discoverIE Group plc (DSCV) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for coming this morning to the discoverIE Annual Results Presentation. So I think we have a couple of new faces in the audience, but it's the same old rogues here. Bruce, our Chairman, over there; Simon, who's going to follow me; and of course me and then Lili and Henry. So Henry is -- where's Henry? Everyone knows Henry. Henry is now part of the team with Lili on IR so he'll answer all your questions. He can tell you the real answers now. So it's been a good year. As many of you will know, there's been quite some pressure on the top line with widespread industry destocking, but our operating profits are up 8% at constant exchange rate. We are very pleased with that. Of course we're pleased with it. We're also pleased with the fact that margins reached a record level of 14.3% for the year, 14.8% in H2 and that's against a target of 15% by FY '28. So as a consequence of that, we've increased our target to 17% by FY '29-'30. And that represents something over 10 years now of continuing operating profit and margin growth. It's a very important metric for us and, as those of you who know as well will know, we set a target out over the sort of 3 to 5-year period and then we aim to hit it early and then we bump it up again and that's exactly what we're doing this morning. And as I say, that's despite sales, which were 2% lower at CER, 3% reported driven by 7% lower organic sales; minus 10% first half, minus 2% in the second half. We'll talk more about that and how we've managed that and been able to offset any sort of margin squeeze. Q4 orders were up 15%; it was up 4% in the second half and 15% in the Q4. Very, very strong bounce back. The reason for that is that most of the subdivisions in the business came to the end of their destocking period and the consequence of that is that customers start placing orders again. So the result of all that is adjusted earnings per share up 5% and that's with the effect of the higher interest charges, which of course are starting to abate and will continue to abate from which we will benefit as we go forward from here. Cash flow fantastic. Free cash flow up 9% to GBP 40.4 million, 106% conversion rate; very, very cash generative through the cycle. Our carbon emissions are also in good shape came down by 59% since our base year of calendar year '21 meaning that we're well on track for our 65% reduction this calendar year and then net zero by 2030. We made 2 acquisitions during the year for GBP 29 million, Hivolt and Burster, some of which we'll talk about a bit later. And we have a very strong pipeline of acquisition opportunities, again we'll talk a bit about that later. But we've got GBP 80 million of funding, which on the multiples we're acquiring at is about the equivalent of being able to acquire about 15% of current EBIT. So we've got good opportunities and we're just focused on getting the timing right of some of those opportunities. So it's been a good year. We're well set for going forward from here. We'll talk about some of the operations later. But I'll now hand over to Simon to take you through the financials.

