Spectris Limited (SXS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good morning, and welcome to the presentation of our annual results for 2023. With me is our CFO, Derek Harding. Before we talk about our results, I just wanted to start by highlighting how different Spectris is today compared to the business that we inherited just 5 years ago. And what have been the ingredients to our progress. In many ways, the video we've just shown speaks for itself. We have streamlined and focused the business completing our disposal program. We have exited businesses that were exposed to more cyclical end markets and those that were more capital intensive. Sorry about that. So yes, allowing us to channel the investment into asset-light businesses with greater growth potential to create value for shareholders. It's also transforming the way that we develop new products, applying a more rigorous approach to R&D, not only increasing the absolute amount that we invest, but also the proportion dedicated to new products, which has been a key enabler to drive organic growth, expand our market share and ensure our best-in-class products remain at the forefront. All elements of our capital allocation framework have been in operation. We've taken a disciplined approach and a targeted approach to M&A, acquiring businesses to enhance our capabilities and returning excess cash to shareholders where this hasn't been achievable within a reasonable time period. We have made continuous improvement in a way of life by engaging our people in deploying the Spectris Business System and the transformation of our business processes via a single ERP. Now we've also invested in developing our people, developing a healthy, high-performance culture that is underpinned by a clear purpose and common values, which are both critical ingredients to ensure high levels of engagement and the right environment to grow the business on a sustainable basis. As a result of the work we have done, the business that we have today is focused on premium precision measurement, is facing into attractive markets that are exposed to long-term growth trends, a business that's taking exciting new products to market on a regular basis, but also with a strong pipeline, and a business that is supported by a strong balance sheet that provides flexibility to leverage the many opportunities that are available to us and including M&A. And it's a business that continues to have a strong self-help story. Importantly, we have highly engaged and multitalented people who have demonstrated their ability to rise to the many challenges of recent years, but who are also ready to embrace the next stage of the group's journey as a leading, sustainable compound growth business. So I'm delighted with what we have achieved together and our progress in executing our strategy, which is reflected in the strong results that we are reporting today. In 2023, we delivered our third successive year of double-digit organic sales growth, very much continuing the momentum from 2021 and 2022. We generated record levels of operating profit. That's above our previous high back from 2019. And with our strong top line growth, new product launches and focus on operational excellence, I'm absolutely delighted that we delivered an operating margin in excess of 18%, very much fulfilling the pledge that we made back in 2019 to restore Spectris to its previous margin highs. Now it's evidence of the strength and quality of our businesses that now see this as just a stepping stone on our way to margins in excess of 20%. We remain highly cash generative, strengthening our already strong balance sheet and providing the group with continued flexibility. EPS and return on gross capital employed are significantly up on 2022. And so overall, a very strong and pleasing set of financial results that provides another step towards meeting our medium-term targets, again, demonstrating the improved quality and resilience of the group and the benefit of the breadth of our portfolio with exposure to both early cycle and late cycle end markets with broad geographic exposure. And alongside the financials, our commitment to creating a sustainable business for all stakeholders is really underpinning our performance, and it's ensuring we prioritize a culture of long-term growth set on solid foundations. Our people are at the heart of our business. We are building a distinct healthy, high-performance culture based on engagement and making Spectris a truly great place to work. I think that's emphasized by our engagement score increasing again last year. I have to say, I'm pleased with the progress that we have made to build further gender diversity on our path to have at least 40% of females in our senior leadership team by the end of the decade. And for our planet, we are making strong progress in meeting our ambitious targets to become net-zero across own operations by 2030 and across our value chain by 2040. So it's also pleasing to see that our progress is being recognized externally with the group recently receiving an A- rating from CDP, that's our highest-ever rating. And we're also actively working with our suppliers to drive sustainability across our supply chain. And then for our society, we have joined the 25x25 initiative, to provide a collective focus on the development of a diverse talent pipeline in our industry. And beyond our business, we're also proud to be building out a legacy through the Spectra Foundation, which to date has committed almost GBP 1.4 million to support quality STEM education for people from all backgrounds. And today, we have announced that we intend to contribute a further GBP 6 million to grow the work impact of the foundation by 2030. Now these results would not have been possible without great people united behind a common purpose and united behind common values. I mean I have worked in a number of businesses and experienced a variety of different working cultures. But there is something special about what we are creating at Spectris. We're combining passion with accountability, creativity with ambition, integrity with engagement, a culture that is really working for us, a great and engaging place to work. So I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of my colleagues who are continuing to aim high every day. So an excellent progress in 2023 with a pleasing set of results. But we're far from done. Significant opportunities lie ahead of us. And while we cannot remove maybe the uncertainty from some of our end markets, we do expect to continue to outperform them and use a number of levers under our control to drive further progress in the years ahead. The combination of the improved quality of the group today, structural growth end markets, our investment in growth and our strong self-help story gives me great confidence in our future prospects, including outperforming the market and the delivery of further margin expansion in 2024. I'll now pass you to Derek, who will take you through the financials in more detail before I come back and talk about what will be the ingredients to our further progress. Derek?

