Essentra plc (ESNT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you. Good morning, everybody. I'm Scott Fawcett, Chief Exec of Essentra. Delighted to be with you today to share our 2023 results, first year of the new components pure-play Essentra. So plan for today, I'll give you a little bit of a highlight to kick off, then hand over to Jack who will go through some more detail on the finances. I'll then pick up on strategic update and regional performance and then we'll talk a little bit about outlook. So 2023, the word resilience is a word that we use a lot to describe performance last year. Clearly stepping into my dream job, January, last year, into a dream market with PMIs at 20-year lows was just what I anticipated. It has been a challenging year. 20 years since we've seen PMIs be below 50 for that period of time, and with a business which has great diversity in terms of end sectors, but broadly is linked to the industrial market and specifically we correlate quite strongly with PMI. It has been a challenging year from a revenue point of view and Jack will give some more color on that as we go through. However, absolutely delighted with the profit, cash performance and the progress we've made as a business. The team has done a great job to drive the business through this very difficult market conditions to deliver very, very credible and I say resilient performance. So operating profits, performing very well, in line with expectations. Clearly a lot of cost focus during the year, more than we would have hoped at the start of the year, but a good job managing the cost base both through the operating businesses and the central costs. And continued discipline on pricing has helped us protect and manage margin as well in what was still a pretty high inflationary market for us. Cash performance, excellent. Balance sheet in really good shape and the dividend in line with our stated policy of 3x cover. And then from a progress point of view, we've resized the corporate cost base, so brought that in line with the expectations we set out at the start of the year as we became this smaller pure-play focused business. The acquisition of BMP TAPPI in October was great, right in our sweet spot of a bolt-on acquisition in one of our core product technologies giving us some incremental products and strengthening our position in the Italian market in particular. Great progress on customer satisfaction. It's always difficult to know whether you're winning or losing in a market when your competition is so fragmented. The 1 metric we have which demonstrates progress is that customer satisfaction. So NPS plus 6 at 40 was a really pleasing result and very much driven by our employee engagement behind that. So employee engagement, 82% is fantastic, well above industry norms in what has clearly been quite a challenging year for the organization. So very, very pleasing. And then finally, continued good progress towards our sustainability goals. We'll talk later on some of the metrics we've hit. But also we announced recently SBTi have approved our targets, which again puts us in that leading quartile for a midsize manufacturing business. So continued great progress there. So with that, let me hand over to Jack, who will give you some more financial highlights and then I'll come back later.

