Macfarlane Group PLC (MACF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the Macfarlane Group PLC Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself, however, the company can review questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to CEO, Peter Atkinson. Good morning, sir.

Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to today's review of Macfarlane Group's first half results for 2025. I'm Peter Atkinson, the CEO; and I'm with my colleague, Ivor Gray, who's our CFO. In terms of the agenda for today's meeting, I'll make some opening remarks in terms of an exec summary, and Ivor will then take you through the key metrics for 2025 first half. I'll cover off the 2 main divisions, the Distribution and Manufacturing division in terms of their individual performances. And then Ivor will take you through the pension scheme, capital allocation, and we'll finish up with some concluding remarks and take questions. In terms of the introduction to the business for those who may be not familiar with Macfarlane Group, we're a specialist business in the protective packaging market, and we supply customers across the U.K. and increasingly in Europe with a range of protective packaging products and solutions. And we're here to protect their products through the supply chain to ensure the products are effectively packed, stored and transported. Key benefit we bring is the working capital reduction and administration burden. And clearly, from a sustainability point of view, we're working to optimize and minimize the environmental packaging. We differentiate ourselves from the competition through the fact that we have now fully European coverage with local service. We've got a breadth of product and service offer, added value customer proposition, something called the Significant Six, which you may have heard of before, long-standing supplier partnerships going back for sort of 50, 60 years. And our business is focused on protective packaging. We don't deal with any other materials. We don't deal with any other product groups. We simply focus on protective packaging. So let me summarize the first half results, and then I'll pass over to Ivor to take you through the detail. What we've seen in the first 6 months is a pretty challenging period. Clearly, we delivered good sales growth, 13.1% ahead of the previous period. But that was based primarily on acquisition growth through the acquisition of Pitreavie that we made in January and the benefit of Polyformes that we made in 2024. We've seen weak organic sales growth, and we've seen price deflation in the first 6 months of the year. So the sales growth was then offset by weaker margin, and there are 3 components to that. We've been slower in recovering input price changes. We've seen quite a lot of competitive activity that has needed us to retain customers by reducing prices. And we're seeing customers in the current environment understandably focusing on short-term price reduction rather than the medium-term value that we can bring them. So that has impacted our margin in the first half of the year. The second component of the sales offset has been higher costs. And I think we're all familiar with the increased costs through national insurance and minimum wage, which is impacting all businesses. And obviously, we're not immune to that. So that's been a big feature of our first half cost increase. And the second key feature has been material increases in property costs, both rental and wage costs. The effect of the stronger sales, but weaker margin and higher costs means that our profitability is down versus the previous period. So what we're going to talk about in the presentation is clearly what's going to happen in the second half that's going to recover that position. And there's a number of features that we'll pick up during the presentation. Firstly, in the second half of the year, we'll have the seasonal benefit, which is usual for the Macfarlane base business and it's particularly acute within the Pitreavie business. They generate something like 70% of their profit in the second half of the year because of their bias towards the food and drink industry in Scotland. So that will be -- give us positive momentum into the second half of the year. The new business that we've won in the first half of the year will flow through into the second half of the year. We win it in the first 6 months and then it really starts to expand in the second 6 months. So we'll see a benefit from that. And then the price increase program that we've initiated, again, will start to flow through in the second half of the year. And to be fair, in terms of both the revenue line and the margin line in the early weeks of 2020 -- the second half 2025, we're seeing improvements in both those areas, which give us confidence for the remainder of the year. And then the final element of the second half recovery is clearly we've got tight cost controls in place. We've made some people changes. Our headcount is lower first half versus second half, and we will see the benefits of those coming through. So in terms of our full year 2025 results, we expect them to be in line with the recent market update that we provided back in July. So let me pause there and pass over to Ivor, who will talk you through the detail of the first half metrics. And then I'll actually put some color on the business by talking about the Packaging Distribution and the Manufacturing Operations.

Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everyone. I'll just take you through the kind of first half year key metrics. Up at the kind of top line, you've got the revenue, which has increased by 13%. And that has really split 14% benefit from the acquisitions. That was the acquisition of Pitreavie in January this year and the acquisition of Polyformes in July last year and a small amount related to the acquisition of Allpack at the very beginning of last year. So 14% improvement due to acquisitions, and we've had an organic decline of around 1%. And most of that decline is related to price. Volumes are relatively flat year-on-year. In terms of adjusted operating profit, we're down 22%. So we're down GBP 2.7 million versus this time last year, a reduction from GBP 12.5 million to GBP 9.8 million. We have a positive contribution from the acquisitions that I mentioned earlier of GBP 1.7 million and an organic decline of 4.5%. And that's primarily driven by a smaller amount related to the reduction in sales, a reduction in the gross margin from 39.7% to 37.8%, which has made quite a large debt in terms of profitability and rising operating costs, as Peter described earlier, which has impacted the business. So overall, those 2 elements, the reduction in gross margin and increase in costs are the prime reason for the reduction in profitability with a small amount related to the reduction -- organic reduction in sales. In terms of the balance sheet, we've had cash outflows of GBP 13.3 million in the first half of the year, and I'll come on to describe that in a minute. So our bank debt -- net debt position at the end of December was GBP 1.9 million, rising to GBP 15.2 million at the end of June. The operating cash flows remain strong. But clearly, we've used those operating cash flows to fund acquisition, dividend and also the start of the capital -- the share buyback program, along with investment in capital expenditure in the business. With regard to the pension surplus, it's down slightly from the year-end, GBP 9.6 million to GBP 9.2 million. Clearly, the key message here is that the pension scheme is not drawing any cash from the group. And we're working in the short term towards a buy-in possibly before the end of this year, at least within -- certainly within the next 6 to 12 months. In terms of the dividend, we've held the dividend at GBP 0.96. That's the same as last year, and that gives us dividend cover of 2.4x and the EPS is moving down in line with the reduction in profitability. Moving on to the income statement. Peter will cover the revenue line in a bit more detail. But as you can see, as I described earlier, the key features here is the reduction in gross margin from 39.7% to 37.8%, and that's primarily driven by a reduction in margin within the distribution business. It's gone from 37.9% to 35.6%, albeit we saw a reduction in the gross margin in the second half of the year, which the second half of the year last year, the gross margin distribution was 36.4%. So a slight reduction in the first half of this year of 35.6%. Pleased to say that margins have now stabilized as we start the second half of this year. And there is a margin reduction in manufacturing of 44.3% to 41%. That's primarily related to the mix impact of the Pitreavie business. The Pitreavie business does run at a lower gross margin than the rest of the manufacturing division. So if you strip out the Pitreavie impact, the gross margin is in line with last year. In terms of the cost base, we've got a GBP 6.6 million increase in the operating expenses, GBP 5.1 million of that is related to the acquisitions that we brought in and GBP 2 million of that -- I'm sorry, GBP 0.7 million of that is due to incremental labor costs, GBP 1.3 million related to incremental property costs, some of that related to the consolidation of East Midlands operation, which people -- Peter will describe later. And we've got GBP 0.5 million reduction in other costs. The interest costs are a bit higher last year, and that reflects the higher borrowing rates that we've had in the first half of this year compared to last year, and also an increase in IFRS 16 interest related to the incremental property costs coming through on East Midlands business. In terms of cash flows, really, the key message here is our operating cash flows have stayed relatively robust, albeit 15% down on last year, but certainly lower than the reduction that we've seen in profitability, and that's because the working capital is still being managed well. We've had a capital inflow of GBP 1.4 million as a result of that. And we've used that GBP 12.4 million of cash inflows from operating activities to spend GBP 15.1 million on acquisitions, GBP 13.9 million of that relates to the Pitreavie acquisition and GBP 1.2 million of earn-out payments related to Gottlieb and Allpack. We've had GBP 1.3 million of capital expenditure. That's primarily related to the consolidation of these properties in East Midlands and the Rockingham of the new facility and GBP 0.3 million related to expansion of capacity at our Grantham manufacturing operation and some other capital expenditure we made within the manufacturing operation. You can see that we spent GBP 0.2 million in the first half of the year on the purchase of our own shares. That is part of the GBP 4 million buyback program that we announced in June. So primarily, you'll see around GBP 2.5 million of outflows in the second half of the year related to that buyback program, but a very small amount of that related in the first half of the year. And again, you can see the dividend there of GBP 4.3 million. That's the final dividend payment that was made in June. So an outflow of GBP 13.2 million and an increase in net debt from GBP 1.9 million to GBP 15.2 million at the end of June. I'll hand back to Peter now to go through some detail around the operating performances within distribution and manufacturing.

