Essentra plc ($ESNT)

All right. Thank you all, and welcome. I'm Scott Fawcett. I get a slide to remind me, Chief Exec of Essentra, I'm delighted to be joined here today by Rowan Baker, our CFO and to take you through the results for last year of 2025. So pleasing that we have got a set of results in line with expectations, really demonstrating the agility and resilience of the business, continues to be an interesting time to run a global industrial business, choppy waters, lots of challenges emerging, but the business has responded very well to those challenges and come through with a respectable set of results. So most pleasing, I think, is the return to revenue growth in the second half. So all 3 regions in growth by the end of the year. Gross margins remaining robust at 43.7%, and we'll talk a little bit more through that in terms of the color by region as we progress through the presentation. And again, operating profit, as we expected at GBP 32 million which does include a partial build back of variable compensation, which we totally removed in the prior year. Balance sheet in good shape, which Rowan will talk to more later. So as headline numbers sort of represent, I'd say, respectable outcome for the year, a heck of a lot going on inside the business to enable us to get there, both in terms of the operational activities. So work on footprint. We have closed a couple of facilities during last year. Lots of work at driving manufacturing efficiencies. I'll talk to some of those through our regional slides as well and actually good progress on pricing and good to see pricing coming through even more strongly as we exited the year. And again, some of that's very much necessary as a result of the tariff implications that we saw through the U.S. as well. Strategically, some good investments coming into the business as well. So we are establishing a clearer focus on product expertise, and I'll talk about that in some of the strategy slides. We've put a new team in place to help us drive that expertise across the 5 product categories that we manufacture and also enabled us to deliver a small bolt-on in December, Device Technologies. And again, I'll touch on that in more detail towards the end of the presentation. So well positioned to deliver further progress this year. Lots of work on the foundations, business is in good shape. Lots of opportunity for growth, both growth that we can drive ourselves through pricing and our own market share work and also ready when the markets do become more cheerful. However, timing of that remains as uncertain as ever. However, we're pleased to say our expectations for this year are very much unchanged, and we'll sort of reinforce that as we go through the presentation. So with that, let me hand over to Rowan to give you some more color on the numbers.