Thank you, Scott. As Scott mentioned, revenue was challenging in 2023, but that was not an Essentra per se issue. That was across the markets. Our competitors and our peers saw that challenge. We're 4.4% down on a constant currency basis. I will go through some of the details of that in a moment. But adjusted profit is up some 85% to GBP 43 million, which is in line with what the market was hoping for in terms of consensus. The operating profit has progressed to 13.7%, which again is in line and some 660 bps above prior year. And cash conversion is outstanding at 112%. There are some specific reasons for that which I will come to. Net debt is at 1x, which again is in that 0.5x to 1.5x range that we've outlined as our long-term goals. And the return on invested capital is at 12.4% and we're trying to push that up over the coming years. Adjusted earnings per share has increased from 1.9p to 10.6p and the dividend is up some 9%. So a very strong set of financial KPIs despite the challenging revenue picture in the backdrop so very resilient performance. Going into the detail on some of that. You can see that organically our revenue is down 8%. Breaking that out, as I know you'll all want to do. We had a price increase of 6%, but we had 14% drop in terms of top line revenue. We did have some acquisitions. Wixroyd kicked in. It met its plan in -- last year and that contributed and we did have a slight ForEx headwind. These numbers are broadly in line with our peers. Scott is going to talk about some of the differences between the different regions and it is quite a nuanced colored picture so that'll be of interest I think. But nonetheless, 4.4% down on a constant currency basis, 6.4% reported in what was a very, very challenging year. Nevertheless, despite that, our income statement shows a huge increase to GBP 43.2 million in terms of adjusted operating profit. Our margins are retained at 44.8%. That's the gross margin. We don't disclose net. That margin is the key to driving value from a shareholder perspective. There's lots of data that show regression analysis. We were absolutely determined to protect that last year and we did through a mixture of confident pricing and also aggressive cost cutting. We said that we were going to take the central corporate costs from the older central group down to GBP 13 million. We said we'd do it by the end of the year. We actually did it with 6 months to go. That helped both from a profitability perspective, but also from a cash flow perspective. We are blessed. None of my making, but we are blessed that our treasury team secured long-term debt some years ago that goes out to 2033 at 3.4% tenor, which means that we have good, cheap financing. Everybody will be aware that debt and interest rose significantly last year in terms of the cost of it. We weren't affected by that, which is very helpful. Our effective tax rate, we guided to 24% to 25%. We did some good work on our ETR, our effective tax rate, and managed to maintain that at 23% to 24%, again which helped with the cash position. And the EPS correspondingly on the back of this good income management increased to 10.6p. Adjusting items, we're sort of at the end of this now because obviously we've had this big strategic process. Half of that relates to the strategic process. We won't be seeing that recurring. Half of this is noncash items. The biggest single item in there is the ERP. Scott will talk to that as to the progress. We are making some good progress on that and we'll speak about that, but this should be a much cleaner picture going forward. Now this is the last kind of remnants of the strategic process. I've mentioned the cash flow already. Obviously we've got the noncash items, which is primarily depreciation and right-of-use assets. Working capital, we had a slight increase on that last year. We built inventories in the -- in H2 because we were positioning for the market growth. Because we have the cash, we're investing. We're continuing to do that on our fast running products so that when the market does turn -- Scott will talk about where we are with that. But when it does turn, we are ahead of the curve and can pick up market share as a result. Net CapEx was at 4%. We've guided in our Capital Markets Day, we said that we'd be at 4% to 5% over the long term and we are. Within that, we've got some really interesting investments. So in Turkey, we put in some new injection machines. Mexico, we built out a major facility there, which is going to help us with our cost base in North America and some of our revenue opportunities. In Asia Pac, we put in 4 new laser printer injection machines as well and we've invested substantially in our Hengzhu operation from a health and safety perspective. So all of these are things that will drive growth in the future and it's an -- we'll come to the capital allocation later, but organic growth is the #1 priority for us and so we will continue to invest. Tax, as I say, we managed that very well and our ETR was sort of 23.5%, which meant that we had a lower tax charge than we planned. And the net working capital percentage of sales is 18%. That's at the lower end of where we've guided. We'd normally be more like 20%, but obviously with the revenue decrease last year and with the close inventory management, so that was at the lower end. So a very, very positive position on free cash flow. That is coupled with the fact that we already have a very strong balance sheet. So you can see we've got liquidity of close on GBP 250 million. We've got 1x net debt to EBITDA, which is well within the range that we've guided to and we're very comfortable with. We have a significant $100-plus million USPP facility that goes out to 2033 with a tenor of 3.8%, which is great. And we've got RCF, which is largely undrawn of GBP 200 million. So we are strong from a balance sheet perspective. We can fuel and feed any growth plans that we have with this sort of balance sheet. On the return of capital to shareholders, we've got a final recommended share -- or dividend of 2.4%. That's 9.1% up on the previous year. We guided on the Capital Markets Day that we would have a progressive dividend as we went forward and this is the proof of the pudding, it's up. The dividend is up in line with our profits being up. The shareholders' return. As you know, the special dividend was paid back in April last year. We made GBP 24 million of the GBP 60 million share buyback that we announced. 40% complete. It's likely to extend beyond 2024 and that's because of our capital allocation program. You're aware that we bought BMP TAPPI at the end of last year. We believe that we need to marry our capital allocation with our cash funds. But we are committed to the program, but it might run on a bit longer than originally thought. What is our capital allocation policy? Well, this is the mantra that we will follow consistently over the years to come. Organic growth is clearly the #1 priority. I've mentioned about the CapEx that we continue to invest in. Innovation is very important. We've just opened a sustainable research facility in our Kidlington operation here in the U.K. to kind of capture some of the developments that are going on around plastic products, et cetera and they're making good progress. Digitalizing customer experience, terribly important for our end customers in the route to market. We're spending significant amounts on that. Got a very strong pipeline of acquisitions. It's likely -- Scott will talk a bit more about it, but it's likely it will be in H2, probably not H1. But what we're trying to do, just to remind everybody back to the strategy in the Capital Markets Day, we want companies that have products that are adjacent to our existing products so we can widen our customer offering and we want things that enable higher organic growth through the ability to cross sell. I already mentioned the dividends, which are at 3x cover, progressive, and that will continue. So I committed at the Capital Markets Day that we'd always present this scorecard as to where we're at and here it is again. So revenue growth is red, that's in line with our peers and our competitors. We managed it well, but it was a very difficult challenging end markets. Profitability is green. It's significantly up. It's en route with what we said at the Capital Markets Day at 13%. Cash conversion is well over our long-term target of 85%. It's 112%. Leverage is smack in the middle of where we said it would be, 0.5x to 1.5x. Our ROIC is progressing towards that 15% return that we want. And our dividend is happening as we said and it's progressive. So a very solid, clear financial performance where we delivered profitable growth in a very challenging market. And with that, I'll hand it back to Scott.