Great. Thanks very much, Nick. Okay. First up for me, the financial highlights. Front page table here, I hope you'll recognize that this is a strong set of results delivered in tough conditions. So despite that, it has been a year of quite heavy industrial destocking in a number of businesses. Look, we're still delivering record profits, record margins, record EPS and record cash flow. So we're really pleased to be able to deliver that to you guys coming through the backdrop that we have. So I'll give more detail on all of these later, but it just gives you that oversight. Next up is this is a table actually we used at the Capital Markets Day. It shows our medium-term targets across the top; in the center, you can see through cycle results across the 10-year period; and then at the base, I put this year's numbers. So if you take on the left, organic sales over the 10-year period we delivered is a healthy 6% annualized growth. This year coming through the bottom of the cycle 7% down. But as Nick said, it's improving to 4% down in the second half and actually that's quite similar to the previous downturn. If you remember, that was COVID and we came through that very nicely. And looking at the margin; despite that impact, we delivered some really decent operating margin growth so up 1.2% up to 14.3%; 14.8%, as Nick mentioned, in the second half and that adds to 8 percentage points that we delivered over the previous 10-year period. So we're really sort of moving that up. We've easily sort of comfortably achieved a 13.5% target, if you remember, we set for this year. We're pretty close now to the 15% target. So we've moved that target up now to 15%, 5-year target 17%. EPS, again that margin has really helped us deliver on the EPS front despite higher interest rates so up 5%, up 15% in the second half and that adds to 19% annualized growth that we've been achieving over that previous 10-year period. Cash conversion you can see continues to be strong. We're a very cash generative company. That's over 100% conversion rate and that again is sort of in line with what we've achieved on average over the last 10 years and nicely above our target that we set ourselves. The return, we managed to keep that improving. Despite having done a couple of acquisitions this year, despite the destocking, it's still gone up. And actually look at the second half is at 16.4%. So again a good number. And on the right there, we are continuing to do good work in terms of reducing our carbon emissions and you can see that's down 59% since the base we set 3 years ago. So nicely on track for the 65% target we set for this coming year and well over half towards the net zero target by FY '30. Moving on to operating profit and margin. You can see on this chart that actually regardless of what the organic sales performance has actually been, we've continued to deliver good growth in operating profits and margin as you can see there. It's flat in the COVID year, but we'll take that. So this year, profits are up 8% at compound exchange rates to GBP 60.5 million. The margin, as I say, lifted up by 1.2 percentage points and there's a number of factors in there driving that improved margin performance. I think a very key aspect is our flexible production model, which allows us to sort of flex our production costs with volume. So that's a really important thing to keep your gross margins at a decent level. But plenty of activity in terms of getting better pricing, pricing for value, but lots of efficiencies too. There's lots of small things that add up. So there's production transfers where we sort of move production between businesses, bring production in-house. We're doing more clustering. We've talked about clustering before and cross-selling between the clusters is really starting to pick up. So all those sort of things compound to make us a more efficient business and that will continue. And as said, we've increased the margin to 17% and that is actually the 10th time looking back that we've increased our margin target over the 15 years that we've been following this strategy. Moving on. This gives you a nice walk from last year's profits GBP 57.2 million up to the GBP 60.5 million this year. The 3 bars on the left, that's organic performance. We like to sort of show you that. And if you look at it, the real upsides there; gross margin, that's actually up. The organic gross margin for us is up 1.6 percentage points and those efficiencies helping both the gross margin, but also we've reduced operating costs through those efficiencies by 2%. And those 2 combined have offset much of the impact from an organic perspective that is caused by the sales shortfall. So GBP 2.4 million organic profit impact from an organic point of view. But all of that you can see is in the first half, second half was flat. And that shortfall together with the impact of a stronger sterling has been more than offset by the 7 acquisitions we've done in the last 18 months, the GBP 6.8 million there. So profit up GBP 3.3 million, up GBP 4.4 million at constant exchange rates. And really I will say I like this chart because it just shows you what our strategy is. Our strategy in action is about organic performance, it's about operating efficiencies and it's about accretive acquisitions. I've also put this chart in. I think we put it in the Capital Markets Day again, but it neatly shows how we've lifted our margin from 7.6% 7 years ago to the 14.3% you see now and it's a nice even split between what work we're doing organically, but also in terms of accretive acquisitions. I think looking forward to the 17%, you're probably going to ask well, how are you going to achieve it? I think we would see about 1/3 of that coming organically and 2/3 from acquisitions, but let's wait and see. Next on to the