Thank you, Andrew, and good morning, everyone. We are pleased to have delivered a record performance this year with particularly good progress on margin expansion, especially in the Dynamics division. We have a strong balance sheet, which provides flexibility, and the group's focused portfolio continues to generate strong returns. I'll get into the specific numbers in a moment, but before let's look at the financial performance in 2023 in the context of the targets that we set out at our Capital Markets Day in October '22. We have delivered our third consecutive year of double-digit organic growth, and we remain committed to our target of through-cycle organic growth of 6% to 7%. In June 2019, we set out the ambition to improve our operating margin to 18%. It's therefore great to see the delivery of 18.1% in 2023. And we remain confident and well on track to become a 20% plus margin business. The quality of our profit continues to be strong, illustrated by cash conversion of 103%. And our return on gross capital employed, and remember, that is the gross number, adding back amortized acquisition cost was 18.5%, representing significant improvement in the quality of Spectris over the past 5 years. Our Scope 1 and 2 emissions reduced by 27%, and we remain on track to meet our net-zero commitments. So overall, we see '23 as the year where all of the hard work and efforts of all the teams across the group is really starting to shine through and we're really proud of these results. This slide provides a graphical view of the main P&L movement. So after adjusting to remove sales and operating profit relating to disposals, we get to an organic baseline, and FX reduced sales by GBP 16 million and operating profit by GBP 1.9 million. We then saw excellent like-for-like growth in revenue, up 10%, adding GBP 132 million of additional sales and GBP 88.2 million of additional gross profit. In '23, like many others, we experienced inflationary pressures in the cost base. However, despite this, through the deployment of SBS and operational efficiency, we were able to limit our like-for-like adjusted overhead increase to GBP 48.1 million, and that maintained our overheads as a percentage of sales. Acquisitions added GBP 23.1 million of revenue, GBP 2.6 million of operating profit, and that brings you down to the GBP 262.5 million of adjusted operating profit, an increase of 18% on the prior year and a margin of 18.1% compared to 16.8% in the prior year. For completeness, I have a slide that bridges between our adjusted operating profit and the statutory measures. I won't go through every number. We remain on track to begin our transition to S/4HANA during this year and we sent GBP 40 million on the material SaaS projects. The loss on disposal in the year of GBP 12.6 million primarily relates to the final elements of CLS, which left the group completely in '23. And that leaves us with statutory profit before tax for the year of GBP 185.6 million. Now to aid your models, the slide includes the adjusted EPS calculation where you can see that our EPS increased by 25% from 159.9p to 199.7p. This increase was mainly due to the improved profit performance of the group, but it also benefited from having 4 million fewer shares following the share buyback program. So now moving on to the divisional performance. Spectris Scientific delivered a strong financial performance in '23 with sales growth of 7%, 12% on a like-for-like basis, to GBP 704.2 million, and they posted a double-digit increase in adjusted operating profit. We saw strong sales growth across all key end markets, except for Life Sciences, which was impacted by early normalization following the strong growth period in prior years. Sales grew across all regions with growth strongest in Asia, including China. And the adjusted operating profit increased by 11%, 13% like-for-like to GBP 155.2 million due to the top line growth as well as continued operational improvements. The adjusted operating margin increased by 70 basis points to 22%. We are particularly pleased with the strong financial performance delivered by Spectris Dynamics. Sales increased by 6% on a like-for-like basis. However, adding the compound growth impact of acquisitions, reported growth was actually up 10% to GBP 542.8 million. Sales again grew across all key end markets with particular strong growth in aerospace and defense and academia and on a regional basis, our largest market, Europe. The adjusted operating profit of GBP 93.1 million, 27% higher than last year. And the adjusted operating margin was 220 basis points higher at 17.2%. And this marks a step change in the profitability of the division as illustrated in the bottom left hand corner of my slide. This sustainable increase in profitability results from our focus on operational excellence through the deployment of SBS alongside a successfully executed margin expansion plan, which comprised detailed pricing analysis, product design cost reductions, supply chain optimization and the rationalization of our product portfolio. But while '23 was an excellent progress year for the Dynamics division, we are confident in the team's ability to deliver further progress in the coming year. This is our cash bridge. Again, I won't go through every line, but I'll point out a few key points. If you add back the almost GBP 39 million of depreciation and amortization, you get to an EBITDA number of 300.1 -- sorry, GBP 301.3 million and an EBITDA margin of 21%. You'll also note from this slide that our strong cash generation over the past 5 years has enabled us to repay the debt position from 2018 and we've ended the year with GBP 139 million on our balance sheet. And this balance sheet strength provides us with the optionality and the flexibility to invest both organically and in inorganic opportunities. So as a team, we've been busy since our Capital Markets Day in June 2019. And I thought it would be a good time just to look back and see how we have executed on the capital allocation priorities that we set out at that time. We have delivered on each of the components of our capital allocation approach, resulting in continued creation of shareholder value. Over the past 5 years, we have generated almost GBP 3 billion of cash. And in line with our capital allocation priorities, we have deployed the largest amount, GBP 806 million on organic growth activities. GBP 385 million has been returned to shareholders via our progressive ordinary dividend which has delivered the 34th consecutive year of growth this year, and GBP 361 million was spent on acquisitions. We repaid the GBP 297 million of debt. We now have GBP 139 million on the balance sheet, as I said. And finally, we've returned GBP 507 million of excess capital to shareholders via the buybacks. The disposal of Red Lion was announced in December and it's anticipated to complete at the end of Q1. Following the completion, Servomex will be reported as part of the Spectris Scientific division, reflecting its position as a world leader in the provision of specialist, premium gas and moisture analysis instruments and solutions. So this slide is included to help you with your models and to show you how the group would have looked in '23 and '22 without Red Lion. I draw your attention to the scientific division, including Servomex, which had sales of GBP 804 million at an operating margin of 21.4%. This would be a significant business even on a stand-alone basis. In addition, the Dynamics division continues to demonstrate compound growth and has materially improved its operating margin in '23. Even Red Lion itself had a very strong year and enabled us once again to sell part of the group at a higher trading multiple than that of the remaining group. The numbers in the red box in the middle of this slide, particularly the '23 adjusted operating profit of GBP 240.6 million, is the starting point from which we will progress in 2024. So finally, some guidance and some modeling considerations. Once you remove Red Lion and start from the pro forma position shown on the previous slide, we expect to make further progress in both sales and margin expansion in '24. We had a very strong H1 last year, particularly in Q1. So we anticipate a challenging comp for Q1 this year with some improvement in Q2. And then we expect to see most of the year-on-year improvements in the second half. The effective tax rate is expected to be 23%, and working capital will reduce and be within our guided range of 11% to 15% of sales. CapEx, around GBP 40 million and SaaS cost should be around about GBP 20 million in '24. The remainder of the GBP 150 million share buyback announced at the end of last year will be completed in 2024. For our planning purposes, we've assumed an exchange rate of $1.24 and EUR 1.15 to the pound. And with that, I'll hand you back to Andrew.

