide a further breakdown of what's happened in the year in the form of a detailed revenue and operating profit bridge. The key takeaways being Roke revenue for 2022 included GBP 9 million of incremental pass-through revenue for products and services with no margin associated with them, which diluted the segmental margin in Sensors & Information. Adjusting for this and the GBP 2.3 million operating expense investment in Roke Academy and Roke USA, the Sensors & Information margin would have been 21%. Going forward, as Roke primes more contracts, we see pass-through revenue increasing and therefore, maintain our segment margin guidance of mid- to high teens margins for the Sensors & Information segment over the medium term. The bridge shows the impact of the HMDS situation to sustainment in 2022, which largely impacted the second half of our year. We expect to see a full year effect of this in 2023. 2023 is very much a transitional year between programs of record as HMDS volumes reduce. Beyond 2023 as the potential full rate production contract for JBTDS ramps up, revenue and profit in the U.S. Sensors business should return to previous levels. Moving on to Countermeasures & Energetics. Revenue was up 14% to GBP 280 million, and operating profit was up 22% to GBP 49 million. The margin improved to 120 basis points and at 17.4% has reached the medium-term target set out 3 years ago. This is demonstrated on the graph, which shows the margin progression over the last 5 years and demonstrates the benefit of the investment in modernization and automation at our sites. Our new Tennessee facility to support expected U.S. extruded flare requirements was commissioned in the final quarter of the year and remains on track to produce its first revenues in the first half of 2023. This investment is the final key enabler of the segmental profitability improvement program, and we expect to see the revenue benefit in 2023 and further improve profitability following in 2024. On the niche energetics side of the business, after some COVID-related challenges in 2021, we saw the business return to normal levels. Order intake was up 37% to GBP 137 million, which bodes well for a continuation of this progress in the future. Across the Countermeasures & Energetics segment, we successfully navigated a number of tactical supply chain challenges and saw a material escalation in energy costs. We expect this to continue in 2023 and to dampen any further margin progression in the short term. The cash flow shows the group's net debt at the end of the year at GBP 7 million, a reduction of GBP 20 million in the last year, which has been driven by strong operating cash conversion. The operating cash conversion ratio was 109% of EBITDA. Indeed, across the last 3 years, operating cash conversion has been 108% of EBITDA, demonstrating the improvement in business practices is permanent and sustainable. The significant nontrading item in the year was CapEx, which at GBP 34 million was focused on our sites in Scotland, Norway and Tennessee. As previously communicated, we expect CapEx to remain elevated in 2023 before starting to trend back towards depreciation in 2024. One other topical area is pension schemes. Our scheme is fully funded actuarially and on an IAS 19 basis. While we have an LDI, we were proactive in ensuring good liquidity in the scheme in September and October and so maintained our interest rate and inflation hedges. Therefore, we do not expect there to be any cash requirements from the pension scheme in the next 2 years. With net debt of GBP 7 million at year-end and a net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 0.1x, banking facilities of GBP 150 million in place until December 2025. The group is in good financial health and positioned well to continue to invest for growth. It's now 3.5 years since we set out our strategy to deliver a higher-quality business. So I'd like to summarize the financial progress we've made in that time. Our focus has been on building a financially sustainable and robust group. We've achieved our margin objective of a mid-teens group margin, have seen full 4 years of clean numbers with no exceptional items and have achieved greater than 100% cash conversion in each of the last 4 years. This has allowed us to invest. CapEx has run ahead of depreciation. And despite this high level of investment, we've been able to significantly reduce net debt. We will maintain our focus on doing the basics well as we continue the group's development in the coming years. Finally, looking at the order book. At a group level, the closing order book was GBP 651 million, with GBP 403 million expected to be delivered in 2023, giving 86% cover of expected 2023 revenue. In both segments, we continue to improve the quality of the order book, leveraging deep, strong, long-term customer relationships, which has improved our short- and medium-term visibility. Turning to each segment and starting with Sensors & Information. Order intake was up 11%, reflecting the strong year at Roke, which more than offset the fact that the comparative period included a $63 million HMDS order, which wasn't repeated. The order book in this segment tends to be shorter cycle. And of the GBP 154 million order book, GBP 112 million is expected to be delivered in 2023, giving 67% cover of expected 2023 revenue in addition to orders that will be won and delivered in the year. In Countermeasures & Energetics, order intake was up 40% to GBP 356 million, reflecting strong customer and demand across all businesses as customers are increasingly placing longer-term orders to secure their supply. The closing order book of GBP 497 million, GBP 291 million of which is for delivery in 2023 gives 96% cover of expected 2023 revenue. With that, I'll hand you back to Mick. Thank you.