Thank you, Scott. Good morning, everyone. So turning to financial results for 2025. So our revenue stood at GBP 302 million, which was flat year-on-year on a reported basis. Adjusted operating profit was down at GBP 32 million, very much as expected, in line with all expectations there. Adjusted operating margin at 10.6%, again the decline year-on-year, well flagged and in line with expectations. That gave us an adjusted earnings per share of 6.1p. Our net debt to adjusted EBITDA at 1.4x remains strong and within our guided range of below 1.5x. We had an excellent adjusted operating cash conversion of 137.5%. And a dividend per share, we're announcing a final dividend of 1.2p, total of 2p for the year, which is at a dividend cover of 3x. So looking at the income statement, just a word on the gross margins here. You can see gross margins remained robust at 43.7%. Now that gross margin was in line with expectations, and we had a number of things going on there in terms of that year-on-year variance. So that was predominantly led by geographic mix both in terms of the 3 regions themselves, but also Turkey within Europe. Turkey is a lower margin than the rest of Europe. So that mix affected things. The Turkish inflation and also a temporary investment in service recovery following our ERP implementation of Dynamics 365 and that was predominantly in Nettetal in Germany. We had significant focus in the second half on margin improvement. We optimized the footprint closure of Japan and Costa Rica, and we improved our pricing performance and our gross margins did tick up ever so slightly in that second half. Another thing to mention on this page is our effective tax rate. Now we benefited for 2 years now in a row of deferred tax asset recognition. So that's why that effective tax rate is lower at 15.8%. So taking a look then at revenue in a bit more detail. So although we were flat year-on-year on a reported basis, on a constant currency basis, we were up 2.5%, which is obviously pleasing to see. EMEA was up 2.6%, Americas 2%, APAC 3.1%. Predominantly, that is pricing, but there is some volume in APAC. It was a game of 2 halves, though, in that the -- you'll recall at the half year, I said that we were down year-on-year on a constant currency basis, but that recovered to 6.4% in the second half. That is a combination of pricing and the easing comparatives there because as you will recall, half 2 2024 was tough. So a little bit more information then as to how the margins have been moving. Now there's quite a lot going on in this chart. So I'll talk you through it. So the first bar you can see there is volume and regional mix. It is mainly regional mix. There's only a tiny bit of volume in there. So regional mix, as I've said, that mix between the 3 regions and also Turkey within Europe. And then the 2 bars that are grouped together there being inflation and pricing. Now at the end of the first half, we were seeing a net impact of inflation. So we weren't able to cover inflation with pricing in the first half. But we've stepped up those pricing activities significantly in the second half, and our pricing impact was about double where it was in the first half, in the second half. And in the second half, we have more than covered inflation with our pricing. But net-net, overall, that still gives us a little bit of a net impact of inflation. Now cost efficiencies is the next green bar, and that's an important one for us. There's a lot of activity going on in terms of cost efficiency. We've optimized that footprint. We have a number of operational footprints, sorry, operational improvements, I'm sorry, going on, which Scott will talk you through a little bit more of later on, and that is underpinned also by rigorous cost control within the business. So there should be more of that to come as we go into the coming years. And again, as Scott mentioned earlier, we've been able to bring back importantly some of the variable compensation into the business this year. Again, this was well flagged and important because we did take out all of that variable comp in 2024. So really important that we were able to bring some of it back. We've got investment in the service issues in Nettetal. So that's freight and staff costs and then FX and the like, and that brings us to the 10.6% for the year. Moving on then to adjusting items. Now consistent with the prior year, this is predominantly our ERP rollout, which you can -- for which you can see the costs coming down nicely year-on-year and a total of GBP 12.5 million of adjusting items. We are on track with the ERP. Again, Scott will talk about this in a bit more detail, but we do still have more of it to go and we'll be completing that by Q1 2027. Moving on then to cash. So this chart shows our net debt movement year-on-year. So going from GBP 68.2 million in 2024 to GBP 60.7 million in 2025, so that's a GBP 7.5 million reduction in our net debt. Again, a number of things going on here. We had an excellent adjusted operating cash conversion of 138%. Now that does include the sale of our Kidlington Warehouse Building Block B. And if I were to exclude that, though, that would still give us a cash conversion of 120%, so still very, very strong. A number of other areas to draw your attention to. So adjusting items of GBP 16.6 million. That is higher than it is on the P&L slide, predominantly because of some P&L credits that don't have a cash impact, but also the settlement of some balance sheet items. The green bar relating to legacy business. Now this is a couple of items that, again, were well flagged through the course of last year, the GBP 10 million of consideration -- deferred consideration for filters, the filter sale and also the sale of a legacy property up in Nottingham. So those have come in there. And the M&A, GBP 5.6 million outflow. Just as a reminder, this is the acquisition of Device Technologies, which took place in December. We got that at a very attractive multiple of 6.6x EBITDA with a total cash cost of $6.7 million, a further [ $1.2 million ] of deferred cash outflow to come dependent on performance. And then to finish there, the shareholder returns of GBP 9.3 million, which also includes the share buyback of GBP 2.6 million in that number. Only other thing to draw your attention to on this slide is CapEx to sales of 3.6%. That's slightly below our guided range. Again, it's just us being very cash conscious and controlling of the spend to make sure that we are fully seeing the return for everything that we are investing in. So that's cash. Moving on then to capital allocation. Our capital allocation policy remains unchanged. A couple of things to draw your attention to. Organic investment remains the most important one there. Clearly really important for us to be investing where we can to drive future efficiencies in order to grow the business. We're keen to continue to invest in innovation. That's mainly digital and sustainability there. Acquisitions, again, should be becoming more of a key feature for the business. Going forward, we do have a strong pipeline. We're really focused on achieving the benefits through cross-sell and compounding those earnings over time. The guardrails that we have in place, nothing new here. You should expect to see from us a greater than 85% cash conversion. So return on invested capital of 15% for any of those big cash investments. And then just a word on the net debt to EBITDA, we would expect to remain within that 1.5x range. But just a caveat to that, which again, I've said before, which is if we were to see an acquisition that would tip us ever so slightly above that. Then we would do that on a temporary basis as long as we could see a path right back to that 1.5x again. Okay. So finally then from me, 2026 guidance. All of this is against the backdrop of a highly uncertain macroeconomic evolving situation, but we don't see ourselves as having direct impact due to that. It would be more the indirect elements that we need to watch. Group revenue growth of 3% to 4%, we'll see a modest level of margin expansion. We are very, very focused on gross margin improvements on our pricing, on our cost efficiencies. But in 2026, that will continue to be offset by a further -- partially offset by a further build back of variable compensation, obviously, dependent on performance. Final full year of ERP-related adjusting items. So we'd expect our adjusting items to be around the GBP 12 million mark. Effective tax rate, I would expect to see normalize more to that 26%. You can continue to expect an excellent operating cash flow from us. We have that greater than 85% guardrail there. And we continue to maintain a strong balance sheet, which will enable us to invest in key areas going forward. So with that, I will hand you back to Scott for a regional update.