So as I said in my introduction, Spectris today is a very different business than 5 years ago. We have carefully and systematically refocused the group brand, premium precision measurement businesses with attractive financial characteristics and long-term sustainable growth prospects. We have strengthened our financial position while increasing investment in growth through higher R&D and targeted M&A. And we still have a very strong self-help story. And alongside this, we have reinforced our credentials as a leading sustainable compound growth business whilst also increasing shareholder returns through our progressive dividend and share buyback programs, as Derek just outlined. But as I've said already, we are far from done. We have built a high-quality business with significant future potential, which we are truly working on unlocking, delivering on our medium-term targets with a strategy that is focused and supported by committed investment. So we'll continue to build on the foundations that we've laid since 2018 and continue to leverage our business model. Now our businesses have differentiated positions in attractive markets. We've talked about this before. And they're supported by sustainable growth trends. The strength and continued investment in our businesses and our position as a premium provider is really enabling us to outperform and grow market share as again, we demonstrated last year. And we continue to expect through cycle end market growth rates of 5% to 6%. Now undoubtedly, 2024 will be a slower year. That's really following 3 years of double-digit growth. So this is to be expected as we come to the end of markets normalizing. In Life Sciences, we expect the market to return to growth in the second half. And we continue to see good orders and sales growth in tech led Industrials, particularly driven by Aerospace and Defense, but being partially offset by continued weakness in machine building and industrial automation. And frankly, we expect that to strengthen through this year. In Automotive, sales were ahead of a strong comp from last year. Now while demand has slowed, we still expect some modest growth in 2024. Sales into semiconductor and electronics also grew strongly last year with growth across all regions. And while order intake was lower in 2023, as very much expected against a strong comparator, our pipeline is still robust, and we expect order levels to pick up through the course of this year. In Materials, sales grew across all regions last year with particularly strong growth in Asia. That's driven by green metals and green mining and particularly the development in new clean energy technologies that is really starting to fuel growth. And we expect these market segments to remain robust over the next 12 months. And after an extremely strong sales period into academia last year, we're expecting a slightly flatter growth rate this year. So in 2024, we are likely to see continued twists and turns in markets as the global economy finds its way towards a new normal. But that being said, we remain confident that we are focusing on the attractive structural growth drivers in our markets, backed up by investment in R&D, but also in targeted M&A. Our order book as we enter 2024 provided good visibility with 4.7 months of cover. And while it is still early with only 10 months of the year to go, I am pleased to say that overall order intake in January and February returned to positive growth. The key things I'd like you to take away is, firstly, that the diversity of our markets is a strength and supports the resilience of Spectris. Secondly, the combination of concentrating on these attractive growth areas in our end markets, really highlighted by our medium-term growth trends and the pipeline of new products and services means that we expect to continue to outperform the market. Our high levels of customer intimacy and also understanding is really helping drive our innovation pipeline. It informs our research and product development strategy such that we can anticipate our customers' needs for the future. And during the year, we invested GBP 108 million in R&D and very much in line with our guidance, with a vitality score of 22% being slightly down on last year, but still very much in the required range. The renewed focus we have on place -- we have placed on unlocking innovation through increased R&D spend in recent years is delivering positive outcomes for customers, and we're having significant success in commercializing our technology. A few of our latest product launches in 2023 are highlighted on this slide. Now these range from class-leading instruments such as the new NanoSight Pro for Nano and Biomaterials characterization for use in drug development as well as our revolutionary new NanoAir 10 particle counter that has unsurpassed sensitivity to monitor air quality in semiconductor manufacturing. This goes through to expanding our range of leading simulator solutions and smart sensors to building out our software business in Dynamics, which today represents about 15% of Dynamics sales. And last year, we released a number of major new updates to our market-leading durability and reliability software products. Overall, our emphasis on R&D is delivering an improved flow of leading products that is supporting our organic growth ambitions as [ worlds ] frankly, enhancing Spectris' reputation as an innovative partner of choice for customers who are really looking to push boundaries even further. And looking ahead, I'm excited about the strength of the pipeline of the new products that we're going to launch this year, particularly incorporating a greater use of artificial intelligence to enhance our measuring capability, but also expand our digital offerings. We also continue to invest in M&A. It is an important element of our strategy to compound growth. It's enabling us to further enhance our advantaged positions, strengthening and expanding our portfolio to add further value for our customers. And during last year, we invested a total of GBP 60 million. In September, Spectra Dynamics completed the acquisition of MicroStrain which is a leading developer of inertial and wireless sensing systems that serve the industrial and aerospace markets, and that's to further strengthen our overall offering. And in Spectris Scientific, we made 3 investments: firstly, the acquisition of the x-ray diffraction product line from Freiberg Instruments. And this provides complementary solutions to our existing semiconductor portfolio. Scientific also made a minority investment in LumaCyte, which provides further exposure to the high-growth cell and gene therapy and vaccine markets, and they also acquired EMS, which is a long-established partner and an exclusive distributor of PMS products in the U.K. and Ireland. Now these are all high-quality bolt-on acquisitions that bring new capabilities to the group. And while we would have liked to have done even more M&A in '23, we will always retain our discipline. And I think we all have to recognize that some years will be more active than others. But importantly, we continue to maintain a substantial and active pipeline of targets and completing additional acquisitions in 2024 remains a top priority. Turning now to operational excellence. This is a key part of our strategy and our strong self-help story. And it's built around a focus on a lean mindset and business process transformation. I have to say, I've been particularly delighted with how the business has adopted the Spectris business system right across the group. But also the tangible progress that we've made across all sites, delivering benefits in excess of GBP 10 million again last year. Now engaging people and continuous improvement is absolutely central to SBS. So let's hear from some of my colleagues how they are using SBS to drive even greater business performance. [Presentation]