Thanks, Jack. So quickly to add some more color to the regional performance. Before I do that, I just wanted to introduce some changes to the exec team that we've made in recent months. Hugues, you may have met at our Capital Markets Event, rejoined Essentra back in 2019 having actually started his career with us originally as a graduate in the early '90s. So Hugues continues to run the European business. Delighted to announce the appointment of Chris. Chris joins us with a very broad industrial background from various U.S. industrial organizations and is running our Americas business. So joined the business and the GEC last month. And then finally Richard. Richard is a former Richard Essentra graduate so he's done now 20 years with the organization, even longer than I have. Has always worked for me in marketing and product roles and over recent years has been heavily involved in our M&A activities in sort of sourcing and managing integration projects. And Richard is just in the process of moving his family to Kuala Lumpur to go and run the Asia business, which he knows very well given he bought half of it for us over the past decade. So a really nice fit for Rich going out there. So really good combination of Hugues with lots of experience of the group, Chris bringing in some fresh thoughts and ideas and Richard again having had that internal experience of the organization creating quite a nice balanced team running the 3 geographies. So talking about the geographic performance. Europe is our biggest region, is our most profitable region. It benefits from that very broad, diverse customer set, broad set of geographical territories and very high percentage of sales direct to end customers rather than through distribution. We have seen market conditions, which have been in line with the PMIs for Europe, which were softening through the second half of the year. We do benefit in Europe from having both of the acquisitions last year within the European business. But also we have the growth engine in Europe of our Turkish business and that's both great growth in Turkey, but also the products that we're making in Turkey are probably our most resilient product range. This is the access hardware, locks, latches and hinges typically associated with growth end markets so digitalization, electrification; selling heavily into those type of categories which makes it a really strong area for us. Finally on Europe, we have gone live with the ERP implementations. I'll talk more about that in the digital slide. But great to get those 5 sites in Eastern Europe live just at the end of the year. So good solid performance in Europe despite the wider macro and PMI challenges. From an Americas point of view, Americas actually saw the largest movement on volume in large parts due to this higher percentage of sales through distributors and distributors were destocking beyond end market trends throughout last year. Now I thought this time last year that would naturally come to an end at some point in the summer and it didn't so it continued through the year-end. It did moderate. The gap between end customers and distributors got narrower and narrower. And actually last month in P2 February is the first month we've seen distributor performance slightly better than customer performance. Now that's one data point. I'm not saying distribution destocking is over, but we're definitely moderating and perhaps we have reached that inflection point. But the impact of both a market softness from a PMI point of view plus distribution destocking has caused the largest volume movement in any of our regions through the Americas, which has led to this drop in gross margin effectively as we've had to try and manage that absorption cost challenge. However, we've maintained the faith. Lots of investment into the U.S. business to set ourselves ready for the upturn. The Monterrey facility Jack mentioned, great new facility, 10,000 square meters, will really be a great growth enabler for us. When we came out of the pandemic and we had that big growth drive there, getting labor into our U.S. factories was probably the most challenging part of that growth cycle and we'd expect it to be similar. The U.S. labor market remains quite hot. Similar challenge coming through the end of this cycle. So having Mexico really gives us confidence in our ability to keep up with growth in the Americas. Commercial teams, we've been investing in the Americas as well and service improvements have come through as well. The Americas actually had the largest Net Promoter Score improvement of all the regions last year. So very much set up and ready for growth and I'll talk more about what we're seeing from a growth point of view later. And then for Asia, again my overconfidence, this time, last year, China was opening up. We thought the world would return to a post-pandemic norm. China has been very challenging for us. We are seeing marginal improvement through our China businesses, but really mostly from China export to rest of Asia. The domestic China market continues to be challenging. So we are seeing gradual improvement. It's slower than we'd hoped 12 months ago and it's mostly China export into rest of Asia. Again interestingly on the same product line that's driving the Turkish business is driving the Asia growth in export there as well. So we've done some work on footprint, which I'll talk to. We've entered into the Vietnamese market with some sales and marketing resources. We are exposing ourselves to some of the faster growing markets, particularly in China where some of the domestic markets are more challenging. And it's been great to be able to get back to Hengzhu. I've visited them twice in the last 12 months now China's reopened. And we bought this business end of 2021. We couldn't visit it from outside of China for 18 months. So great we're back into that business and starting to drive some of those commercial opportunities from the Hengzhu acquisition. Moving on to talk about strategic update and the progress we've made during 2023. So just to recap, this is a fantastically positioned business. We are selling fairly low cost materials to our customers and their criticality far outweighs their actual unit cost value. So service differentiation is what we're trying to achieve. We're trying to outservice our competition, give our customers peace of mind in these products which are small, but critically important to their manufacturing processes. The market is massively fragmented so we have a huge opportunity to continue to grow our share and to look to acquire bolt-on acquisitions as we have done to continue to expand the proposition. So really well set strategic opportunity as a business. And our ambition remains as it was when we launched the business back in 2022 to double the revenue and to triple the operating profit of the group through this strategic positioning. Looking a little bit of color in terms of end customer segments and product segments. Probably most noticeable from an end customer segment is the weakness in consumer electronics. This has been a fairly global phenomenon for us and other people in the industry have cited similar challenges. We are seeing some growth in some of the faster growing areas so automation, renewables doing better, but that consumer electronics market really has been quite challenging. Again you saw a big spike in that market