Thank you very much. So just to bring a little bit more color into the 3 regions. So starting with EMEA. So again, returning to growth in the second half, actually, strong growth, somewhat driven by Turkey. So Turkey performed very well, again, hyperinflation market, but also the markets that business exposed to are typically good growth, structurally growth market. So that helps as well. But even excluding Turkey, the core European business back into mid-single-digit growth in the second half, which is great, admittedly on some weaker comps in the prior year, but still positive impact to growth. Overall, we are seeing growth in those faster-growing end markets. We'll talk more about this later, but showing that we're focusing the business on the right path of the organization, right path of the market opportunity. Margins diluted due to 2 issues. One of them being this overperformance of Turkey relative to the core business and Turkey does come through at a lower gross margin versus the very high gross margins we have in core Europe. And then secondly, we invested into effectively protecting service as a result of the German ERP go live. That went live at the start of last year, and we had a higher backlog than we'd expect pretty much right the way through to late summer. So we spent money on freight and labor to manage that impact on service on customers. That did come down by year-end. We didn't see any repeat of that through the Italian, Swedish, Finnish, South African go-lives. I'm pleased to say the go-live of the ERP in the U.K., which we did on the 2nd of January, has gone very well. So we're now at 90% of the region trading on the ERP. Two core sites left, which are the Italian acquisition, BMP in Milan, which we'll do in Q3. And then the Turkish business, which we'll do again right at the end of the year. So we'll enable ourselves to close this year, but be ready to turn on, on the 2nd of January, which you'll see us then completing the rollout as soon as we take Turkey out of the early life support process. Lots going on in terms of improving the performance of the businesses as well. We talked about Turkey and hyperinflation that has had an impact on the cost base in Turkey over the past few years where you're seeing the dilution of the lira, not matching the inflation rate. So fundamentally, labor has become more expensive over time. It has led us to accelerate the investment in automation in the site. We did a couple of projects in the last year. This is a cylinder assembly line, which is a multistage process, bringing together a complete cylinder unit. Between those 2 projects, probably taking 30 to 40 heads out of the organization as a result of that. And I said, we've actually now accelerated the next 2 automation projects with Turkey as well, so they'll come through during the quarter of this year. So process automation is an important part of our opportunities we drive an efficient organization. Moving on to the Americas. So again, good -- pretty much consistent growth through the year. What we did see is -- and we talked about the half year is a slowdown around Liberation Day. So it took the wind out of our sales, what was a good start, but came back to a sort of more normal level of growth through the second half. Great work on pricing by the team. Bizarrely somewhat helped by the tariff situation leading to a more inflationary market, but they did a great job of being agile to react to those pricing changes because they changed quite frequently, and we managed to offset that with the pricing activities. Distribution channel, which is over 1/3 of the business, almost 40% of the business in the U.S. remained stable. So we're not seeing any great destocking or stocking up through distribution, I think, in line with what's a fairly flat market overall. We are seeing some good growth in those growth end markets, again, though, which is, again, pleasing to see. In terms of efficiencies last year, Costa Rica operations were closed to and moved into Mexico in the second half of the year. So that's enabled us to save some overhead and some complexity in the business as well. And overall margins remaining stable given that pricing performance that we had. Again, lots going on underneath the surface in terms of automation. This is a robotic multistage process that we put in place in Erie for our dip molding, replaces quite old technology. Again improves the cycle times of the throughput, uses less energy, produces better quality, generally helping us drive up a little bit of gross margin through that investment. So pleased to see that come fully online and start producing goods in the second half. Moving on to Asia. So as -- again, as expected, we knew that the second half in Asia was going to be less strong than the first half. We had won some very large one-off business at the end of '24, which flowed through to the first half. But overall, the underlying business in good shape. In particular, looking at the China business, export-orientated customers were performing very well. There is some weakness still in the domestic China customer set, and that trend is pretty much continued throughout the second half and into the start of this year. Again, seeing some good growth in those growth markets, which is great. And then we talked about this at the half year, but we've now fully exited from direct operations in Japan. Japan was really the only country in the group where the P&L wasn't massively positive. It was always a border line business for us. And effectively, we've now transferred that business to distribution. We've given those distributors some gross margin benefits, but we've taken all of our SG&A costs out of the market, enabling us to overall create a greater return for that. So gross margins in good shape, a little bit of pricing and pricing pressure in China. China is always the most difficult place to do pricing. Other areas of Asia like Australia are doing a good job on pricing, but overall holding that margin stable, which is pleasing. The image doesn't show everything, but this is a multistage automation project. The team we have in Ningbo, which is our legacy site in China are great at automating relatively complicated technical processes. So this is sort of a 2-part manufacturing process, insert molding, and they've got a great set of pick-and-place robots in place. So another great example of using some local automation to take cost out of a product and actually quite a technical solution in this case, which was great to see. So that's it from a regional play. Let's just step back and think about the wider group and where we are and where we're going as an organization. So just to remind you what do we do as a business. We're a manufacturer fundamentally, we're a manufacturer of what you described as relatively low cost items that are on