So as you've heard, we are using SBS to remove waste, to drive efficiency, but also strengthen our competitiveness as we grow the business. And these activities not only deliver hard financial benefits, but also strengthen our capabilities but really importantly, create an empowered culture where everyone can help improve the business every day. And as you heard in the video, we also commenced our bronze, silver, gold program last year to further embed and sustain lean across the whole business. And I have to say, I'm very pleased to report that by the end of the year, 7 of our sites had achieved bronze certification. And we're also making good progress on the rollout of our ERP program that will deliver simpler and more standardized process helping us to more efficiently scale our business. Our implementation will be phased throughout the year with benefits starting to be realized from 2025. So pulling this together, as you can see on the slide, we have clear line of sight to our medium-term operating margin target in excess of 20%. In addition to our expectation of further margin improvement in 2024, we have the building blocks in place to go even further. The ERP implementation will generate an additional 150 basis points of margin improvement with benefits, as I said, starting to flow in 2025. Additionally, we will deliver further benefits from SBS each year as well as operational leverage as we continue to grow. Our progress to date absolutely gives us every confidence to achieve our margin targets, and at 18.1%, we're already very close to that goal, which, frankly, this business as a leader in premium precision measurement is absolutely capable of maintaining. So in summary, we've had an excellent year, which is absolutely a testament to the brilliant work of my colleagues, our business model and also our culture. The strong financial performance and further progress on strategic execution represents another step on our journey towards delivering our medium-term targets. And as well as a compelling compound growth story, we have a number of initiatives to further strengthen and enhance the business. We are a more resilient, higher quality business today. And while we remain absolutely alive to the uncertain macroeconomic environment, I am confident that the combination of our leading market positions, our strong balance sheet and self-help initiatives will enable us to make progress in what promises to be another important year for the group. Thank you very much for listening. And now Derek and I will be more than happy to take your questions.

Mark Davies Jones from Stifel. A couple, if I may. On the margin progress of Dynamics, is there any mix effect in there because there's obviously a range of businesses with the other different margin profiles? And particularly, how is the virtual testing business continuing to grow?

Yes. Mark, so you -- thank you for your question. I think for dynamics, as Derek sort of said in his presentation, is that margin progression is -- it's come about from a number of factors. It was quite a big reorganization that we did at the beginning of last year, really sort of restructuring Dynamics into sort of 3 customer-facing pillars around virtual test, physical tests and in process. So really focused on their end markets and that's helped to bring greater focus, but also productivity improvements in terms of the way we did deliver the restructuring. There has been some mix effect. I mean we continue to push our software business and our software sales, and that's clearly higher gross margin. That helped. Within that, we've all been driving SBS very hard. You saw in the video the Suzhou site there. I think that's one of our sort of leading sites in terms of SBS application in the group. They've really picked that up and driven that strongly over the last 3 years. And that's been -- that's driven strong productivity and margin improvement from that. And I think -- what's the other point, I was going to say, I can't remember that. But I think it comes about from a number of factors. And Ben and team, I would say, have done a phenomenal job of laying out that road map and then executing on it.