divisional performance. Nick touched on this. You've got a real contrast between the early cycle S&C business and the later stage, later cycle M&C. So just looking at S&C first. Organic sales actually up 1% overall for the year, it's actually up 6% organically in the second half. And that growth combined with really good gross margins, we've been putting cost in. We've been investing cost too into the business and we've got the benefit of 4 acquisitions in the last 18 months. All of that's helped lift profits by 26% up to GBP 36 million and operating margin up I think 3.6%, over 20% now. So a really decent performance from them. Orders: we delivered 12% order growth through the year nipping up to 15% in the second half. So a really good strong performance coming out of the low point of their cycle. Conversely, M&C is still seeing some quite heavy impact on destocking for those guys. Organic sales down 11%, 10% down in the second half. So it is still a bit to come out there. But we've done a lot there, you can see, to minimize the impact. So good gross margins again. We've reduced some of the operating expenses, make it more efficient. And so we've reduced the impact there, profit impact down to 9% and the margin impact to 0.6 percentage points. And you can see that the orders through the year down 4%, but I think we put this in the trading update, orders were up 15% and so that's good, it's a good sign. We need that to continue as we do in S&C. But really record performance from S&C, resilient performance from M&C and Nick will take you through a bit more detail on the 2 divisions later. Next on to earnings. This tracks you from profit of GBP 60.5 million down to EPS of 38.7p. You can see the finance costs actually just up 16% in the year and that's the interest rates on average were about even year-on-year. So it's more the average level of debt was higher this year versus last year. As Nick said, we should get the benefit now, I've put the data. As rates start coming down, we've got a variable based debt facility so we will benefit. A 1 percentage point fall in base rates will give us about a 3% EPS pickup. So fingers crossed there. Tax rates down 1 percentage point. That's the use of some historic tax losses. So overall, 6% growth in operating profit, 8% at CER converts to 5% growth in EPS, 8% growth at CER and that was 15% growth in the second half. So if you remember it was 4% down first half, 15% up second half. So really excellent second half performance and that adds as you can see in the graph. We've delivered 15% annualized return over that particular period. So all adds to that. I've put a number there. Reported EPS up 58% sounds huge. There were some disposal costs associated with Santon last year. If you take those out, we're up 15%. So still a decent bit of growth there. And finally, we've got a progressive dividend policy. We've increased the dividend again by 4% in line with the interim. And actually looking back, we've grown the dividend in the 15 years we've been around by 150%. So we're pretty pleased with that. Next on the cash generation. So this chart you'll be familiar with this from previous years. It takes you through the adjusted EBITDA of GBP 68 million through to free cash flow of just over GBP 40 million. The 2 bars on the left, that's capital investment. So you can see we've reduced working capital a touch. We've invested GBP 6 million in CapEx. That was a replacement Chinese facility thrown in there. There's a number of product line extensions. There's a fair bit in there, but it's only 1.4% of top line. So that's very capital light. I think it was slightly up on last year, but it's capital light and that's what we're very much about. If you look at the chart in the middle, free cash flow is up 9% year-on-year. Operating cash is up 5% year-on-year. And actually if you look at it backwards, it's 16% annualized growth in cash flow over last 10 years so that's not too shabby. And conversion rates, they're strong. As said that they're over 100% for both those cash flow metrics and that's what we've delivered. You can see the table at the base of that, which shows our conversion rates over the last 10 years and they're averaging over 100% as well. In terms of balance sheet, we ended the year at GBP 94 million net debt, GBP 104 million last year. Gearing has come down from 1.5x down to 1.3x. Within that was about GBP 33 million we spent on acquisitions and earn-outs. We've received actually GBP 13 million on disposals. That's the Santon disposal, we would have talked about this last year, proceeds came in this year. And we've also got the deferred consideration from the sale of Acal BFi that was due this year and came in on time. So GBP 30 million in total. I've also noted there that we've done a buy-in of a defined benefit scheme and that should save us about GBP 1.5 million of annual cash flow going forward. And then just you always ask in terms of funding capacity, 1.3x gearing translates to around about GBP 80 million capacity by the end of this year and that's plenty for us to be going on with, plenty of scope for more accretive acquisitions. Finally, it's another look at the KSIs. We like the KSIs. This sort of metric allows you to see the picture of those KSIs through the history and it reflects, you can see our journey in that. If you look at the lines 2 and 3, sales and EPS; in good times we're growing really strongly. In tougher times like COVID, like now, we're pretty resilient. And on the top line you can see that through all of that, we're growing profits, we're growing operating margin. And 4, 5 and 6, we're delivering strong cash flows, good returns and finally, we're delivering on those environmental promises. So with that, I'll hand over to Nick to give us the operational overview.