our customers' bill of materials. And what we've done over the past decade or a little bit longer is grow those manufacturing capabilities to an ever broader set of products. So we now have 5 product categories that we're able to manufacture. The thing that ties them together, they're typically used by customers in their manufacturing processes, but they're typically right at the bottom of the bill of material when it comes to a cost point of view. So that gets you to a situation where actually the service of those items, those items are arriving on time and being good quality is far more valuable than the actual physical cost of those items. So service differentiation is the key to our success and enables us to command a reasonable price position, have strong margins and actually react to pricing challenges such as tariffs when they occur. So not totally price inelastic, but certainly one of the more elastic areas that you can see from a pricing point of view. So global service led because of the nature of products we sell, business with this breadth of manufacturing expertise. And I'll talk about the next slide, nobody else has brought those 5 product categories together under one roof. That's a unique position for us at Essentra. We're focusing on the end markets. You can see from all 3 regions. Our growth in those end markets is outperforming general industrial performance, which is great. So we're focusing on the markets, which have got structural growth, and we can help win with the winners. The way we win effectively, we're winning customers through product expertise, so we can help them find the right product. We have a real depth of knowledge given our manufacturing capabilities to help customers in the identification of the right product. But then uniquely, we can take them from that initial product across our product range and cross-sell to them into the other product categories. And then we keep customers because we make it hassle-free. We give them peace of mind so they don't want to shop elsewhere. The real magic in many ways is the high volume of transactions. So tens of thousands of products, tens of thousands of customers flowing through hundreds of thousands of transactions. That high mix is where the margin lies. Anybody can manufacture relatively simple plastic components like the way we do. If you are making 1 component in huge volumes and selling to one customer, anybody could do that in reality. You just wouldn't command the margins we command from producing single volumes of high-volume SKUs. That high mix is really where the magic lies and managing that data through the organization to bring those products to those customers in an effective way is how we make margin. And then that margin is reinvested in the business organically or inorganically. I have talked about product expertise and our investment in greater product capabilities this year and into new product introductions, but also through the acquisition of bolt-on businesses that help us grow that product range even further. So a little bit bringing each of those together and some evidence of the unique position. I have lost the header. The quick note is gone. Obviously this is going to be [indiscernible]. So there are headers here. This effectively is machine and component automation space, then coming into digital, then energy, special vehicle and then defense the last one. Thank you, Claire. So what you're seeing here is typically our growth markets enjoy a hot spot into a particular product technology. So machine component is going to machine automation is pretty common. Protection products going into specialist vehicles, again, lots of masking products going into production of specialist vehicles. Access hardware coming into energy and then cable management coming across a lot of them. But the compelling thing here is each of these customer sectors is buying more than just the 1 product where they start. They're able to come across the product range and by a broader set of products from us, hence, demonstrating the value of that cross-sell that we bring to the market. And what we're doing is constantly looking at new products and new product opportunities, to help us to drive these markets and drive that cross-sell even further. And typically, that's where acquisitions play for as well, really helping us to expand that product capability. If you look at those end markets and where they are and how they're growing. So they represent just under 50% of the business now, mid-single-digit growth last year from high single digits in the Americas to low single digits in Europe. Again, a good spread across. Relatively light in defense and aerospace, although the acquisition of Device Technologies will help us boost that a little bit. They have more aerospace exposure than we do as an overall business. And again, we're doing more and more work to focus ourselves and marketing teams onto these growth sectors. So regular marketing campaigns focused on these sectors and promotional activities into the sales teams. As well as thinking about how we identify prospects and really highlight those prospects into the commercial teams as part of the onboarding process. And then very much the new product agenda driven by thinking about what these customers are buying, what are their challenges, how do we help them overcome those challenges from a new product point of view. How that then translates into sales. So that 12-month rolling costs, so you can see peaking towards the end of the year. So driving good growth from cross-selling items, which is including new products. We've talked to the half year, good performance coming through from the last couple of acquisitions we've made, helping drive that product extension and new business wins. Service remains good, 40 NPS is a very high number, slightly down on last year. And within that number, there are 2 moving pieces. So Europe has fallen as a result of those challenges we talked about in Germany despite our offsetting of that. The U.S. actually increased well last year, which was good to see. But 40 still a very strong NPS overall and demonstrates that we've got good level of customer satisfaction behind us. Should never be forgotten that it's very difficult to have high levels of customer satisfaction without a highly engaged workforce. So 81 continues to be a strong level of employee engagement, again, slightly down, but we are on the third year of a difficult market environment. We're in a year where we come off paying no bonuses in the prior year. I continue to be amazed and grateful for the commitment of the energy around the organization. We have some absolutely committed superstars in the business always wanting to try and do the right thing for customers despite challenges that might get in the way. So great to see that level of engagement