Thanks, Ivor. So let me begin by talking about the Packaging Distribution business that represents around about 75% of the group's revenue. As you can see from the slide, sales -- like-for-like sales were broadly flat year-on-year. What we've seen is, as Ivor has already indicated, we've seen price deflation and volume declines. And that's simply because our customers are not buying as much packaging as they're used to. So hence, they're not buying as much packaging from us. And that's more acute in the retail space than it is in the industrial space. The split between retail and industrial within distribution is sort of 70-30, 70% being the industrial business. The new business performance in the first 6 months has been slightly weaker than the previous year. What we're finding in this sort of period of uncertainty, which we're all very, very acutely aware of is customers being slow to make decisions. So we know we've got a very strong pipeline of activity. We know we've got a number of customers that are very, very close to completing, and we'd expect our new business to accelerate quite materially in the second half of the year as the new business customers come on stream. Our gross margins, as I indicated in the exec summary, have reduced versus the previous year. And that's primarily increased input costs and our inability at this stage to fully recover those input cost increases. Plus, we've had to do some competitive defenses of key customers through some aggressive pricing competition from a small number of our competitors. So that's caused us to reduce our margins on some of our major customers that were up for tender. But we're confident that the gross margin will start to improve in the second half of the year and the evidence of the early weeks of the month of July and the early weeks of August and to be found in September as well is that our margin is beginning to improve. The operating cost increases, which I'll talk about on the next page are really the labor cost increases, national insurance and national minimum wage, property cost increases and issues around the East Midlands property consolidation. So I'll pick those up on the next page. The final metric just to comment on is our Net Promoter Score. As you know, it's a key part of how we measure how we are dealing with customers and how customers perceive us. And the Net Promoter Score has remained pretty solid at 61. As you know, the average for B2B customers and Net Promoter Score is sort of late 20s, early 30s. So we're way above average for B2B type clients who use Net Promoter Score as a measure of customer satisfaction. So just moving on to the raw material price graph. As you know, this is a series of ups and downs because we're operating in global markets for polymer and paper. And what we're describing there is what we're seeing in the first half of the year is broadly input price increases and hence, that gross margin pressure as we now work to recover those. Just the detail, as I promised on the cost program. So here's a breakdown of where the cost increases have been. If you take employee costs, our headcount is down by around about 33 versus the previous period. So we're operating with lower heads. But we've obviously had to take on board the impact of NI, the impact of extra temporary costs associated with the East Midlands project, which I'll come back to. We've also had some redundancy costs in the first half of the year as we've taken some heads out, and there's also increased pension costs in there. The property cost increase that you see, which is the second big chunk of cost increase during the period is 2 things really. It's partly increased rental costs on existing properties. As you know, most of our properties are leased. And we've had a number of rent reviews that have come around, and we've had very aggressive rent increases from our landlords and not really had much opportunity to offset that in any material way. So that's impacted us by about GBP 200,000 in the period. And then obviously, you've got local authorities that are ramping rates up at the moment. So that's impacting us also. Ivor referred to it, and I touched on it, is the East Midlands project. The East Midlands project has been something which has impacted the first half of the year. We were due to complete the project at the end of May. It's actually run through to the end of August. It's quite a complicated project moving 4 sites into 1, closing 4 sites and moving into 1. And the delay in the project has caused us to actually incur additional rent because we've been renting the existing properties and the new property and additional operating costs, [indiscernible] have to add extra labor as we manage through the transition. The good news is that project is now completed. We're out of the 4 sites. All the business is in the new site, and we won't see a recurrence of that incremental cost in the second half of the year. Next page just is a refresh and reminder really of our acquisition program. While we haven't specifically acquired in 2025 in the distribution business, as you know, we bought the Pitreavie business, which is part distribution and part manufacturing. We've classified it within our manufacturing division. We've got a very strong pipeline of acquisition opportunities, both in the U.K. and in Europe. And while it's unlikely we'll do any more acquisitions in 2025, we would expect to be back on the acquisition trail in 2026. And then next page is just really a summary of the key things that we are focused on. I won't even try and go through