Yes. So just a recap of what we're about. We think that we have a very strong value proposition. We create innovative products that are driven by a technological need and we help customers create solutions for their equipment that they perhaps wouldn't otherwise be able to do. So it's got very high added value. We increasingly price according to the value that we're creating rather than the sort of cost-plus mentality. And very important today we have the flexible international production footprint is important and very relevant. We can move production according to where customers need it or perhaps in this case where tariffs are more dictating it currently. So we're creating a real value solution for big customers globally and they like it, they need it. And we are building a very strong position that we're able to add to by acquiring other similar smaller independent stand-alone businesses and build out our footprint. So we start from a strong base. We have a very clear strategy to grow, acquire, generate more efficiencies and repeat. So yes, we're in good shape. So this is just a quick overview of the group. At the top right, you can see the geographic splits. I think perhaps most relevantly down at the bottom left is the organic growth profile through the year. The headline point here is that the destocking has been mostly felt in the U.S., which is down 16%. That follows 20% organic growth last year followed by U.K. and Germany both down 7% and then the Rest of Europe and Nordic down around 3%. The one bright spot was Asia, which recovered by 1%. If you look at those bar charts on the right, you can really see the difference between the first half and the second half. So the blue chart at the bottom there, bar chart, you can see that the industrial connectivity and security sectors were down 10% organically in the first half recovering to 9% organic growth in the second half. So very strong switch in performance as that destocking sort of came to an end there. Looking at the data, a different slice of the same data. The middle bars there, you can see that our Top 10 customers at a group level were down 5% organically in the first half, up 13% in the second half. That's significant because sort of 18 months ago, the first signs of destocking were led by those Top 10 customers and you can see how that's played through the year and then recovered strongly in the second half. Design wins, we always talk about our design win figures. The performance continues to be strong. We grew 5% in the year. More importantly perhaps, that's up 30% on 2 years ago. So very, very strong design wins. And despite the softer top line, the design win progress has continued albeit at a slightly slower pace, but nevertheless continuing. So we have a bank of design wins registered during the year with an estimated lifetime revenue potential of over GBP 350 million. As we always say, you can't precisely correlate design wins to next year's sales numbers because it's not that closely related. But the thing that I always ask you to remember is that without design wins, we would have no future revenue. It is fundamental to this business and they are in good shape and as you can see from the chart at the bottom right, they're continuing to grow. And then in addition to that, behind the design wins is the list of new opportunities that we're working on where we have a pipeline there of well over GBP 1 billion potential value coming through. So really good fundamental for the business. Notwithstanding the year's negative organic growth, we're focused on long-term growth markets. Actually they have been more and our revenue has been more resilient than the market overall and what we expect to see is very good sort of steady recovery of revenue over the next stage of the cycle sort of playing into this whole point about long-term growth through various cycles. In the Capital Markets Day last September, we added security as our fifth target market. That's obviously a bit sort of flavor of the moment. Our security market is focused on both commercial and military security applications. And in terms of design opportunities and design wins is obviously a fairly fast growing sector at the moment. But the other 4 target markets, industrial and connectivity is a fairly wide area, but continues to be an exciting area. There's actually quite a lot of technological innovation going on in that area, particularly in the sort of connectivity of industrial applications, robotics, AI controlled remote applications, things like that. Medical: medical is mainly medical equipment for us; think scanners, think diagnostic equipment, things like that. Transport is principally things like rail and marine. It's not electric cars, never has been. And then renewable energy now is we sold our solar business, the Santon business, last year. So it's now principally wind along with a little bit of hydrogen. So those are all markets that they all ebb and flow at slightly different timings, but they are good markets we believe for the long-term sustained growth of the business. Looking at the Magnetics & Controls division. You can see here that, as Simon reported, it was down 11% organic. Sales were down 11% organically for the year. But importantly, orders for the year were up 4% -- down 4% organically, but up 4% in the second half, up 15% in the final quarter and that was principally as the industrial and connectivity markets started to turn the corner. You can see geographically, North America being the main destocking culprit followed by sort of Europe and U.K. similar to the overall group profile. During the year we've acquired 2 businesses, which have actually gone into S&C, but we have brought in 3 businesses over the last 3 years; Silvertel, Shape and DTI; all of which get included into the M&C division. Sensing & Connectivity: so this business grew 1% organically, but orders grew 12% again with the second half orders up 4% and fourth quarter orders up 15%. So very, very strong recovery again as the destocking came to an end. Hivolt and Burster are the 2 recent acquisitions we made. Hivolt in Northern Ireland last August and then Burster in January of this year based in Germany and you can see here the slightly different geographic profile. So U.K. is a bigger proportion of revenue here, 22% of revenue and that was down 6% in the year. North America just slightly better than flat at up 5%. That's principally driven by some of the big security applications. A little bit on order book. So we have currently about 4.5 months order book. That's down from the 7-month sort of peak order book level that we had at September '22. That's actually slightly elevated about 3 to 4 weeks compared to historic norms and there are really 3 reasons for that. Firstly, I think it's fair to say across the industry generally, customers have moved from a just-in-time to a just-in-case mentality. It doesn't do them any harm nowadays to just put a little bit more order book in place. Secondly, actually some customers particularly in some of the big sort of medical customers that have been destocking pretty significantly as their demand profile has actually softened slightly as well so it's pushed out. So they've pushed out some of their orders and we generally don't allow reschedules, but there's been a bit of an effect of that. So it means that it effectively extends the order book coverage window. And then actually on the positive side, we're seeing that 15% pickup in orders that we saw in the fourth quarter includes orders long term being 12-month frame orders that we're receiving from some of our big recovering customers. So we've seen some big industrial and medical customers place 12-month orders, which are firm. The call-off scheduling varies a little bit, but that all goes into the order book and that has obviously an averaging up effect. So the net effect of all that is the order book is slightly elevated, flattening out overall from the adjustment period of the prior couple of years and we think that, that's probably likely the new norm for now in coverage terms. So outlook. Importantly for us, the growth drivers are in very good shape. Our order trends and sales trends are steadily improving. Most of our business units now have bottomed out and are picking up, a little bit more to go; but most of them are there and I'm sure as [indiscernible] the final steps will follow. We have a very, very good bank of design wins, which are important for driving the medium-term organic growth and we've got a very significant pipeline of acquisition opportunities. So the areas that we need to be -- the drivers that we need to be strong are strong. So that's really good. We've unchanged the outlook for this year. We've got a positive outlook for FY '26, further progress. Q1 has kind of started okay, a bit better with further continued improvement steadily. It's doing what we would expect it to do. Our expectations are for the year to have the normal H1/H2 split. We're fairly balanced, sort of 47-48,-52-53 typically first half, second half split and this year is no different from that. And as we've talked about, we've upgraded our margin targets. So notwithstanding the somewhat volatile trading conditions that could have sort of adverse or positive effects, we are doing all we can to continue making good progress and we're well set to continue that trend from here. So that concludes the presentation. I think now we'll move over to questions and answers. We'll probably move up to the table, shall we?

