Volex plc (VLX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Volex Half Year Results Presentation. I'm going to provide you with a summary, as always, before handing over to Jon, who will give you more detail on the performance in each market. Following this, I will update you on our strategy before we take questions at the end. Before we turn to the results, I'd like to talk to you about a further step in our strategic journey. I'm delighted to be able to announce here, although you already have seen the RNS that Dave Webster has agreed to join as our Non-Executive Chair, enhancing an already exceptional Board of Directors. Dave has unique industry experience. In his current role, he has led the transformation of CPM, a global leader in advanced process automation equipment. Prior to that, and importantly, he was the driving force for growth and transformation as the CEO of Electrical Components International, or ECI, a leader in consumer electrical and Off-Highway harnesses. He brings decades-long customer relationships in our space, particularly in North America, strengthening the Board's insight. His experience will be invaluable as we scale our North American operations and deepen our customer partnerships in this important market. Now this month marks 10 years, believe it or not, since I joined the Board of Volex and became Executive Chairman. In effect, combining the Chairman and CEO roles. I came into a business that was in decline with less than $400 million of revenue and a market cap of about GBP 50 million. And in fact, it has dropped down to about GBP 30 million at the lows. And I set about building a new organization, including talent from within Volex who had not been given the leadership they deserved. And there were many people who we inherited inside of Volex who were and remain exceptional partners in this journey. So with an excellent team to support me, a lot of hard work and endless travel, we've created one of the true standout success stories in U.K. industrials. A significant architect of this success is John Molloy, our Global COO. He will continue in the same role and is every bit as committed to the business as I am. And the two of us talk literally every single day, 7 days a week. Both of us have very significant personal investments in Volex. Indeed, my move into the Chief Executive position in Volex merely underlines my deep and ongoing commitment to driving further growth and customer engagement, and I will continue to lead from the front, delivering our ambitious plans and bringing in new customers. None of this would be possible without Jon Boaden's exceptional financial skills and cool head as the business has become increasingly complex. I'm also incredibly grateful to Jon for the role he plays in this company. So thank you, Jon. I'm very much looking forward to working with Dave and the existing Board to pursue growth across our markets. There are substantial opportunities ahead, and we have very big ambitions. This is a sensible time to align more closely with corporate governance best practice given the scale of our organization and the strong performance we are setting out today. So moving on. We delivered another excellent first half with revenues of $584 million at an operating margin of 9.8%. We've generated further strong organic growth at 13% despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop. In particular, we've seen very strong growth in electric vehicles and data centers. And later in the presentation, Jon will take you through exactly what has happened in each sector. The strong performance is proof that our strategy is working. Investment we chose to make in previous years is supporting growth this year and beyond. Our capabilities make us a first choice provider of critical connectivity solutions for global technology businesses. As the world changes, we're changing with it, and we are evolving our footprint to follow the demands of our customers who are reconfiguring their supply chains to deal with tariff challenges. Our move towards centers of excellence where we can deliver a range of the most advanced Volex solutions in a single location has resonated strongly with customers. It also gives us the opportunity to rationalize smaller sites, thereby improving the overall efficiency of the group. We continue to win new projects with our customers, particularly with electric vehicle customers and in the North American Off-Highway space. Our first half performance positions us strongly relative to our 5-year plan, which, as you may recall, sees us getting to $1.2 billion of revenues by the end of FY 2027, and our strong results for the first half are another significant step towards these objectives. So before we break out the individual markets, it's worth talking about how our customer-centric approach delivers deeply embedded customer relationships, giving us confidence in our strategy. And as you should all know by now, we work with the biggest technology brands in the world who have earned recognition as leaders in their fields. They trust us to deliver manufacturing solutions that either meet or exceed their quality, reliability and functionality requirements. Although our assemblies might be a small part of a large and complex system, they play a critical role every time. And there is no difference whether we are powering a domestic appliance that brings convenience to everyday life or connecting the key components at the heart of life-saving medical technology. We've built a business that revolves around the customer. We anticipate their needs and rise to their challenges. Our engineers define innovative production solutions and optimize processes for products that are assured to perform in challenging environments. This creates strong customer lock-in and sticky relationships. In many cases, regulatory requirements form a barrier to our substitution in the supply chain. In others, our deep expertise and consistently strong delivery position us as a preferred manufacturing partner. So this customer-led approach, disciplined reinvestment and daily operational excellence form the foundation of a business that compounds value over time. Many of our largest customers have been working with Volex for longer than I have been operationally involved in the business. And over the past decade, revenues have tripled, driven by expanding share with existing customers, winning new projects and customers and a targeted acquisition strategy. Operating margins have strengthened from 2% to a consistent 9% to 10% range maintained successfully for the past 5 full years. As a result, operating profit has grown from $7 million in FY '16 to $106 million in FY '25. And this performance reflects stringent cost control, relentless operational improvement, talent attraction and retention from the top to the bottom of the organization, plus targeted investments in future growth, each aligned with our customers' priorities. This combination of growth and margin expansion has translated into basic earnings per share rising from $0.015 in FY '16 to over $0.36 in FY '25. Volex continues to steadily build capability, deepen relationships and deliver consistent, sustainable returns, creating value that compounds year after year. So I'll now hand over to Jon to take us through the financial performance and the end markets.