Around scientific, It's obviously a big move in year-on-year growth rates from first half to second half, perhaps a little more severe than I was expecting. So I'm assuming most of that is Life Sciences and some of it very tough comps. But in terms of those Life Sciences customers, is there a sort of any kind of stock cycle there? I thought there is, given how specialized those pieces of equipment? What do you think is going on in that shift in demand?

Yes. So I think for -- if you look at scientific, the predominant slowdown has been in sort of the pharma life science arena through last year. I mean, we saw that coming into '23, and we signaled that very early on. We're not alone. I think the whole industry has seen it. In some ways, we've fared better than a lot of our peers. But I think inevitably, it's not the fact that I think we're exposed to destocking. That isn't our business model in pharma. We don't provide lots of consumables like some of our sort of peer companies. So we've not been exposed to that sort of big destocking cycle coming out at the end of the pandemic. But I think what is clear is that clearly, a lot of equipment, a lot of instruments were bought through sort of the second half of '20 through '21 into '22. And a lot of labs were reequipped with new equipment. And so I think that has just suppressed demand through the course of the last 12, 18 months. As we said, as we look forward, we, like many others, are anticipating that we'll start to see sort of the pharma and the life science market starting to pick up from an order perspective in the second half of this year.

And just last one on M&A. It remains clearly very much in focus. Is the primary focus still on bolt-ons? Or are you also looking at some bigger things?

Mark, I'm going to give the same answer I always give. I mean, we look right across the spectrum from sort of pure technology, early-stage businesses through bolt-ons, through to sort of larger scale businesses. I think it's fair to say that the majority of our sort of the pipeline that we are currently nurturing and cultivating is more skewed towards the bolt-on end of the spectrum. But we still look right across that spectrum as to where we can see attractive acquisitions that will be highly synergistic and will be accretive to what we do and particularly strengthen our customer workflow offerings.

It's Rory Smith from UBS. I've got 3. I'll go one at a time, if that's okay. Volume price in H2, did that develop much as you thought it would within the 10% like-for-like? And is there any carryover on pricing into '24?

So pricing last year, I mean, when we got into the second half, the majority of the growth in the second half was pricing. I mean, when we were at the half year, we were sort of 60-40 volume to price. And that inverted as we said it would. I mean, it actually took longer to invert than we anticipated. We talked about it at the half year results last year. But I'd say the majority of the growth by the end of the year was really coming through on price. I mean the good news is that that's very sticky. We're not seeing pressure to bring prices down. Typically in our industry, prices go up and then they just stay up and that sets the new normal. And that's been very much the case. As we go forward into 2024, I think we're very much back into sort of normal pricing to offset cost and input inflation. But for us, we price also in terms of the value we deliver to customers. So we do -- we really think hard about our value sell, what is the value we're creating for our customers and try and price for that accordingly. But also importantly, as we launch new products, that's -- typically, we can also command higher pricing and higher margins on those new products. So that pipeline of new products that's coming through is also helping to fuel some of that pricing growth as well.

Great. And secondly, with Servomex, has something fundamentally changed there, either in its end markets or the way it does business with its customers that you're now happy to include it within Scientific?

Yes. So I think with Servomex, I mean, I think we've been consistent all the way through, maybe not as clear. But when we did the initial strategy work back in 2019, Servomex was always a business we felt was absolutely fitted our business model. It's got strong technology, strong products, strong brand. It's solving customers -- some of the toughest challenges in gas analysis. They're a leading gas analysis company. But what we weren't seeing at the time was the operational performance of the group -- of the business. And so we put a lot of focus on driving its operation forms and particularly simplifying what sort of makes it, it was very much a high-mix, low-volume business. And so a lot of focus has gone into thinking really sort of on this sort of the 80% preto where we're really making money, which are the product were key products, where we should invest. And there's been a lot of work done over the last few years on that. As I said before, we replaced the President of Servomex at the beginning of 2021 -- sorry, 2022. Andy Cowan, he's done a phenomenal job there and really driving the business forward. And he's now actually going to move on to run our PMS business. We brought in a new President for Servomex, who've got a good industry experience. And I think the other thing that really sort of help cement them as part of the group and the change is that as we look at things like the hydrogen economy, carbon capture, gas analysis and premium gas analysis are going to be absolutely key to enabling those technologies. So we do see quite a strong growth vector for the Servomex business. And we also have some very exciting new products that we're launching this year that's coming out, which will be quite disruptive in the market, we believe.

Brilliant. And finally for me, just to sort of follow up on Mark's question on Life Sciences. I appreciate the point on sort of consumables and there's no stock in the channel to work through and it's also a bespoke, but then you do flag sort of biologics as one of the growth drivers going forward. But let's say, some of your other peers have that at a higher sort of medium- to long-term growth for that piece. And obviously, your growth outlook is more like mid- to high single digits. So is there a range -- are there a range of growth outlook for the different pieces within Life Sciences? Or is that sort of regional comment? How should we think about that?

Yes. So for Life Sciences today, I mean, we are more skewed to sort of small molecule drug development. I mean, historically, that's where the majority of the industry has been. The biologics, the gene therapy, protein molecule treatments have been a high-growth vector for the industry, although that did slow quite a bit in the last 2 years. But for that medium and long term, we absolutely see that biologics, larger molecules is going to be aware of a lot of the focus and attention is going to go. The small molecules is still going to be developed. The growth rate we skewed more towards the larger molecules. And that's why we've sort of made the LumaCyte investment, why we bought Creoptix, why we're developing some of our own products internally to really target that market and really sort of tune our instruments around that biologics biotherapies.