still remaining so high, well above a normal industrial metric would be, so probably 10 points ahead of an industrial average. Moving on to driving the foundations and driving our margins. So manufacturing and cost efficiency. We've given some examples around the automation that's in place, continues to do a good job on procurement. We continue to look at opportunities to in-source manufacturing, probably the best example last year. We moved some insulated spaces from being a bought item to a manufactured item out of our Thai facility in Rayong. So continue to look at those opportunities to in-source footprint always under review. These were the 2 most obvious opportunities for us. We still have a lot of capacity, but we also recognize at this point in time, reducing that flexibility in an uncertain world is not the right thing to do. So we're very much set from a footprint point of view right now, but we'll continue to monitor that. And whenever we acquire a new business, that question also comes on to the table. And then technology, driving into EMEA now 90% of the sites on D365, 2 large sites to go, so helping us to get over the legacy risks. Process is improving. Price optimization is starting to come through, starting to provide some much better data to help us run the business, which is great to see. And so that pricing is probably the key one in the short term, but also opportunities around supply chain. We've also started launching a new generation of websites. So 3 of those launched last year, a big rollout this year into a number of countries and also some product-specific websites that we'll talk about probably at the half year, and that will complete into 2027. So lots of things helping us drive the business forward and manage more efficiently. A little bit on DTi. So we acquired DTi, I have my sample in my pocket. So lovely niche product. It's a flexible grommet edge. So a flexible piece of metal, which effectively snaps onto the edges of metal, which has cable running over it to make sure cable can't snag as it's moving through anything. So on aero planes, on trains, but also originally came out of HP server. Anywhere you have odd shaped metal that you want to protect it against cables, this grommet edge solution is a premium product, but a great quality product to help you do that. Clearly, market leaders in that space, great gross margin. Business is actually growing very nicely -- growing so nicely. I can't yet drive my synergies at it because it has too much order book. So we're going to work on how we do drive greater manufacturing capacity out of the site, but nice problem to have as you acquire a business, so it's got a fundamental growth behind it. So progress underway, lots going on integration-wise, safety and compliance always our starting point, but we'll start to drive through the commercial opportunities and cross-selling to the rest of our customer base as we come through the year. So a nice bolt-on into the wider organization. Then bringing all that together, it leaves us in a position where we maintain confidence in that midterm target of 18% operating margin driven from those efficiencies that we've talked about, including the automation and the procurement activities. We have got some reinvestment, which again, we've been clearly flagging, there's more variable compensation to come. We've done around 1/3 of it, so around 2/3 yet to come in the next year or so. Some investments still into technologies and marketing to come as we end the ERP rollout. Some of that cost will flow to P&L at a smaller level, clearly. However, positives coming through pricing. We've always had a good pricing performance. We're getting better at it and more intelligent with the work that Rowan is leading, market share through our product efforts into these growth markets. And then fundamental market growth assumptions. Now this is clearly the area we are dependent on what the external market does. We have assumed a 2% market CAGR. That's in line with history. It hasn't been in line with the last 3 years. Clearly, that's been 0 or negative. But I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that at some point, fundamental markets will start to recover, and there'll be an element of growth. However, if that growth doesn't come, we can still achieve our 18% margin through our own actions and through more M&A work, again, maintaining a sensible and conservative balance sheet position. So moving on to the outlook, which is all anybody cares about. How do we feel about the world right now? So to date, '26 has started well, trading in line with expectations. However, we are mindful of recent geopolitical events. Clearly, we've had a good start to the year, carrying the momentum we saw out of the second half of the year. Margin is working well, pricing working well, new products coming through, helping us drive growth. I'd say, DTi from an M&A point of view, working well and more in the pipeline that we'll be hopeful to land this year. But we are mindful that recent events are going to have some impact. Just to be clear, we have about GBP 2 million sales in the Middle East. So negligible direct sales, and we're seeing a little bit of slowdown there, but that's thousands of pounds at this point in time. So nothing to report. Clearly, we process plastic materials, plastic resins, which are predominantly oil-derived, recycling being the other aspect of those. We have started to see in the last few days some requests for raw material price increases. Now we would be able to -- expect to be able to offset those in the same way we did with tariffs. It will just be work, but we'll need to understand that in the coming days to get that positioning right. And we're also seeing some inflation around freight costs. So again, we've seen this in various points of history. We have surcharge mechanisms to enable us to offset those freight costs. So the agility and the skills in the organization to manage those things are there. They don't really worry me. It is work and it's distraction from doing things that perhaps create more value in the long term, but we can definitely protect the P&L through that distraction. My real concern is the wider economic one and what it does to what felt like a more certain market coming into the year. I suspect PMIs will drop a little bit at the start of next month, recognizing that level of uncertainty. So we'll watch through that, but still lots in our own control, lots of things we can do ourselves to help us drive through the rest of the year. So at this point, I remain -- expectations remain unchanged, very much managing through that situation and very much committed to achieving those midterm targets. And that is the end. Over to Q&A, and I'll grab Rowan back up and shuffle. I'm a bit like ChatGPT, I can only do one at a time, though.