Mark Fielding from RBC. Actually 2 questions, please; 1 very short term, 1 much longer term. Short term just give us any comment on whether you've seen any recent change in trends in the last couple of months after tariffs, just how things are evolving in the more near term. Maybe just do that first and then.

There's certainly more uncertainty unquestionably. There's less clarity, things change; they pause, they start. There's a bit more start/stop. I think we've been somewhat shielded from that because our order books are actually quite good. So the call off or the sort of the sales output is much smoother. But the activity levels in the customers is quite clear. The levels of uncertainty have a slightly sort of destabilizing effect on behavior of customers.

So the longer-term question. Simon preempted the question of what will the split be organic, inorganic, but I'm still going to ask about it because actually the run rate in the last 7 years has been broadly on average 50 basis points per annum of organic margin improvement, which if you kept going at that rate would largely get you to that 2030 target. So I suppose my question is, is there structural reasons you wouldn't be able to continue to deliver the sort of efficiencies and benefits you have over the last 7 years from an organic perspective?

Well, I think we're going to continue to work on that. That's why I said let's wait and see. I think obviously some of the businesses which are lower margin, we've done a lot of heavy lifting on that. But acquisitions have come in. We continue to look to improve efficiency as well. So let's wait and see. But I think 1/3, 2/3 is a good estimate for now, but we'll push hard. And we probably said 1/3, 2/3 when we did. I think we did, but it came out different. So obviously the important thing is to get there.

I'm Mark too. Can we just talk a little bit more about the balance between the divisions? Because also S&C had a really strong year, margins north of 20%. Presumably margins don't go higher than that short term and perhaps more of the focus this year is what you can get out of M&C. But I guess the question is how comfortable are you that it's just later cycle issues versus something a bit more structural, particularly the U.S. being very weak and the orange one not liking windmills, whether you see any real impact from that?

Well, so if you stand back from it, we've always had a -- one of our focuses has been to reduce exposure to any 1 customer, any 1 particular market area and any 1 particular geography because over the long term you always get variations and things come in and out of fashion or vogue. And our model of low customer concentration, largest customer just over 6%, low individual application concentration or target market concentration; all of those things sort of protect us from the kind of gyrations that we're seeing recently. Has anything fundamentally changed in the M&C area? No. I mean M&C has a big exposure to things like electrification not just renewable energy, but sort of grid optimization and other sort of subset areas. So the reason that the M&C -- fundamentally, the reason that the M&C division is softer at the moment and recovering more laterally is because the sea of M&C is the area that has yet to fully turn the corner. So the follow-on question is, well, why is that? The why is because there are customers in that sector that have been very, very heavily affected particularly in medical in North America from the prior component shortage periods 2 or 3 years ago. So they stocked up very heavily. Our products into that sector have a high sort of semiconductor content, which kind of added to the concerns. And so customers are taking the stock that they've -- burning off the stock that they've had and so that comes through in the M&C growth rate. But the medical diagnostics is still a good space to be so it will come back once those inventories burned off.

Great stuff. If I can, sorry, 1 more. Just on the M&A side, you said you're waiting for the right moment, lots of prospects out there. But how much is that also affected by the geopolitics? Are you looking at different places, different industries? How does that affect your hunt for the next target?