Thank you, Andrew. I'll now take a few moments to look at the broader market and how this relates to our strategy and thereafter, some of the exciting opportunities that we are seeking to exploit. The evolving threat landscape illustrated by Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine and by growing competition with China in the Asia Pacific region is expected to result in increased defense and national security spending in our core markets. Against this backdrop, many countries are looking to modernize their defense and security technology base. The war in Ukraine has brought a reminder of the relevance of traditional defense capabilities, while sub-threshold or gray zone competition is continuing to drive a focus on novel and digital capabilities, including open source and geospatial intelligence, OSINT and GEOINT, respectively. The U.S. continues to be the world's largest defense and security market with budget requests at record level, which specifically seek to address the strategic competition with China. Current priorities for the U.S. defense spend in cyber, space, missiles, electronic warfare and biosecurity are all well aligned to Chemring's capabilities and provide a solid foundation for our growth ambitions. In the U.K., the requirements in the Defense Command Paper will continue to provide opportunities for the group. Given the prevailing geopolitical environment, defense in its broader sense, will remain an important priority for government spending and demand for Roke's market-leading technologies is only expected to grow. We expect these priorities to be reconfirmed in the upcoming refresh of the integrated review. In Europe, we are seeing many nations increase their defense budgets to meet or, in some cases, exceed the 2% of GDP NATO commitment. Whilst there is some uncertainty regarding the level and timing of defense spending, which may result in delays to customers' procurement processes are multiple market-leading positions across different geographies and sectors, together with our investment in high technology niches provides attractive long-term opportunities. Against that market backdrop, our strategy for FY '23 and beyond is to continue to deliver profitable growth by operating in markets in which we have differentiators such as intellectual property, niche technology, high barriers to entry and deep, long-term customer relationships. We will underpin this by continuing to focus on building a safe and resilient business that is able to sustain margin performance through continuous improvement in operational performance and execution. We will continue to expand the group's product, service and capability offerings by innovating and investing in technologies to enable our customers to protect their people, assets and information. We will also enhance these organic growth opportunities with focused strategy-led acquisitions to accelerate growth. However, any acquisition target must meet a rigorous set of business criteria and enable long-term growth and value creation. To date, this activity has been principally focused around our Roke business. And whilst this remains our primary focus, we are now considering opportunities in the U.S. space and missile sectors. Both areas which play to the group's high technology skill sets offer opportunities for long-term growth. Our overall strategic goal remains to balance the delivery of near-term performance with long-term growth and value creation. I'll now spend a few moments highlighting some of the opportunities we see for our Roke business and our vision for its future. As Andrew highlighted, Roke's recent performance has been excellent, with double-digit growth in revenue in each of the past 4 years. Significantly, we've been able to maintain strong margins despite increased investment in people, infrastructure and product development. Our intention is to continue this progress, doubling Roke's revenues over the next 5 years to circa GBP 200 million, whilst maintaining strong margins. There are a number of key enablers that will help fuel this growth. The first is sustained growth in demand from our core customers in national security and defense with growing customer budgets and a focus on high-end technologies, the U.K. national security and defense markets are expected to remain buoyant. Indeed, in these areas, customers are increasingly placing multiyear contracts for Roke's products and services. Our cyber and electromagnetic activities, CEMA, become increasingly important in today's threat environment, we are seeing growing customer inquiries for Roke's suite of leading electronic warfare products and systems. We're also continuing to support the U.S. with a view to securing further orders from this potentially significant market. Continued investment in our Roke USA business has allowed us to support ongoing customer demonstrations and field trials. Customer feedback remains very positive. In order to deliver sustainable growth and unlock future potential growth, Roke has combined its Public Sector, Industry and Cubica business units to create Roke Futures, which sits alongside as National Security and Defense business units. In doing so, it has brought together its market-leading capabilities in data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and autonomy. Futures will focus on building world-class capabilities and technologies to support customers in the adjacent markets of law enforcement, aerospace, energy and digital health care. Earlier in my market overview, I mentioned the increasing need for digital capabilities, including open source and geospatial intelligence, OSINT and GEOINT as they are known. Roke's national security, defense and commercial customers have a rapidly growing need to access information at scale as evidenced by activities in Ukraine are increasingly viewing OSINT as a key enabler for their mission success. To capture this market opportunity, Roke is creating an Intelligence as a Service business area based off proprietary data sets, artificial intelligence and customer-facing platforms. Roke aims to provide these services to both government and commercial customers. And finally, Roke remains alert for opportunities to expand and accelerate it inorganic strategy through incremental acquisitions. It has a robust pipeline of technology-based acquisition targets and it is pleasing to be able to announce today the acquisition of Geollect, the U.K. leader in geospatial intelligence technologies. Geollect based in Bristol and in Virginia in the U.S. is a data analytics company specialized in geospatial intelligence, 1 of the most exciting and growing areas of data and information innovation. GEOINT utilizes imagery analysis and data processing to survey and assess human activity and physical geography with potential applications across a vast range of customer needs in commercial, national security and defense markets. This acquisition will enable Roke to accelerate its Intelligence as a Service offering by utilizing the intelligence gathering and