James Beard from Deutsche Numis. I've got 2 questions, please. Firstly, can you talk through the reasons that you've made the management change at the head of the EMEA business and when you expect to have a successor appointment in place, please?

Yes. So as we came through effectively 3 years of a difficult market environment and most difficult in Europe and lots going on with an ERP point of view. I guess talking to Hugues at the end of the year, we came together and concluded it was the right time for us to refresh management in Europe and think about that next chapter of our evolution. So Hugues has been excellent in working with me through that transition and helping me step back into the role. The European business is where I started in the organization. I've taken it as a caretaker in 2019. The team are very familiar to me and very strong as well. So yes, great support from Hugues in terms of helping me just pick up. We are in the process of starting to look for a permanent replacement. So that will take as long as these things take, but we will bring somebody clearly back in to run the business, but we'll make sure it's the right candidate as well.

And then second question, if I look at the notes to the accounts, I noticed that within the revenue by customer segment note, there's been a marked increase, 500 basis points in proportion of your revenue coming from large consumer manufacturers, which feels intuitively slightly contrary to the message you've given about wanting to sort of pivot away from consumer products exposure historically. So I wonder if you could just talk through the circumstances there.

I'll have to double check. I imagine it's certainly not in automotive or consumer electronics. So it will be in one of those growth markets, which is touching on consumer, I expect. So let me double check that. If you look at the automotive and consumer markets, they're both down and consumer electronics are both down in the year. So can I come back and just verify, but I suspect it's linked to one of those growth customer sectors, I can't think which one right now.