all of them, but probably worthwhile just touching on sourcing. We're increasingly finding ways to utilize our in-house manufacturing for in-house supply opportunities. And certainly, the acquisition of Pitreavie has given us a big opportunity to use our manufacturing capability for some of our RDCs to buy from an internal supplier rather from an external supplier. And obviously, we keep the margin internalized rather than give it away to an external supplier. Bottom left-hand corner, we launched our new website around about 6 months ago. Good progress. It's early days. We've got some interesting momentum there, which is positive, and we expect that to becoming an increasingly important part of the way we transact with customers going forward. I mentioned acquisitions. And then just in terms of Europe, Europe, as you know, is a key part of our development of the group's business to give ourselves an opportunity to access different and larger markets using our existing customers to help us through their relationships with their subsidiaries or the head offices. And we continue to make good progress both in the Follow the Customer program and also from the first acquisition that we've made down in Frankfurt with the PackMann business. And again, we've got further acquisitions that we're working on that we would hope to bring to fruition probably not next year, but certainly moving into 2027. And then just finally, on property, we've done the East Midlands consolidation. Prior to that, we did the consolidation in the Northwest and recognizing the property footprint we've got and the increased rental costs that we're seeing, we're looking now to accelerate our property rationalization program. So more of that to come as we go into '26 and 2027. Moving on to our manufacturing division, which now represents sort of close to 25% of the group's revenue and has been an important area for us investing in certainly in terms of acquisitions recently. They had a pretty solid first half of the year. The revenue growth was primarily through the acquisition of Pitreavie and then also part benefit of the acquisition of Polyformes that we made in 2024, and there was some small organic growth. The partnership with distribution, as you know, this is -- it's not a stand-alone business as such because it does partner strongly with distribution. And that partnership continues to strengthen as we're able to offer customers a broader range of services and a wider product offer. And as you're aware, everything we do in this business is bespoke. So these customers coming to us with particular requirements and then us designing with their engineers bespoke solutions to protect their typically very high value or fragile items through their journey through the supply chain. Margins have weakened slightly here, but that's primarily a mix issue. As we've added Pitreavie into this business, Pitreavie has generally a lower gross margin than the base manufacturing business. So the margin reduction is a mix issue, not a pricing or margin issue related to transactional activity. And our operating expenses are well under control, while we've got increase in obviously NI and national minimum wage here, we managed to do some offsetting of that in terms of productivity improvements. Moving over the page and just a reminder, I mentioned this has been a sort of fruitful area for us in terms of acquisitions. We've made about 4 acquisitions in the last 2 years, Suttons, B&D Group, Polyformes more recently and Pitreavie very recently. Pitreavie is doing well for us. Pitreavie, I think if you remember from when we made the announcement, it's like a mini Macfarlane in many ways. It's got a box-making facility up in Scotland. It's got a distribution business in Scotland, got a design and manufacturing business based up in Aberdeen, serving the oil and gas industry, and then it's got a temperature control packaging business. And we're now working to create synergies within Pitreavie that benefit the group, particularly from in-house sourcing, which I touched on. And also, we're in the process of combining our distribution businesses. And again, we've got more acquisition activity planned. We've got 2 more acquisitions we'd like to do within this business in the near term. So moving over in terms of the action plan. Again, I won't go through everything. We've touched on in-house supply, and that's progressing really well with both Pitreavie and with GWP. Bottom left-hand corner, integration. We have now effectively closed the B&D site in Southampton and that's been integrated into our Westbury business, and we've got further integration programs in place for the next 12, 18 months. Acquisitions, I've talked about, as I say, there's 2 more acquisitions we'd like to do in this space to strengthen our U.K. proposition. And then going forward, it's not on the schedule, we're reviewing internally because we've got some pressure from certain customers to extend the reach of this business into Europe. We do some export work at the moment out of this division, but we've got certain customers who are asking us to actually co-locate with them, and we're working on plans to actually evaluate that and see where that's a fruitful journey for this particular business. So I'll pause there and turn to Ivor to talk you through sustainability, which is obviously a key issue at the moment, both in terms of our in-house sustainability objectives and also the external pressures around government legislation and also take you through the pension scheme and the capital allocation.