analysis capabilities of Geollect. Geollect is a valuable addition to Chemring's portfolio and provides further scale to our Roke business. And importantly, Geollect will offer us access to new and adjacent commercial markets such as maritime insurance and critical national infrastructure. This acquisition is another important step in Chemring's inorganic growth plans and is further evidence of us delivering against our strategy. Turning now to Countermeasures & Energetics, where our strategy is to strengthen and protect our niche world-leading positions, working with our government and commercial customers as they assess inventory building requirements driven by the current threat environment. As a consequence of activities in the Ukraine, we are seeing increased demand for our specialty materials products manufactured in Norway and Scotland as countries reassess their defense priorities. We expect that the elevated demand for products related to traditional defense battle space capabilities will be sustained as customers rebalance their spending priorities. Our Countermeasures & Energetics sector has seen a continued improvement in operating margin during FY '22 as the benefit of capital investment made in recent years delivers improved lean manufacturing efficiencies. This investment phase is now largely complete with Chicago, [ Solsby ], Philadelphia and Australian sites, all now delivering to expectations. In Tennessee, our capacity expansion project is now largely complete with a new facility currently going through first article testing and is expected to deliver initial revenues in the first half of FY '23. We remain well placed to maintain and grow our market-leading positions on increasingly seeing new opportunities for long-term growth. Chemring already has exposure to the growing U.S. space and missile markets through a Chicago-based business, Chemring Energetic Devices, CED. CED is a leading supplier into the space and missiles market with a 70-year heritage proven through key space programs such as Atlas V, Vulcan and the Mars Perseverance Rover and satellite programs such as Galileo. CED is also a key supplier to U.S. prime contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. We will continue to focus on further growth in both of these markets as the falling cost of access enables increasing growth in commercial space, and as defense customers increased their investment in space and missile solutions capable of deterrent and defeating even the most advanced adversaries. Organically, we will look to capture new program positions with missile and space customers, and we are increasingly investing in new product development to ensure our mission-critical precision engineered devices and subsystems retain their leadership positions. We are also assessing inorganic growth opportunities to accelerate growth in these markets and are exploring low-risk acquisition options in the U.S. to build out from our current niche positions with our known customer base. Turning now to ESG where FY '22 has seen us make further progress as we proactively manage our sustainability agenda. Focus areas include health and safety, diversity and inclusion, reducing climate impact and employee well-being. Our safety performance in terms of total recordable injury frequency rate was 0.78, well below our annual limit of 1. Most injuries were either slips, trips and falls or muscular skeletal events. Significantly, there were no serious injuries associated with energetic events during the year. In 2021, we committed to reduce our total direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions year-on-year and be carbon neutral by 2030. We have made good progress throughout FY '22 against these goals with a 7.3% reduction in Scope 1 and market-based Scope 2 emissions from our FY '21 baseline. We submitted our first CDP report this year, further improving the group's nonmandatory disclosure and have begun to collect and report select Scope 3 carbon emission data. As our disclosure increases, so has the need to ensure that our data is accurate, and we put in place an auditable framework for our emissions reduction activities with external subject matter experts appointed to verify the data. Our investment in nurturing a culture built on our core values of safety, excellence and innovation continued throughout 2022 and is now firmly embedded in every part of our business. We continue to focus our efforts on building an inclusive, respectful and diverse culture. And finally, from a governance perspective, in July, we announced that we had been informed by the U.K. Serious Fraud Office that they had closed their investigation with no further action. Chemring self-reported and then fully cooperated with the SFO throughout its investigation, and we are pleased that this matter is now closed. Looking forward now to FY '23. As a result of the U.S. continuing resolution, that delayed order intake into the second half of FY '22, the balance of our trading performance in FY '23 is expected to have a bias towards the second half of the financial year. However, the current financial year has been going well with 86% of FY '23 expected revenue covered by the order book, and the Board's expectation for FY '23 performance remains unchanged. The group order book as at 31st of October 2022, was GBP 651 million given excellent visibility for the full year and beyond. We will maintain a focus on cash generation, which will in turn provide increased flexibility to deliver shareholder value. I am confident that whilst there may be some macroeconomic uncertainty surrounding the level and timing of defense spending, Chemring will continue to deliver both organic and inorganic growth in FY '23, balancing near-term performance with long-term growth and value creation. So in conclusion, FY '22 was a year in which we continued to make solid progress as we continue to build a strong, high-quality and technology-focused business. We have maintained our focus on relentlessly living our values of safety, excellence and innovation. And in doing so, we are driving our collective purpose of delivering innovative protective technologies to help make the world a safer place. Our strategic imperatives are to continue to grow our Roke business, invest in new and adopt existing technologies to meet evolving customer requirements, pursue new market opportunities with our defense, security and industrial customers and accelerate growth opportunities with focused strategy-led acquisitions. Our multiple market-leading positions across different geographies and sectors together with our investment in high technology niches and the group's strong balance sheet gives the Board confidence that Chemring's long-term prospects remain strong. So that concludes the presentation. If you have any questions, please do get in touch with us either directly or through our advisers. We look forward to speaking to you again at FY '23 half year results in June. But in the meantime, stay safe, stay well, and thank you for joining us.