during the pandemic periods and we're seeing an offset to that right now. And then from a product point of view, probably access hardware remains our standout opportunity. The products that we're making in both the Turkish operation and the Hengzhu acquisition in China fueling growth for us and providing great cross sell opportunities for us as well. As I say, this product range is really nicely exposed to the dynamically good markets. So electrification, digitalization being trends that will support continued growth in that category. And our caps and plugs general protective business has grown largely as a result of the acquisition of BMP. Again probably the oldest product range within the group, something we know very well and BMP gives us some good flexibility both from manufacturing and product point of view. Talking about the acquisitions. I guess if we just step back, we've acquired 2 businesses over the past 15 months since we became a standalone business. Great that they're both performing in line with our expectations, demonstrating that we know how to find a good opportunity and also drive synergies from that. So we've launched about 11,000 products from Wixroyd into the European market. There's about 7,000 more products coming during the course of Q2. And we have about 1,000 products coming from BMP again coming into the European market during the course of quarter 2. So good start from both businesses. No surprises, doing what we expected and starting to offer us those cross sell opportunities. We are continuing to work on the pipeline. We do have a very long list of opportunities and 70 or so organizations. We've talked to 20 or so that we're keeping in regular contact and then active conversations continue. As Jack says, we're not planning anything for the first half. We would like to do something in the second half, but obviously we'll need just to find the right opportunity at the right price to make that. So we are disciplined with our approach to M&A. More than anything else, we won't transact just for the sake of it. But our H2 transaction would be our ambition should we be able to close the right opportunity there. So a little bit from a footprint point of view and I think the main point here is the capacity for growth that we have within the organization. And not wanting to get ahead of myself in terms of when that growth is coming, but we've set the footprint up ready for growth. The acquisition of BMP in particular gives us great flexibility in the European manufacturing base. Mexico gives us great flexibility in the Americas. One of the product areas that actually we've struggled for capacity is something called dip molding, so a soft molding process that we operate in a number of sites. We've added some further capacity into Brazil in that product area, which will help us grow as well. And then in Asia, we talked about the Vietnamese market entry and then a small footprint piece of work moving the -- or closing the Perth operations and relocating all of our Australian business to Sydney, which was a cost driven activity to be clear. So footprint well set up to support growth in the coming periods. Delighted with the progress that we've made on service through the year. It's always the pleasing point at the end of the year when we're getting our big customer survey and big employee engagement survey data back. So customer satisfaction, up 6 points in total to 40. Good progress towards that midterm target of 50. Again I think common consensus says if you're above 30, you're probably winning market share out there and 40 is clearly a strong print on that basis. Very much supported by OTIF, so our on time in full, the investment in stock that we've made. Still below where we'd like to be from a strategic point of view, but good progress over previous year and very much supported by employee engagement. I continue to be humbled by the amount of passion people have within the organization to help us succeed. We shouldn't ever take it for granted. We certainly don't. But that demonstration in the 82% employee engagement is a fabulous result in what was not an easy year for the organization. We basically didn't backfill very many roles. We removed roles from the organization. We made people really dig in during what was a challenging period clearly. And to have 82% engagement in that type of environment is a fantastic result, probably the best number in this whole pack from my point of view. A little bit about our digital journey. We continue to invest in the digital processes around the organization. Front-end websites, we've had live for some time. I talked last year about the digital hub we'd created in Istanbul. So we have a great team in Istanbul who are owning the product development roadmap for our websites, which is fantastic. Still working with some AI in both cross selling and lead scoring activities. CRM rollout, we've completed during the year. So we're using CRM for both pipeline management, but also for all of our customer service interactions. So much better ability to track customer service interactions now. The largest and most complex project clearly continues to be the ERP program. I'm pleased to report we went live in Eastern Europe in January. We decided to delay the go-live through the year-end to not cause any year-end complications. These ERP go-lives are never easy. I think we can say at this point that the Eastern European go-live is about as good as it ever gets. So we've managed to hit our sales numbers, we've managed to keep our customer service numbers high and we're getting back to a good level of operating efficiency in the organization now. Now the way we've done that is our people have worked incredibly hard. I had a call with the Polish and rest of the Eastern European teams on Friday just to thank them for all of their efforts. And that change curve, that change process is a challenging one and obviously we're stabilizing the system through here. But very good go live in Eastern Europe. I would say probably as good as we'll ever have in terms of the limited impact on the business. The key for us clearly is how do we accelerate that from this point onwards. We know we can't continue to spend this much cash every year at infinitum, but we're managing through that process. On top of that, we're now looking at an integrated planning solution, replacing some of our planning capabilities within the organization. And this will give us much greater global visibility of our demand profiles and support some of our procurement and make versus buy decisions. It actually gives us some of the benefits we may have associated with a global ERP but enables us get them at an earlier stage as well. So between the ERP and the integrated planning, we're expecting to spend circa GBP 10 million this year on SaaS software developments and continue that rollout into the European business. We're still expecting the benefits from the program to be the same, but it will take a little longer than we'd initially anticipated clearly. Moving on to ESG, really great progress across our whole ESG agenda during the course of the year. Probably most noticeable, the starting points, the approval from SBTi to our targets for carbon reduction. So had that approval in February. Part of the progress there, 38% reduction in Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions since our