Stephan from HSBC. I would like to dig in to the margin expansion you said more or less and picking up what you said before. So you said pricing is going to be flat. Volumes are probably missing in the first half, picking up in the second. So very simply where the margin expansion coming from?

So the margin expansion for this year is really coming from driving the Spectris business system. As we said in the presentation, I mean it's well over GBP 10 million of benefits last year, and that builds on the GBP 10 million of benefits we had in 2022. So we've got a real momentum now in terms of deploying the Spectris business system. And I hope the video that we showed, so it really sort of brings home the fact that this is not just a top-down initiative. This is really owned by our sites, really owned by the businesses. They are using the tools, they're tailoring it to their needs. And when I go around the sites, it's really excitement enthusiasm around sort of making life better every day by deploying the Spectris business system. It drives better safety, better quality, better customer outcomes, higher performance in terms of on-time delivery as well as we can do all that in a smaller footprint with fewer people. So it's really helping to sort of fuel the productivity in the business, and it's very much owned by this. So we'd expect to see that this year come through. But then equally, we absolutely anticipated a slower 2024 last year, and we were taking actions through last year, particularly in the second half to make sure our exit run rate on our cost base was a level that would then also support margin expansion in 2024. I mean sort of Derek talked a little bit about sort of overheads in his presentation. We were still suffering some input cost inflation at the beginning of the year. Some of the restructuring we've done in dynamics, plus other things we've done, our exit run rate on overheads is lower coming into '24 than it was for sort of the average of 23%. So that again helps.

And then last one for me. Well, you deliberately didn't give any quantitative guidance. So it's all qualitative. How much visibility and certain team confidence you have in the second half year?

Yes. So I mean, as I said, we've still got 10 months to go for the year. I mean, we clearly slowed in the fourth quarter of last year, admittedly against a very strong comp. I mean Q4 of 2022 was mostly a record quarter. So it was going to be very hard to repeat that. But if you -- for the 2023, I mean, our orders were down 5% for the year. But effectively, they were 5% down every quarter through the year. So I think -- in some extent, you've got to sort of think back over really look at 2022 and 2023 almost as a combination to try and get the right picture because we saw a lot of orders being pulled forward into 2022 because of the supply chain constraints, lead times going out. Input cost inflection going up, customers want to get ahead of that. So we saw orders up over 10% in 2022. And so -- and then we couldn't -- because of the supply chain constraints, we couldn't actually deliver on that order book. So we exited '22 with a very strong order backlog, a record order backlog. We had 6 months visibility of that. That clearly helped to then drive strong organic sales growth through certainly Q1, Q2 and a bit into Q3. But if you take that as an aggregate session over the 2 years, I think you get a much significant -- a clearer picture of actually the development of the market. And the fact that orders last year were only 5% down, and were 5% down every quarter after a very strong 2022. The underlying demand that we talked about is still there in our industry. I mean we track sort of what we call marketing qualified leads, opportunities where we basically look at when customers are thinking about placing orders, we check whether they've got a budget, are they going to buy this year, are they going to install this year, et cetera. So we have a good sense of what that pipeline of opportunities look like. And that is as strong as it's been over the last 2 years today as it was through last year in 2022. The only difference we've seen is that sort of it's just taking longer for customers to convert. There is some caution in the market mainly because of the macro backdrop and everything that's going on. But hopefully, we're passed peak inflation. I think we passed peak uncertainty. The markets are still uncertain. But I think we, along with lots of other sort of industry commentators, are sort of really seeing the fact that we expect to see, as Derek said, a more challenging Q1, and then things starting to pick up through Q2 and into the second half of the year. But it all depends really on the order intake that we get over the next 5, 6 months. I mean we had 4.7 months of visibility at -- when we came into January 1. Orders were in positive territory in January and February, as I said. So we can see the demand starting to come through. But we need that to continue to sustain and build to then allow us to make progress in the second half.

Calum Battersby from Berenberg. If I could just ask kind of a follow-up there in terms of the H1 outlook. If it's slightly weaker in Q1 and improving in Q2 from the orders you've seen at the start of the year, are you expecting the overall H1 picture to be down slightly and then the recovery in H2? Or do you think the business can still grow overall in H1? If that's the case, then which parts of the group are most likely to be performing stronger?

Okay. There's quite a lot in that question, Calum. Look, I mean, I think it's going to be a challenging Q1, and then it just depends on how fast that recovery starts. We could be flat in H1. Equally, we could be down a bit in H1. It's all going to be timing. But I think it's the momentum that we'll start to pick in Q2 that we then expect to carry on into H2. But as I said, it all comes back to the order intake really over the next 4, 5, 6 months to support at the end of the year. I mean if you go -- I go back to my previous answer to Stephan. We entered 2023 with 6 months visibility, 4.7 months coming into January. That is still very much in our range. We've always guided new Spectris to have about 4 to 5 months order visibility, old Spectris about 2 to 3. So in all the changes we've made over the last 5 years, the course of our business is actually we have more visibility because we're more resilient, and we're very much in that range. So we're not concerned from that perspective. But we do need to see the orders continue to pick up a few months.