Yes. Thank you, Peter. Yes, in terms of sustainability agenda, a lot of information in this slide. I think off the left-hand side, you can see we continue to make good progress in terms of the impact that is having in the environment, whether that's through the electrification of our truck fleet, putting solar panels in various sites that we have, managing our carbon reductions, our carbon impact down that we're managing internally within the business and also working with our suppliers on the broader impact that we're having in the environment through Scope 3 emissions. In terms of customers, clearly, we continue to support our customers through the innovation labs. And one of the key features that's coming through this year, which we'll cover off in the next slide, is the introduction of extended producer responsibility costs, which are going to impact primarily our customers. So we are working very heavily with our customers to minimize the carbon footprint that they have, but also to help them through the challenges of introducing the new kind of packaging regulations, the first fees, which are due to come in, in October this year. And you can see we're also continuing to make good progress in our Net Promoter Score, which is a kind of external validation of the kind of services that we're bringing to our customers. Across the right-hand side, we continue to progress the accreditations and that kind of gives us some validation that we're doing the right things and we're moving in the right direction. Some of these are quite important to our customers and some of these are important to our investors. So overall, we're making pretty good progress on our sustainability agenda. And if I come on to discuss really some of the regulations that are coming in that are impacting the business. Really, the ones that are impacting the business at the moment are the ones on the left-hand side and the one that's probably particularly prevalent is the extended producer responsibility. So this is effectively a charge that's coming in on all packaging that is ending up in household waste. So from a Macfarlane perspective, it effectively impacts around about 20% of our customers, and it's broadly customers that are involved in e-commerce retail. And we are working with our customers. So effectively, any packaging that we provide to those customers that they are then shipping to their customers then they will have to pay a charge on that packaging, depending on whether it's paid for plastic or any other kind of substrate. So we are working with our customers to educate them on the impact of that packaging, supporting them through in terms of what impact that's going to have in terms of their costs and engaging with them to try and mitigate the impact of that packaging, whether it's moving to something that's more recyclable or whether it's reducing the actual amount of packaging they're actually using. So we do that through our innovation lab, and we do that through our significant progress. There's clearly some evolution of that coming through next year in Phase 2, which is called modulated fees. And that's effectively saying that the fees will start to increase for the packaging that's not considered environmentally friendly and stay the same or decrease for the packaging that's considered more environmentally friendly. So it's like an evolution of the EPR that's coming in this year. So again, we see ourselves as being well positioned to be able to support our customers to try and mitigate the impacts of that as much as possible. As you can see, there's a number of other things that are going to come through over the next 2 to 5 years that will impact the packaging market in terms of regulation. So clearly, a lot going on, but the immediate impacts for our customers and for us as a business is the impact of extended producer responsibility, which is coming in, in October this year and will continue to evolve over the next few years. In terms of the pension scheme, I suppose the key messages here is pension scheme is an accounting surplus. The company hasn't had to put any cash contributions into the scheme for a couple of years now. And actually, we're actively working towards a buy-in within the next 6 to 12 months. So we always said that we'll be working towards a buy-in somewhere around 2026. There is a possibility we might be able to achieve a buy-in this Christmas, but we're certainly more in that kind of short term. So first of all, moving the scheme to buy-in and then ultimately to buy out at the point of buyout, that's the point where the scheme would come off our balance sheet. So the scheme is well funded. It's not drawing any cash and resources from the group, and we're working towards a position of taking the pension scheme off the balance sheet. First stage of that is buy-in, which we hope to complete in the next 6 to 12 months and then a buyout that would take a further 18 months beyond that. In terms of capital allocation, as I described earlier, we've invested in -- we've continued to generate good operating cash flows, both through the profitability of the business and good management of working capital. We've invested that in the first half in capital expenditure programs, and we've also continued the acquisition program with the acquisition of Pitreavie at the beginning of the year, and we paid the final dividend out in the first half of the year. Clearly, the new thing that we've introduced in the first half of this year is the buyback program, which we commenced in June. So we are looking to spend GBP 4 million buying back own shares between now and June next year. And that's really a reflection of the fact that if you look at the rating of our share price relative to the profitability of the business, there's not a huge differential between that and some of the acquisition program. So at the moment, we're prioritizing some of our capital towards the share buyback program in the short term. Clearly, we're not planning in doing further M&A this side of Christmas, but we'll get back on to the front foot of M&A in 2026. So a slight prioritization of resources towards buyback as opposed to M&A in the short term, but we'll get back on the front foot with M&A program in 2026.