Yes. We slightly shifted our focus. When the tariff issue was announced, we just sort of paused on acquisitions that were sort of U.S. dependent to some extent and shifted our focus to other areas. And then once the tariff situation sort of settles, then we'll look at it again. So in the short term, we're progressing opportunities that have a lower U.S. exposure until that's all clear and steady and stabler.

Andrew Douglas from Jefferies. Few questions, please. Can we focus a little bit on the 15% order intake in the fourth quarter? Sorry, I'm a bit lazy here. But is there a weak comp in there that we need to be cognizant of? Is it a one-off prebuy impact from the tariffs? I guess what I'm trying to get at is that just a 1 quarter blip and then we go into the first quarter and we're back to, you could say, progress. So I don't want to know it's mid-single digits.

Yes, there's a bit of all of that. So yes, there's not prebuy. Our products are on a 3- to 4-month lead time and we didn't see any kind of particular prebuying activity from customers. What we saw is that in certain sectors as their inventory destocking came to an end, their order levels just bounced back very strongly. So it was against a weak comp, yes, but a continuing sort of weak figure through the year. Then suddenly once you've destocked, then your order levels have to bounce back through to reflect your demand and that's what's happened.

But no double-digit order intake in the first quarter like we've seen in the fourth quarter.

I couldn't possibly comment.

It doesn't sound like it. Slightly following on from the 2 questions from Marks. On the M&A focus, clearly we've got this security focus. Given what's going on with commercial aerospace recovery and defense now being the vogue sector, are you struggling to find sensible acquisitions at sensible prices or are you guys operating in a slightly different world where maybe [ STR ] doesn't make a difference?

Our business is about buying reasonably priced high quality businesses so we're not going to buy a business that is very highly priced because it's in a super attractive sector. What we will do is buy businesses that have some degree of possible exposure into that space. We'll pay a reasonable multiple for them and hopefully try and accelerate the growth through increasing focus into that sector. That model works better for us we find. There's sort of a bit of a gold rush inevitably on some of the sort of defense related businesses and that's something we don't need to get involved with.

And then last one just on Mark's question. We've seen a lot of industrial companies in our universe having to put cost back in when recovery comes from a top line perspective. It sounds like you've got quite a lot of firepower in terms of cost out. Do you have to put cost back in soon? And if so, when do you pick that kind of moment? Is it based on order intake? Is it gut feel or is it post order intake improving? Just trying to figure out that kind of margin improvement. Do we have a little bit of a slow period and then a bit of a catch-up?

Yes. So growth continue -- I mean to continue growing, you've got to continue putting a steady rate of cost in. We have been taking cost out overall. But within certain areas of the business, as Simon referred to in his slides, we did actually put cost in. So you manage it very much on a micro case-by-case basis. We have plans to put more cost in and it's the rate at which we kind of put that cost in. So we will phase the cost in according to the conditions that we're seeing and that's always been the case and it will continue to be. So yes, there's cost to put in and we'll choose the timing when we feel the timing is right.

It's Maggie Schooley from Redburn. Order trends are obviously moving the right way, but what we've seen across the industry is that the sales growth has been lagging particularly somewhat different than in other cycles. Historically, you've probably had a time frame in mind from orders to sales growth starting to inflect. Can you give us some indication about what you're thinking in this particular cycle given the unprecedented conditions and what we're seeing across the rest of the cycle? So I kind of have a feel for it. And particularly that you mentioned you had some long 12-month orders in the fourth quarter. How should we think about that normalized order growth rate and then the conversion into sales?

So orders have inflected and sales are following, but they haven't fully caught up yet. That's the headline. So in the fourth quarter, we saw both areas come back strongly as we talked about in orders and that will start to flow through into or is starting to flow through into sales. And typically, there is a 4- to 6-month lag between orders and sales coming through realistically. I mean it varies from sort of application customer to customer, but that's broadly what we see. So what we're seeing is orders has done this and it's sort of back to where it was just over a year ago and sales is catching up.

And second question, if you could, qualitatively. On Page 18, you give the end market [ skew ]. So could you just perhaps give us some qualitative understanding of what you're seeing by end market so we have a better idea of how we should be thinking about that?