Got it. Very clear. Then wondered if you could give a more precise update on the ERP implementation program for this year. Where are the major milestones? When in the year do they come? And then do you have any precise guidance on the phasing of margin benefits for the next couple of years? Or is that dependent on progress in '24?

Do you want to take it?

I don't know how precise you want to be down to the hour or the minute. It's going to start going live in the scientific division in Q2. And then at the back of Q2, it will start going live in the Dynamics division and then get rolled out through the remainder of this year and the final phase should be Q1 next year. So really, we're entering to this point now over the next 12 months where all of the rollouts start to happen. It's actually why our inventory is a little higher at the moment than I would like, just as an aside because we were holding stock just when you go live on something that doesn't always go exactly to plan. So we're holding a little bit of stock just to make sure that we can smooth that out over the sort of the next 6 months. In terms of the benefit, therefore, we'll start to see benefits come through in 2025, but we hope to be at the sort of full run rate of benefits in 2026.

Rich Paige from Numis. Just a couple of questions from me. End market-wise, the one that really set out to me is semicon electronics looked remarkably robust still in the second half. Thinking of the products you supply them, I'm guessing you're really typically late in the cycle. I'm thinking of your order profile going into '24. Is there anything exceptional we should be thinking about?

Rich, great question. I mean I think the exceptional piece is we had an exceptional order intake in 2022. And we've basically been busy burning through that. So I think we may have talked about this in the past. But my anticipation, which I think go back 12 months, was that despite the sort of cycle that we're seeing in orders, in semicon, you won't see that through our revenue growth in semicon because we had such a strong order intake in 2022. And we are starting, as we talked about in the Q3 trading update last year, we're starting to see early signs of the market coming back. We are -- I mean some of our products are later cycle, but equally, we have some very early cycle products as well. So our sort of HPGA or high-pressure gas analyzer for the semiconductor fabs, where we basically are qualifying, verifying the purity of the import gas is for the manufacturing process. This is a product that's a few decades old, and it's still loved by the industry as the market standard. And that's one of the earliest products that gets ordered. And we've seen quite a tick-up in demand over the last few months. So that, for us, is sort of an indicator that the market is coming back. There's still a lot of investment going into new fabs. Some of them been delayed a bit because of what's happened in terms of output volumes and the recovery. Post bounce in semicon has been a bit of a correction, but we certainly anticipate semi to be back in positive growth territory this year.

And maybe aligned to that, we're hearing across the industry sort of differing order patterns and order normalization. Obviously, you talked about 4.7 million where you in months of visibility being where you think. But is there a big variability across end markets, customers that you're seeing within that?

Yes. So if you look at our sort of order intake last year, I mean, where were we most down, pharma area, machine manufacturing and industrial automation was really the other area. And a lot of that was driven out of China, China was weaker from an order intake perspective last year. We saw a bit of a bounce when they came out of lockdown. It's hard to think they only came out of lockdown every March time frame last year. We saw a bit of a bounce around pharma and Life Sciences at that point, but we never saw a bounce in the other markets, and it's sort of seen weakness ever since. Again, I don't think that's an unusual story. I think that we -- lots of business have seen that. Where we have seen real growth in China, which is a -- I think, again, is a positive indicator of the future is sort of academia, the advanced research was significantly up. I mean we were up to what, 29% -- 26% in academia last year. China was even stronger than that. So China is investing in a lot of the sort of clean energy tech around batteries, catalysts, advanced materials, nano analysis and materials. Building Materials also had quite a big investment in China. But also, they're investing in sort of pharma, Life Science applications as well. And also in sort of semicon. While semicon is a bit tougher in China because of the trade restrictions, the memory market was pretty strong for us still there. So it's -- you got to peel these things back because I really understand what's going on. But it was the machine building, the sensors, weighing technologies that we're selling into China, that sort of Industrial Automation side of the Chinese market was where we saw the real weakness last year. That's what was suppressing it.

[ David Powell ] from Jefferies. Andrew, you said earlier you would like to have done more M&A in 2023. Can you just explain a little bit what held you back from doing more M&A?

We were very active. Nothing held us back. And we had a strong pipeline, and we participated in a number of sort of bilaterals that led to some of the deals we did, put some processes to the deals we did. But also, we were unsuccessful in some processes as well. So clearly, we participated more than that we're successful in, which I think comes back to the point we made about discipline. At the end of the day, if someone is prepared to pay what we think is a crazy price, then better look to them. We have to remain disciplined around our capital allocation framework and the levels of returns that we expect to see and to make sure we're driving shareholder value creation. So you shouldn't expect us to win every deal. If we are, we're mostly overpaying. So that was really what's behind that point.

Just a follow-up from me, please. It's Rory at UBS. You've mentioned there sort of semicon in China, tougher. I guess, at the higher end, I guess some of your peers have also talked about U.K. export license issues. Has that affected you at all? And if that comment on memory is sort of the answer, I suppose, then is that where you are in the value chain if we think about semiconductor just being...