Thanks, Ivor. So before we go into Q&A, let me just sort of conclude. It's clearly been a difficult H1. There's been significant headwinds that we are trying to and to a certain extent, managing to navigate through. And those headwinds are around -- at the end of the day, customers just aren't buying as much as they previously were buying. So that weak demand is impacting customer volumes. The whole customer uncertainty, you wake up every morning at the moment something new has happened in the marketplace. So customers uncertain about making big decisions that's slowing down our new business performance. And then obviously, we've got rising operating costs, a big part of which has been the taxation on employment. So as we look to the second half of the year, and we're now sort of 2 months in, we don't expect the market to improve in the second half of the year. We will benefit from the seasonal uplift, and I touched on that earlier on, both in the Macfarlane business and more acute in the Pitreavie business that we acquired. And then from there on in, it's really us focusing down on a series of management actions around converting the new business pipeline, which is extremely strong, and we really feel very confident about new business in the second half of the year, managing through the price changes to improve margin. On both those things, I say we're seeing some positive trends in the early part of the second half of the year. Continue to drive operational efficiencies. We won't have the challenge of East Midlands in the -- from now on in because we've managed the transition. So we'll benefit from East Midlands consolidation. And then Ivor has touched on sustainability and how we're helping customers manage through the EPR challenges. The Pitreavie acquisition, there's still some more benefits to come from that, particularly around in-house sourcing. So that's something that we're focusing very hard on at the moment. And then as Ivor touched on, we've got strong control of working capital, and that will continue to be the case. Ivor has touched on the fact that we're not planning to do any more acquisitions this year, but the acquisition pipeline is strong. And as I said earlier, expect us to be back on the acquisition trail in 2026. And then the share buyback program we initiated, we're continuing with that. And also, obviously, we've announced our sort of dividend position, which is a continuation of the current dividend at the current levels. So in overall terms, difficult period. We're navigating well through it. Second half, we will demonstrate improved performance, and we will exit the year on a good trajectory for 2026. So we will move from here to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via investor dashboard. Peter, Ivor, as you can see, we received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Can I please ask you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Okay. No, I've got a few questions here, Peter. First one is, can we kind of write the relative kind of contributions from price inflation, the impact of demand, customer churn on the kind of organic decline story? I think I covered off in the financials that basically, the price deflation impact was primarily a reason for the kind of 1% reduction in organic decline. But yes, there is ups and downs. I think Peter touched on new business growth of about GBP 3.7 million. And we've also seen an equal and opposite reduction of that kind of similar scale in terms of customers spending less and some losses of business, albeit some of the losses of business have been primarily a kind of smaller customer end. So if you think of our movement in profit and sales line, particularly within distribution in the year, then most of that is kind of price driven. Impact of new business is GBP 3.7 million and there's been an offset in terms of lower demand from existing customers and a bit of loss of customers within the smaller customer base, which kind of offsets that in equal order. I don't know if you -- in terms of -- there was a discussion of EPR there, is EPR going to significantly increase the cost of the business? And I suppose adding on to that, do you see any kind of a continual headwind in customer demand declining as a result of that in terms of environmental pressures?