Andrew Nussey from Peel Hunt. A couple of questions as well. Pricing action agility was also an important theme through the second half. Do you think there was any volume impact from your actions that you've undertaken there or more market share impact? And is generally pricing a little bit easier in some of those growth segments as opposed to what we'd consider more traditional segments? That's the first one.

Yes. So just picking up that pricing and volume. So it's obviously something we watch very carefully, what impact is the pricing action having. And just when looking at half-on-half. As I said, there is significantly more pricing impact in the second half, but not significantly more impact on volume in the second half. So ultimately, kind of the volume impact sort of remained as was and indeed Europe pricing impact doubled and the volume increased overall. So it was somewhat more of a symptom of the underlying market in terms of the volume rather than the pricing action that we're taking. But it is something that we watch carefully. And part of the reason that we make sure that the decisions around pricing are taken by those closest to the customer to ensure that we've kind of got that visibility and got that under control.

I think the dynamic, which is contrary to what James is making, but the dynamic in those growth sectors are typically, they're not making significant volumes of products such as the automotive or consumer electronics market. So our pricing power tends to be a little bit stronger because there is this sort of more mid-volume market. That's why we chose them partially as being focus areas for us. So pricing is definitely easier there than it would be versus a large Tier 1, Tier 2 auto, but again, a little bit geographically dependent because pricing in China in that sector remains difficult, whereas the European pricing is probably a little bit easier.

And second question, when we look at sort of all the Turkish margin, clearly, you've invested hard in automation. And without, say, material benefit from operational gearing, would you expect to continue to push on the margin in Turkey and close the gap with some of your more mature European markets.

I think there's always opportunity for us to push and close the gap somewhat, but it will always remain a lower-margin product area versus some of our very low-cost simpler plastic products. Though effectively the manufacturing of the access hardware is same in Turkey and in China, there's a 2-stage process. You're making component parts and then you have an assembly process. The assembly drives a lot of labor, which drives a lot of the automation benefit, but there's still a higher cost involved in that product. And there's probably a less margin opportunity to achieve because it's slightly higher on the bill of materials. So I think we can always continue to optimize it, but it's never going to be -- we have aspects of our more simple cable management products that have 70-plus percent gross margin as a product line. This is always going to be in the 40s as a product line.

It's Henry Carver from Singer. Just a couple from me as well. Improving the customer mix and driving into the higher-growth markets, obviously, you talked a little bit about sort of how you do that. But I just wondered if you had any kind of practical examples of sort of what has worked last year or anything that's ongoing that sort of is actively driving that? And then the second one was just around the robotics and automation and investment in that. Going forward, if you're doing more than that will that still sort of fall within the 4% to 5% revenue or sort of will ever need to exceed that? Or any sort of help there would be...

Yes, let me make a start. I mean we're winning good business across those growth sectors. Probably the one most noticeable movement since the start of the year has been into data center cooling systems. So my understanding is latest generation data centers and chips, data centers require water cooling rather than air cooling. There is a whole subsector now arriving around cooling systems into data centers. And we sell protective caps that will be used on cooling pipes effectively in transit. We've actually generated a new material for these because they have to be perfectly clean and can't leave any residue. So we've engineered a new material that's helping protect data center pipes. Now there are a lot of them. So these contract wins are into the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and euros of small plastic pipe and caps effectively. But great that we've engaged with customers and engineered a solution, particularly for this application. But we've won business in U.S., in China and in Europe on that in the first half of the year already. So in the first 3 months of the year. So that's an example of us being focusing on a growth market with a slightly bizarre essential-like application, which I love.

And on CapEx, 4% to 5% is our assessment of what is required in order to keep on top of that. And just to describe the way it works, I mean, these investments are very incremental. They're done sort of certain specific areas, small areas of each factory where we take them sort of almost one at a time. So it's very sort of controllable and it's done more of piecemeal rather than a kind of complete revolution of one factory overall. So I think we'll be fine within the 4% to 5%. Yes.

It's Andrew Douglas from Jefferies. Three questions, please. Can you talk about the M&A pipeline? Clearly, DTi is a nice little bolt-on. Just thoughts on how that's progressing, whether the current turbulence in the market is throwing up interesting things and I guess broad comments on pricing and quality of assets.