Yes. I mean so industrial and connectivity and security are growing quite strongly actually and within industrial and connectivity, that's quite a wide catchment area. Some of the connectivity, security related application -- connectivity, wireless comms related applications are growing quite strongly. Wireless metering as an example is something that has really been -- there was a big wireless metering project that was on hold this time last year. We had the design win, but it was on hold at the customer and that has now taken off. So we're seeing these sort of specific projects moving quite quickly. Security, there are quite a lot of moving parts in security. Actually it's not as simple as all security is up. It moves around quite quickly, but the net effect of security is up quite significantly. Mostly the security is in -- well, almost all of it is in passive applications so training, wireless comms, things like that for military applications and things like data centers and the like. Medical is slow. Medical equipment is slow. Our largest medical equipment manufacturer started to recover in the fourth quarter, but the others are playing catch up. Certainly some of our U.S. medical customers are still burning off some of that big inventory that they built up. Transportation is mixed. It's very much project by project. We've seen a couple of project delays in the U.S. offset by 1 new one that was accelerated, but it's a very lumpy kind of -- more a lumpy kind of business. Renewable energy is wind and that has been doing -- did very well during the first half, slowed a bit during the second half and actually in April and May has picked up again a bit. So I don't know if that gives you -- that's not very qualitative, but that's kind of a little bit of flavor as to what's going on.

It's good just to sort of reinforce. The reason why these are long-term growth markets, but we're in a number of markets rather than just 1. It's all about sort of derisking the model. So we're in a number of markets, we're in a number of technologies, we've got different divisions and all of that and you can see that this set of results is a great example of that. But it derisks it so we can still get that growth. Things are going to move at different rates, but we're in the right sort of areas. Overall, the company is going forward.

One last question kind of a swerve on Andy's and it's 2 part. Cash conversion, as you start to recover, should we be thinking more around the 90% level?

Yes. That's the history. If you look back at our conversion is when times are strong and you start and get some sales growth so you're going to have to invest in working capital. So that's why we tend to have that target of 85%. So it allows for lower conversion rates in higher sales times.

And a completely unfair question and I'm sorry for this. But there's been some concern with companies who have exposure in the U.S. on Section 899 from the Big Beautiful Tax Bill in terms of cash remittances. Have you had a look at that?

That is a real fair question. Yes, it is something that we are looking at. I don't think initially is an issue, but yes, we are looking at it and it might have changed by tomorrow anyway.

James Bayliss from Berenberg here. Just looking at Slide 25 in the appendix on the gross margin profile. Can you talk us through that acceleration from 2023 up to FY '25 and the 42.9% you've got now? And then if we think about the future margin story on the organic side of the business, how much more is there to be done on managing that gross margin up through proactively working with your operating companies?

So obviously acquisitions has a positive averaging up effect. We buy higher operating margin businesses and they have higher gross margins. Additionally to that, our organic margins have increased across the businesses. Although there's a mix effect in the headline figure as a higher margin business may be growing faster than a lower margin business, you get those kind of effects coming through. But despite that, actually across our operating businesses, almost all of them have delivered organic gross margin improvement. And the reason that that has happened overall is really 3 reasons. Firstly, flexible production is key. So as volumes have come off in the destocking, we've been able to take the direct costs down accordingly. So that protects, you don't get the gross margin squeeze that you get in a more automated production environment and we can do that because we've got high mix batch production operations. So that's the primary or that's the first reason. The second reason is efficiencies. So as we put businesses into clusters, we move stuff around. We do a lot of that. So we move production. We're always moving production from 1 business to another for some certain reason and customer and you get efficiencies from lower cost labor rates, better purchasing, aggregating some of the purchasing through the cluster and as Simon said, there are many, many, many small moving parts, they add up to quite a significant contributor. And then the third area is we have better -- we spent years building up this design pipeline. We put a lot of focus on the quality of the design pipeline and the design wins and one of the outcomes of that is that the margin profile of the revenue we have these days is better than it was 10 years ago. And so we are able to have more robust margins through better quality revenue streams. That's not about necessarily putting prices up with existing revenue, but having a better priced new revenue stream than perhaps an old outgoing revenue stream. So you add all that together and then you add on the acquisitions and that's how you get the gross margin improvement. And those plans are in motion. They've been running for a number of years and they'll continue to run. We actually did a check during the year to make sure that we weren't missing anything in terms of volumes and the resounding feedback that we got back from the businesses was that we're in good shape with the volume and our efficiency programs are working really well. So yes, just more of the same to keep going.