Yes. I mean it's really difficult to judge because EPR is complicated. The rules around EPR and the metrics around EPR keep changing. So we've not got a steady state at the moment in terms of where EPR is going to impact. In terms of the direct impact on Macfarlane, it's relatively small, primarily because as you're all aware, retail is an important but relatively small part of our overall business. It's about 25% of our distribution business revenue. And a majority of what we're doing in -- which is EPR related is e-commerce. It's not FMCG. So there's a small direct cost of the business, which is not material. Where we are very active at the moment is working with customers to help them reduce their risk of EPR taxation. So there's a lot of work going on, a lot of work in the innovation labs, a lot of roadshows that we're doing, which is basically guiding our customers and helping them navigate through what is a very tricky and complicated period and process. Is it going to overall reduce demand going forward? Undoubtedly, I think there will be a demand reduction around FMCG, which is where the EPR has the most material impact. There may be some slight reduction around e-commerce potentially, but I don't think it's going to be a material feature that's going to impact the business and its future over the next 3 to 5 years.

Thanks, Peter. There's a question here on operating margins. So what does the half 2 run rate in terms of margins look like in terms of first half versus second half? And what does the outlook look like for operating margins going forward? If I can pick that one up. I mean, if you look at our net margins in the first half of the year, they were just under 7%. We would expect that to be kind of near 9% in the second half of the year. And that's primarily driven by more volume throughput. There's quite a seasonal uplift in volume that we expect in the second half of the year, and that naturally absorb our cost base more effectively in the second half of the year. And we actually do see the gross margins being slightly higher in the second half than the first half. So they are the kind of 2 key features. The other feature is the Pitreavie business, as Peter described, is more weighted towards the second half of the year. And some of that is down to some of the seasonal uplift in spend that Peter described earlier. But also, we're driving some of our more internal corrugated buying and distribution through our Pitreavie business. So that's also retaining some profitability within the group. So we would expect our margins in the second half of the year to be higher in the first half. Certainly, as we exit this year, we're probably targeting our net margins around about 8%. We don't see that probably improving much next year because I think next year, we continue to see those kind of operating cost pressures. While we see the kind of gross margin stabilizing, we don't see the margins changing significantly next year. So we would expect the margins next year, the net margins to stay around 8% with we're starting to see some improvements from '27 onwards. So what we're looking at next year is seeing some uplift in sales next year falling to the bottom line, but not a significant change in terms of the bottom line margins. I think there was an add-on to that, whether that changes our view in terms of capital allocation between M&A and returns to shareholders. I don't think it does. I mean, I think at the end of the day, we are trying to achieve a balance between returning some money to shareholders through the buyback program, but we want to recognize and the M&A program is still an important feature of the growth story going forward. And certainly, I don't think we're missing out on any significant opportunities at the moment, but we do want to invest strategically in M&A, both within the manufacturing and distribution business going forward. So clearly, where those opportunities arise and the price points are right and are strategic to the business, we will certainly continue the M&A program and try to balance that return to shareholders and [indiscernible] program in line with each other where we can. In terms of looking at a question around Europe, Peter, in terms of the use of third-party logistics, do we see third-party logistics being a key part of supporting the growth story in terms of our European expansion?

Yes. It's a good question. And the answer is yes. We -- through all the research we did before we entered Europe, we recognize that a big part of the model in Europe for successful distributors is more outsourcing of activities, particularly in warehousing and distribution. While in the U.K., the majority of our activity is running through our own warehouses with our own trucks. We do recognize in Europe, it's different. And so certainly, in terms of our operations today, we are very active in using third-party logistics companies, and that will be a growing feature of our European story to make more use of third-party logistics companies, both for storage and for distribution.

A specific question here around you mentioned East Midlands site consolidation. I think previously, we had mentioned that we would get some cost savings out of that once we're through the program. Do we still see those level of cost savings coming through? The question mentioned that we had mentioned GBP 400,000 per annum once we're through program. Do we still expect to see that? Or has that changed given the current circumstances?

Yes. When we get to steady state, probably it might not be -- GBP 400,000 was based on assumed volumes. Clearly, as we've said, the market is weaker, so the volumes are weaker. So the benefits are probably not going to be as great. So you're probably talking more in the GBP 300,000 range than the GBP 400,000 range. But yes, we would expect to see once we get to steady state savings coming through these Midlands consolidation.

And just moving on to the -- we talked about the relaunch of the website and is that having a positive impact? And how much of our revenues do you see coming through the online shop?

Yes. So in relative terms, the online shop is a small proportion of our revenue today. It's less than 5%. We -- in terms of trading electronically with customers, we've got about 50% of our revenue where we trade electronically. But in terms of direct people buying over the website, it's less than 5%. We clearly would like to increase that. The new website is the start of the journey to increase that because we recognize both the functionality, appearance and presentation of our old website was not in line with current sort of website trends. So we've done the relaunch. It's still early stages, but we are seeing some positive progress and we'd expect to see further progress as we exit this year and into 2026.

And as a question around the kind of margins within the distribution business. Are our competitors facing the same challenges that we are facing? Do you see the opportunity for us to recover that and specifically around gross margins, is the decline in gross margins a sign of that kind of competitive intensity or kind of discipline within the marketplace starting to loosen?

Yes. I mean I think the market conditions are the market conditions, so it's certainly affecting all the key players in the U.K. market to different degrees. How they're managing it is their business rather than our business. But certainly, we've seen the margin fall back in the first 6 months of this year compared to the first 6 months of last year. But we're now seeing the margins start to recover as we've come into H2. And we would certainly expect to see the margin. It's currently running at sort of just under about 35.6% at the end of H1. We'd certainly expect as we exit the year to be back up the exit rate at the end of 2024, which was sort of around about 36%. So certainly, pressures there, but certainly, we can see a way of getting back to a sort of 36% gross margin. We're probably never going to get back to the heights of gross margin that we saw during the COVID period, where I think most of you were aware that was where demand was outstripping supply and price increases were going crazy, and we over-recovered during that period and hence, margins were high. So I don't see us getting back to those levels, but certainly, around about 36% is we see as a sustainable level going forward.