baselining time so really great progress there enabled by green energy and solar projects. Jack talked about the launch of the center of excellence looking at biodegradable and recycled content. So we're doing lots and lots of trials on new material types to try and understand how to reduce the carbon impact of our raw materials. But very pleasing to get to 20.7% recycle content through our plastics factories last year. That's 2 years ahead of the target that we signed up to. So again really credible progress. From a customer point of view, still working with customers in those high growth ESG friendly markets and having increasing conversations with customers in terms of how we support their own ESG journey as well. Internally again we're showing the cultural drive with employee engagement. Lost time accidents is clearly part of our culture. Safety is the starting point of employee engagement. So great to see a 57% reduction in lost time incidents last year and actually even greater reduction in severity. So frustrating we still have 10 accidents, but very good progress versus the 23 in the previous year. And then finally from a community point of view, we've joined UN Global Compact, which is great and relaunching our community volunteering programs with most sites now engaged in activities to support local communities, which is always fabulous to see. Moving on to talk about margin. Jack talked about the progression in the margin story we set out when we launched the business moving from 13% operating margin up to 18% over that 5-year window. Fantastic that despite the volume impacts in the first year, we have achieved 100 basis points of progress towards that target. That's really come through a number of these key areas. So pricing definitely benefiting for us. Efficiency, less so. Obviously, ERP benefits will come later. We have made some good progress on footprint so things like the closure of Perth, the opportunities that come from Mexico. Procurement has done a great job in the first year of a standalone business. We've got a new procurement team combining the group and divisional teams together and making some really good progress. And then obviously from an operating leverage, we haven't seen the volumes to gain leverage, but we've done a lot of good work on the cost base to help support that margin position. So very, very good progress in what's been a challenging volume market to get 100 bps of progress there. So now to talk about outlook, which is what everybody really wants to focus on and think about. How do we feel about the future? My starting point is stability, and that may sound underwhelming, but there were lots of last years. I was craving stability. So we continue to see stability in the organization. We're not seeing negativity in trends. The stability in sales and orders per day is a great starting point for us. There is a clear sign of some order book momentum around the organization. Now it's not significant, but generally it feels like we're seeing more positive news than we're seeing negative news right now, which is encouraging as we start the new year. Europe, we've seen a sequential improvement from Q4 into Q1, but Europe really is quite mixed for us. The German economy really is quite challenging. I was in Germany a couple of weeks ago and we're seeing lots of challenges from our customers; canceled orders, delaying orders. It really is a difficult environment again in line with the PMI data that we see published for Germany. However, offsetting that, the Turkish business continues to do well and actually we're seeing some interesting uptick in Eastern Europe. Just what you need when you launch an ERP program is a bit of a sales boost and have an additional challenge. But I think we believe some customers are migrating production out of Germany into Eastern Europe to try and offset some of that labor and energy cost inflation they're seeing in Germany. So Europe is mixed, but again very much in control. Americas, and then particularly the U.S. are probably seeing the most notable signs of improvement and again that does correlate with the PMI data that we're seeing. I think U.S. PMI has been above 50 for the last 2 months and we have that sense of some progress in the U.S. As I mentioned, distributor behavior seems to be normalizing. One data point to say it's totally normalized so I won't celebrate total success yet. But again that trend has been closing throughout the end of last year and perhaps we're at the point now where we're not going to see that destocking. That has quite a significant impact from us even if the distributors are just tracking end customers. It's a good benefit for us. So again Americas probably feeling like the best part of the group right now with the most opportunity and I think most economists would say that the U.S. is likely to lead us out of the downturn in industrial that we're seeing right now. And APAC continues to show this very gradual recovery, but China domestic continues to be very flat and the growth and the recovery really is coming from that China export market for us. It is export into the rest of Asia to be clear. It's not export to the Western market. So again it's something we wanted to invest and wanted to drive. So overall stability, some order momentum across the group. Probably the Americas is the one you call out as being the most resilient. And again profit and cash continuing to be in control given the work we've done to reset the cost base of the organization. So expectations for 2024 are unchanged. Trading so far is doing what we expect it to do. Performance is going to be marginally weighted to the second half of the year. We are normally marginally weighted to the first half. But again, I think all common consensus says we're likely to see gradual improvement through the year and that's how we're forecasting the business to perform as well. Balance sheet continues to be in good shape. We continue to invest in the business. We talked a lot about the investments we made last year even in such a difficult market. We'll continue to do that as we go through the course of this year. And fundamentally, this is a great robust differentiated business. Still very confident in achieving those midterm targets and making further progress through 2024. So to summarize, really it's being prepared for return to growth. We're not calling growth quite yet, but we have a sense it will come through the course of the year, maybe different geographies at different times, but we're in a good position to take advantage of that. The footprint's in good shape. The product range is in good shape. The M&A is giving us cross sell and growth opportunities. We've invested well in the group during the course of the year to position ourselves ready for the market upturn, which we know will come. And the team is very much together and collected and ready for managing us through this next part of the cycle. Central costs are very much in control. New management team coming in place is to help us drive that geographical model. Engagement is in a really good place across the organization to support us in managing our customer service. And most importantly, we're gaining customer sentiment with an NPS of 40. Customers want to work with Essentra. And when their volumes return, I'm sure they'll be sharing those with us. So that's the end of the presentation.