I mean, we participate in the complete value chain. The flip side of some of the trade constraints are on the high-end semi is effectively driving investment back into North America, in particular, but also into Europe, which again creates -- is creating new opportunities for us. So sort of net-net, there's maybe a bit of a timing shift, but there's plenty of incremental demand to offset that. And we play right across the whole semi production chain. Any other questions from anybody? Yes, Stephan.

Yes, Stephan Klepp from HSBC again. So 150 basis points, biggest driver in the group, IT harmonization implementation. A, what can go wrong? B, what kind of visibility do you have on those 150 basis points because that is obviously the biggest step we need to see those 20% approaching.

I'll share, Derek's blushes. But so Derek has been driving the project. He's the sort of key sponsor for the ERP program. I'm sure he'll add some commentary to this. But I was very firm, shall we say, when we were looking at the investment because it's a significant investment to make sure that we do put the spend in and we put the systems in that absolutely, we get the return on that investment. So Derek did what he called his time machine. And we actually went back to the business 2 years prior and said, if you had implemented ERP in Salesforce, Salesforce 2 years ago, what would that have done for the business in terms of productivity and improvements in efficiency. So we have a very clear model as to where those benefits are coming from and how they're going to be delivered. So we are very confident in achieving at least 150 basis points from the implementation. In terms of what goes wrong, they are ERP implementations. They are -- there's always a risk with them. It's a big change. But I think we are mitigating that in the best way possible by basically adopting standard processes. So our fit to standards is as high as SAP. So we're not a complicated business. SAP have been developing their processes and their IT for many, many years. It works. We know it works. The best thing to do is to say, right, which of the processes fits our business model and go with their processes. So we've also done a lot of work to actually modify what we do today to fit SAP already. And we're now in that whole testing phase with our key users and our users across the business to make sure it does work and also all the data bridges that are being built between the old system and the new system are also -- have high integrity. So we are making sure in taking every step we can to make sure we have a smooth implementation. Derek, I don't know if you want to add to that?

So 150 basis points and your time machine. So is it a man-hour headcount calculation, which is behind that because that's probably what's interested most?

Yes. So if you imagine, when you're looking at a big business case like this, there'll be a whole host of benefits. So you'll have sales -- assumed sales benefits through efficiency. You'll have assumed sales benefits through having better visibility on your working capital or having the opportunity to interact more electronically with your customers. You'll have benefits from kind of AI that you can deploy bots, the SAM SAP standard processes that today we don't have. We were going across 6, 7, 8, 9 systems on different aspects. What I was very keen to do was not ensure that this whole thing sold itself on the idea that some magical growth would come. And therefore, by simply growing and keeping the cost base flat, we would see a margin expansion, right? So at the time, the time machine approach was to sit and say, okay, if we had this level of sales, 2022 levels of sales, what would the cost base be? So in that example, clearly, it's a lower cost base. And that lower cost base comes through fundamentally fewer heads because you don't have as many people running as many systems with as many handoffs and the complexity that, that brought. That was the main driver at that time. Clearly, by the time we go live and we see the benefits come through, there will be some operational excellence that will give us. There'll be some efficiency gains that we'll have. So the exact number of heads that we have today, and we have 2 years from now will be a function of a whole host of things. But we're confident when we actually look at the underlying processes. So for example, how we book in inventory, how we move inventory from the warehouse to the shop floor, how it gets tracked around world. Today, there are people that have to do all of those things. And hopefully, in the next 2, 3 years, those same people will still be doing it because we would have grown another 6%, 7% through the cycle, and that operational excellence drops through in that way. If it doesn't happen, if we have a difficult couple of years for whatever reason, then we can look at the structure and tune it accordingly. So what -- just to manage your -- I know there's lots of analysts in the room. In 2 years' time, I'm not going to be able to sit and say right, this little 2% of margin came from this piece and this came from that. The reality is that we will be a more efficient, faster operating business that hopefully can support the growth, and you'll see that leverage drop through effectively, at the end of the day, to either increase margin or a lower cost. That's the only way you get there. And it's a combination of both that will come as a result of the system. So hopefully, that helps.

One last one, I promise. '25, '26, yes. So you say '26 full effect; '25, it's a bit of it. Can you give us a first glimpse what is a bit of it?

So let's -- ask me that question this time next year. I mean, clearly, it will start to flow through. We'll see bits in different places. But I mean, it that the earlier point on precision. I mean it's -- this is a major program. There's an awful lot of change. And I think you'll see it start to flow through. And as we see it, I'll be able to point to it. But exactly where and when. I mean, the beginnings will be on the scientific side because [ Molten Palios ] is going first. And has the biggest element. Dynamics will then follow. So that will be where you might start to see it in the first half of '25, perhaps more in scientific than Dynamics, and then it will start to flow through in 2026. Sorry, I can't help you any more.

So look, very much delighted with the excellent progress that we made last year and the pleasing set of financial results that we've delivered. But as I've sort of made it in my presentation, we are far from done. We have bags of opportunity in front of us still. We are more focused today than ever before on going and accessing those opportunities and truly delivering the full potential of the group. And as we said, we've got every confidence given the momentum we have over the last 3 years coming into this year, we can continue to make progress both in terms of outperforming the markets and also expanding on our margins this year. So thank you very much for coming. We'll hang around at the end. So we're very happy to take any other questions you may have over a cup of coffee. All right. Thank you very much.