Let me start there. So pipeline remains active, probably more active than average, which is encouraging. Whilst we've been working on DTi, we always had a second opportunity that we're running in parallel. It has taken us longer to progress that, but it's still live and active. Again, very much in the sweet spot of those product and customer categories. So hope to be able to see that through to completion in a relatively short period of time. Behind that, though, a number of interesting opportunities. We have one of our longer-term targets, which is about to come to us effectively, is something we've been working on for a number of years. We have an inbound process opportunity, which we're currently assessing, which is would be a different product category, but feels very adjacent to where we are. So probably slightly larger scale, but again, worth doing the work on that. And then finally, I've talked about this a little bit. We are interested in acquiring an Indian manufacturing asset because currently, we don't manufacture in India. They are -- they have high import tariffs and we think to grow that Indian market, manufacturing would be a helpful thing to do. We won't find something which is perfectly ready for Essentra, but we have found a couple of assets that look interesting that we're doing work on. So there's a lot going on at this point in time with one pretty progressed, a couple early days and 2 which are under reasonable consideration, but more busy than usual.

We've got another year of ERP. It seems like from a professional pontificator, who's never had a real job. It's getting a lot easier. Europe was a bit tough. U.K. has gone really well, fingers crossed and rolled there. How complex is what's left in terms of Turkey, TAPPI in Italy or is it a straightforward progress?

Yes, ERPs are never straightforward, I think, is my starting point. So BMP process-wise is an exact copy of Kidlington, but it comes from a different starting point because it was an acquired business. Their data is not the same quality as the data we had in Kidlington. So we're working on BMP data right now. The actual processes are a carbon copy of Kidlington. So the ERP system will work fantastically well as long as the data is good enough. So that's the current area of focus. Turkey is slightly more complicated. It has a 2-stage manufacturing, say, component manufacturing and assembly, but nothing really to write home about. And the manufacturing implementation of Kidlington has gone so well that we're pretty confident that we'll do Turkey. It probably is the most complicated manufacturing site we have though. So again, always on high alert. But you're right in terms of building confidence, the go-lives in the middle of last year went very, very well. Kidlington -- and these things will never be perfect, but definitely upper end of expectations. So confidence is building. We have a really good team rolling out. We've also got a really good process of ensuring the local teams understand and build knowledge to help them -- help themselves as well, which has definitely been the case in the U.K.

And then last one is a slightly different pricing question following on from the others. It feels like there's a lot of opportunity for you guys in pricing, notwithstanding putting things of tariffs and energy costs. It also feels like the U.S. is ahead of Europe. Is there a structural reason why Europe can't catch up in terms of making the material, I guess, progress from a pricing perspective, being a bit more agile? Or is it largely a function of the underlying markets just stopping that from happening? Or is there something you can do internally to kind of properly rev it up?

I would say that there isn't a structural reason why it can't. I think what you saw from us during 2025 was the fact that we were rolling out an ERP system and the one thing you can't do clearly is put your prices up when customer service isn't exactly as you would want it to be. So I think there is scope, I think U.S. has sort of benefited from the environment that helps to create the time for those conversations and the kind of impetus for those conversations. But fundamentally, no, there isn't a reason why they can't go in tandem, and we are getting better at the data. We are getting better at being able to use ERP system to help us there. So there's still plenty more to go up.

I would say historically, Europe had the greater pricing muscle. Now it was the unsophisticated, put your list price up and see what happens, pricing muscle. But over time, they've done that very well. They benefit from having a longer tail of smaller customers where there's greater elasticity. So I think structurally, there's probably reasons to think Europe will do increasingly better over time. Last year was a bit of a blip for us given we were waiting for service to stabilize, but end of the year came through quite nicely.

Tom Fraine from Shore Capital. Are you able to quantify the price increases at all, the percentages, just so we can work out the potential impact on this year as a whole and even the split between H1 and H2 on the margin from price increase?

The price impact for half 1 was just under 2% and for half 2 was just under 4%.

Now we are deflating a little bit from that. So I wouldn't expect 4% this year, but I'd still...

Don't get over excited.

Between those numbers for this year, I think, would be our expectation. So again, Rowan shared guidance. We're not expecting great volume recovery during the year, which I think is a reasonable place to start, especially given news the last 10 days. So the majority of that expected revenue growth will be pricing driven in reality. Perfect. No more questions, then I'll thank you all very much, and we are around, if anybody has anything else they'd like to raise. But thank you all, and we'll bring the meeting to an end. Thanks.