We will move to Q&A. As always, all difficult questions for Jack, please, as we've always agreed. Sanjay?

Sanjay Vidyarthi from Liberum. A couple of questions. First one, if you could provide any metrics on how the cross selling has progressed through the year, that would be helpful. Second one is just in terms of customer numbers. Could you talk a little bit about churn and particularly new business wins?

Yes. So 2 things to talk about. Cross sell has remained totally flat across the year. Now clearly there's less cross sell opportunity in a market like 2023 than would have been in previous years. So not totally surprised by that. A little disappointed. It remains a real focus for us. We're actually baking cross sell further into sales incentive programs in 2024 to help us continue to focus and drive that. But totally flat '23 versus '22 is the outturn. In terms of new business wins, we are seeing an uptick in new business as we come out of the year. That new business is predominantly in the existing customer space. New customers are down year-on-year and retention is improving I think linked to the customer satisfaction that you're seeing. The 1 thing I would point to and I think as you'd expect any management team to do, we did reduce our marketing investment during the course of last year on the basis of it being a very difficult market and is not seeing the returns that we would normally see from the marketing investments. So that's one of the costs that we have taken out of the organization. We will start to put it back when we start to see the growth opportunities coming. So whilst we're not investing as much in marketing, we are going to be penalizing some of those commercial metrics. But again the returns are the right thing to do in this type of market we feel.