And in terms of the -- one of the questions is you mentioned headcount reduction within Packaging Distribution, what are the kind of key areas that that's impacting?

Yes. So the -- what we've tried to do is to focus our headcount reductions primarily in the head office, the central functions. So we've tried to retain staffing levels as best we can in our operational business units. As you know, we operate the business through a series of business units. So we've not tried to strip out major costs there. It's really been in the head office functions. And if you look at the increase that we've seen in terms of headcount over the last 2 or 3 years, it's primarily been not in the operational side of the business, but in head office support functions. And it's that where we focused our activity in the first 6 months of this year, and we'll continue to focus our activity. Clearly, we want to be able to service customers effectively. So in terms of salespeople, in terms of drivers, in terms of warehouse people, in terms of sales administration, those are functions that we continue to ensure that we've got strong resources in place to service our customers.

And again, I think we probably covered this one. Do we intend to continue to acquire companies as a regular process?

Yes. No, acquisition is a key part of our strategy. Clearly, it's finding the right companies at the right price. I think we've got a well sort of rehearsed program in doing that over the last sort of 7 or 8 years, and we continue to work on that. The fact that we're in a pause now is purely because, obviously, Pitreavie, we did in January was the biggest acquisition we've done in the last 20 years, was complicated in terms of the components, the full components of the business. So we wanted to spend management time making sure that bedded in and making sure we generated the synergies, which Ivor touched on. But we'll be back on the acquisition trail, the right companies at the right time, right place, right price back in '26.

And obviously, one of the features of the first half of the year is manufacturing clearly contribute more of the profit of the group than distribution, where historically distribution has been the kind of stronger contributor in terms of overall. Do you see that as a kind of structural shift in the profit mix of the business?

No. I mean it's right to identify that proportionately, the business has always been sort of 90-10 historically, 90% distribution, 10% manufacturing. But I think we've seen a really good opportunity in manufacturing. As you can see, it's a specialist niche. The customers are extremely sticky. The margins are higher than distribution. Although it's a smaller market and it is a more complicated market, we do see it as a nice adjunct to our distribution business. And as you see from the stats, a significant proportion of manufacturing sales is driven through distribution. So there are synergies by the 2 businesses working together. So I think in terms of the scale of opportunity, distribution still represents the biggest scale opportunity for Macfarlane. But we do see manufacturing as an important adjunct to our distribution business to provide a comprehensive sort of protective packaging suite of products and services.

I think, again, we might cover some of this in terms of operating margins, we've always talked about the kind of 10% goal. I think we got there last year and also we've gone back a bit this year. Does that feel still like the medium-term target? And what are the levers to kind of get us from where we are now back up to that kind of level?

I mean we've always, over quite a period, talked about 10% being the underlying operating margin we were looking to achieve, and we've touched that recently, as Ivor said. I think the sort of things that we do, we've got to make sure that we get our gross margin back up to 36%, which we mentioned. And we've got to ensure that the cost increases that we have inherited in a way or come our way, a big part of that through government legislation. We've got to ensure that we find ways to offset those either through pricing or through a lower cost structure. I think there's no doubt that the property portfolio, as I touched on this, and I'll repeat it, the increase in rental cost is going to be an increasing challenge for us going forward. So having completed the East Midlands project, we'll be looking to accelerate the opportunity to rationalize our property portfolio. It's a balance between ensuring that we've got effective customer service on a regional local level, ensuring that we've got a property portfolio that fits and is cost effective. But there's clearly some more opportunities to do property rationalization and property consolidation, and we'll be accelerating those programs in the coming period.

I think we've covered all the key areas. I think we've covered EPR. Don't really impact EPR directly in the business, that's a long-term headwind from customers continue to reduce packaging. We covered that one earlier.

No. So I think we've covered all the questions from what we can see. If anybody has got another question, happy to take it. If not, then we will thank you for all your questions, and thanks for your attendance today and appreciate your continuing support as we navigate through what are turbulent times. Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Peter, Ivor, thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Macfarlane Group PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.