Yes. If you look back, we're quite visible in terms of we put out what the organic gross margin improvement is and obviously you can then work out what the bit is from acquisitions. And if you look back certainly in the last 3 years is a lot of that is organic. So I said it's 1.6 percentage points this year. It might be a similar -- I think it's a similar sort of amount in the previous year. So a lot of what Nick -- a lot of those initiatives that we've been following are coming through. The clusterings we've been doing a bit, but that's really taken effect over the last few years. So you're getting the benefits of that really coming through.

Sorry, can I just pick up on that? Because from the outside, it looked like the clustering has had a big effect, particularly in a period of weak volume. But how far can you push that before it starts to sort of dent the strategy of keeping things very decentralized and autonomous, particularly when it comes to I guess M&A and pitching to entrepreneurs who run their own businesses?

Yes. So we don't impose the -- we put businesses in clusters and the cluster management and the opcos within the clusters come up with these plans and they're all incentivized to do it. It makes sense for them to do it. I mean for example over the last year, we moved a business. We bought a business that had production on the East Coast of the U.S. and we've now integrated the production facilities into another one of our businesses in the U.S. in Minneapolis and that is just a net game. And all parties are incentivized to do it. It actually has other additional benefits because by moving the production into this larger facility, it comes with all the medical certifications required. So we've won approval of a new major U.S. medical customer on the back of it. So we'll get new revenue from it. So it's not like we're sort of forcing them to do something that they don't really would rather not do. It's more a case that we arrange -- we put them together, we incentivize people. We have common sort of aligned incentives throughout the group. We put them together and we see what opportunities and synergies we can find and then that's what comes through. So how far can they keep going? Well, we're cognizant that we've got more to do. Where is the limit? We're conscious that we don't want to push it too hard so I don't know. We'll keep going until we find that we can't get more. Of course the areas where it will come more from is the more recent acquisitions. So as we keep the rate of acquisitions going at a healthy leg, then we should be able to keep that coming through and those will then be classed as organic margin improvements.

Clustering is it's not some big hard integration. As Nick said, it's getting similar businesses to work closely together and find opportunities. So we're not sort of dragging out loads and loads of costs in order to do that. It's actually more about efficiencies at the top line and on gross margin.

Okay. I think this must be the last question. We're being waved at the back.

Just a follow-up on the other part of that actually which is the pricing part. I suppose I'm just curious whether the more inflationary world that we had in recent years allowed for a bit of an exceptional step change in how you approach pricing and whether you still see that same pricing momentum in the design wins going forward? And I suppose linking to that tariffs and are you going to deal with that potentially with partly pricing or surcharges because the 2 are obviously different in the long-term impact and just how does that all fit together?

So on the tariff point, there's a different -- so if it's a component that we -- if we're buying a component that is subject to tariffs for use in our production, then we -- because it will be a small proportion of the system cost, we will pass it through as a price increase. If the customer requests, and those conversations have been happening for some time now. In some cases the customer requests us to classify it as a surcharge and so they would choose to account for it as a surcharge and then we'll make the adjustment accordingly. But we basically class it as a price increase. Most of the tariff effects though are incurred not by us, but by the customer. So where the customer is importing product upon the point of importation, they pick up the tariff cost as it enters the country. So we don't actually mechanically see it.

And on the wider thought of the strong pricing of recent years, does that continue in the design win backlog that you have?

So we feel as though -- we price the products fairly for the value we are creating, which means we don't want to undercharge and we don't want to overcharge and we think we've struck that balance fairly well. But what that does mean is that as we've seen over the last 3 years as things like -- we have the rabid inflation of 3 years ago, we passed that through. We haven't got room to just absorb that and we've made that very clear. We've been consistent and customers have understood that and accepted that partly because we haven't taken advantage of it. And no one likes a price increase, but they have accepted that in the context of the products we're supplying. That's not an unreasonable position to take and we've pushed them through. So we continue with that approach and mentality. And so through the last 5 years and longer, our gross margin has been very steady because of that approach. We haven't taken any negative hits from adverse external conditions sort of blowing us off course and we won't because it plays to the heart of the value proposition of our products; very high tech, very highly differentiated, small proportion of customers' equipment spend and cost, but absolutely critical. And that's the sort of the backdrop. And if we don't abuse that position, then our position remains a strong one and that's very much what we intend to do. Thank you. I think that's it. We've got a full time. Thank you very much for coming and thanks for all the attention and questions. Thank you.