Just one other question. One other question. When do you think you will start building stock again or is it tentatively already started?

It's already started. So we added some stock in the second half of last year. We're planning to continue to do that. So the general message for the organization is let's get our service proposition in as good a place as possible; uncontrolled fashion, very much planned and controlled, but we'll continue to get services as high as we possibly can do.

James Beard from Numis. Two questions from me, please. Can you talk to your expectations around pricing in 2024? And secondly, in terms of your OTIF metric, your -- we saw somewhat of an improvement in '23, but you're still way below your sort of 95% OTIF target. How do you get from here to that 95% target? How long would you expect that to take? And to how -- to what extent can customer NPS continue improving whilst you remain below that target?

Yes, perfect. Do you want to get pricing first and I'll come around to...

Yes. So pricing we're estimating to be 2% to 3% this year. Well, notably our cost base will probably be less than that. Maybe break out the major cost groups. Labor has certainly come down from the high levels it was last year. It's still fairly high, but it's coming down in all the major markets. Some of the professional service costs such as IT, et cetera have continued to escalate. Materials, which is obviously our biggest costs, are flat to down. So we do anticipate that our pricing to cost margin will continue to be positive in 2024.

And then on OTIF you say there is an improvement in the year, but it's probably not as great as we would have hoped. A few things to add on OTIF. We measure OTIF and we also measure a thing called strike rate, which is the sort of almost stock availability measure at a point in time. That has made further progress during the year. So what we're seeing is we can actually serve customers with some stock at the point of time of the demand, but we may need to then manufacture to cover the entire quantity of customers' demand. So that -- those 2 metrics both work hand in hand. If you look at the organization, about 60% of what we sell is sold from stock and about 40% is made to order. So there is also a need for us to continue to work down our lead times for the make-to-order items. So that's been a big focus and we've got many sites now down to a 3-week manufacturing lead time, which will continue to be very supportive. And then from an NPS point of view, the other thing which is a play is around our customer service. Whilst we still want to have that strong stock position, in customers' minds actually hitting the date you tell them you're going to hit is the most important thing. It doesn't need to all be from stock all the time. So improving our ability to commit to and hit a date actually will continue to improve NPS and there are a couple of things helping us there. The CRM platform gives us greater control of those customer communications and then the integrated planning that we're working will also give us much better global stock visibility to get to those dates. So I still think we can progress. We will progress OTIF, but I think we can progress NPS even beyond OTIF. The 2 of them correlate, but they're not the only drivers towards the NPS metric.

Adrian Kearsey, Panmure Gordon. Two questions, if I may. You mentioned about NPS going to 40. The target in -- 50. When you look at the NPS scores across different geographies, what are those variances telling you about what's going right and where are the opportunities? And then the other question sort of Asia Pac quite challenged, but your gross margin moved up and sort of could you explain what happened?

Sorry, Adrian. On gross margin, could you repeat the first question?

On the NPS, you moved up to 40. What are the variances telling you in terms of what you're doing sort of really well and where you can learn?

I think it's actually very difficult to compare markets with NPS. Each country almost has its own culture of how customers respond to NPS. Let's think of the Dutch effect. The Dutch are notoriously more challenging for NPS. My wife gives me a very low NPS score because she's Dutch as an example of this. But -- so 's difficult to compare and contrast across markets. The real key is the trend within markets. And we've been looking at NPS since I joined the organization and it's something I brought in very early. So we understand trends within markets. The biggest growth in the Americas really links back to our improvement in service capabilities in the Americas, greater stability in our sales teams and the Americas are showing that trend. I say most markets actually saw very good progress last year, but it is about looking at each geography rather than comparing and contrasting against them. Now what we do in total just to give us a sensible global number is we actually weight the country numbers based on the active customers in that market as a proportion of the total. So it's a weighted average number that you get to the 40. So the mix effect can't impact the progress we're making. So it's a sensible viewpoint to talk about the 40 and the progress there, but the countries are very different. Now Asia scores typically much higher on NPS and employee engagement than some of the European markets for example.

Andrew Douglas from Jefferies. Hopefully 4 quick questions. Yes 4, I'll go up from 3. In terms of the growth investments you talked about in 2023, how much more do we need to put into the business to drive growth when you talk about Vietnam and other bits and pieces? Is this now a journey for the couple of years or have you done the big heavy lifting now and it's now about market and you benefiting from it?

So there will always be an opportunity to invest in growth in the organization in reality. Now the big heavy lifting of last year was the Mexico site. We don't do those things very often. We don't have any more of those planned at this point in time. We have talked about probably a U.S. warehouse capacity challenge at some point in the next 2 to 3 years as an example of that. So the investments we're making are becoming more in SG&A than they are in operational footprint, but we will continue to invest in SG&A as we see market opportunities. Now there's opportunities to move around the world, a little bit less in China right now, a little bit more in Southeast Asia. There's a good debate about how much do we put into India at this point in time as an example of us being selective around where we see the SG&A investment.

And do you think you're positioned, if we think 5, 10 years, tough question, in Eastern Europe, if we continue that shift from West to East, do you have enough capacity out to address it?

Yes. We have a fabulous business in Eastern Europe and we were in Eastern Europe very early. Before I joined, we had very good business in Eastern Europe. We've added some scale to them. We've got a good management team there. So I think if Europe is near shoring, Eastern Europe and Turkey is the other market, which is gaining from near shoring within Europe. We have very good businesses there, some of the best in the entire organization. So I think that's a really good opportunity for us.

Perfect. You talk about the first half; second half weighting might be a bit bigger than normal. Are you able to help us just understand what you mean by that?

Yes. So from a revenue point of view, we're normally 52/48, first half/second half. We're expecting 49/51 this year, so a reversal. So a slight second half again. I think most consensus says we're expecting the market to give us some tailwinds as we go through the year. So it feels logical at this point in time. PMI starting to improve so give us confidence that, that shape is a sensible one for us.

And then just 2 quick ones for Jack. ERP costs post '24, do we start seeing those declining or is it moving to the right?

Probably '25 will be around about the GBP 10 million level again, but it will decline after that, yes.

Okay. And just on ESG, are we fully linked now with the ESG progress you're making to your bonus and LTIPs further down the organization management wise?

Yes. So short-term bonuses pick up waste this year. Last year they had the recycled content. So waste is a big area of focus, which is part of that overall SBTi commitment. And then our LTIPs are on the energy reduction part of it and gender diversity within the leadership team. So yes, they're strongly correlating across. Quick question, any questions online at all? I think we're done. Thank you all for your time. We'll be around for coffee if anybody wants to chat further. But thank you all for the time and attention.