Thank you, Nat. So first and foremost, I'm incredibly pleased with the results that we've been able to deliver, and this is an excellent performance, $584 million of revenue in the first half of the year, which represents organic growth of 13%. Profitability is towards the top end of our margin target at 9.8%, which means we've delivered $57.2 million of adjusted operating profit in the first half of the year. With lower interest costs, that means we've increased basic earnings per share by 30% to $0.197 per share on an adjusted basis. We've maintained a strong track record around return on capital employed despite the investment that we've made in our business, which includes putting in additional working capital to support our customers. As a result, we've stayed at 20% return on capital employed. These results are an indication of a business that is in great shape and navigating a dynamic market effectively. Over the next few slides, I'm going to take you through what we've seen in each of our end markets. So starting with electric vehicles. We've established a market-leading capability in electric vehicles and are recognized for our proficiency in both designing and producing key components to power the next generation of transport. Our long-standing partnerships with leaders in EV technology have positioned us well to support a broad cross-section of the EV market. Much of our 13% organic growth has come from expanding our capabilities laterally to meet evolving market demand. This includes delivering complete AC charging solutions through integrated end-to-end manufacturing. Consumer demand for electric vehicles has continued to grow in our key markets in the U.S., Europe and China. EV sales as a percentage of new car sales recently hit 30% in Europe and 58% in China. While changes in government incentives in some key markets such as the U.S. may soften short-term consumer demand, long-term prospects across key geographies are strong. Our footprint allows us to be flexible around customer requirements. For example, we are moving a new program to Mexico to support a customer's tariff optimization strategy. And while this will push out the timing of the initial ramp-up, it is exactly the type of this dynamic problem solving that strengthens relationships. With enhanced capabilities supporting a wide range of global automotive brands, we have confidence in our ability to grow in EV in the medium term. It's worth starting the explanation about Consumer Electricals with some context about the performance we've seen over the last 18 months. We had what you might call a post-destocking rebound in the first half of FY '25 when we hit $132 million of revenue. This normalized to $125 million in the second half of FY '25. For the first half of this year, we delivered $126 million, slightly down versus a year ago and more in line with the H2 performance. This represents an organic decline year-on-year of 6%. Main voltage power cords continue to represent the largest share of what we do. We work with some of the biggest consumer brands in the world where reliability, reputation and customer experience are key priorities. These brands choose Volex because they have confidence in our ability to exceed their quality and safety demands. Vertical integration and scale in this market means that we have relationships with all the major domestic appliance manufacturers. This is giving us significant traction as we continue to push our harnessing capabilities, an area where we see strong opportunities for growth. In fact, harnesses and other complex assemblies now constitute almost 1/3 of revenues. In the second half of the year, we have a new incremental harness project in Europe. We've seen some secondary impacts from tariffs on European domestic appliance manufacturers. Some of the Chinese competition have reallocated their marketing spend from the U.S. to Europe and are pushing inventory into the European market in response to U.S. tariffs. This is likely to result in some short-term rebalancing with medium-term growth weighted more towards harnessing opportunities. So now moving on to Medical. And although Medical is the smallest of our sectors, we proudly support health care innovators whose technologies are transforming patient outcomes and improving lives. Our assemblies distribute power and data through sophisticated medical equipment, ensuring reliability, accuracy and patient safety. The first half of the year has seen disruption in demand for complex medical devices, reductions in spending for both medical research and public health care and the impact of tariffs are leading to reduced or delayed orders for some large medical equipment. The effect is different between different customers with some customers continuing to increase demand during the period, but others looking to reduce orders and manage inventory levels. We have the flexibility to manage this variability within our operations and support customers as demand patterns shift. It is against this backdrop that we saw sales in the medical sector decline by around 10% organically during the first half of the year. It is likely that the uncertainties caused by the impact of tariffs and policy changes will continue in the short term and will result in a headwind to medical demand. However, we remain very positive in relation to the medium term. This is partly due to our success in winning new projects with significant medical brands, expanding the range of customers that we work with. In addition, structural growth drivers are very strong in this sector with rising demand due to demographic change and advances in technology, creating new diagnostic and treatment options. And with our significant and in-depth understanding of our customers' requirements, we are well positioned to meet the needs of these health care innovators. We've seen excellent organic growth of 48% in complex industrial technology with data centers a significant part of that, but we've also grown across the other categories. Outside data centers, which I'll come back to shortly, we're delivering complex assemblies, both wire harnesses and printed circuit board assemblies into highly specialist and demanding applications. Our customers need exceptional quality and complete confidence that the solution will work first time and every time. Meeting their challenging technical and scheduling requirements takes coordination across our operations and engineering experience to support the build process. When we successfully deliver, we unlock additional project opportunities and further repeat business, which contributes to our growth. We are well positioned in the U.S. market with advanced facilities, which were accredited to deliver defense and aerospace projects. This includes involvements in major programs that are stepping up to address current defense challenges. Our overall organic growth outside data centers was over 20%, and much of this came from defense projects. In parallel, we're seeing increased demand from core industrial applications such as building environmental systems. Although the end users are different, in all cases, customers are relying on us to deliver a complex solution with maximum reliability in a competitive way. Our additional capacity in Mexico is an important part of fulfilling these requirements. In data centers, we're supplying high-performance copper data interconnects operating at speeds of up to 800 gigabits per second. These cables form the critical physical links between servers, switches and storage systems within data center racks, enabling ultra-low latency, high-bandwidth connectivity for AI and cloud applications. Growth in data center investment globally is fueling demand for these products and revenue is up by 80% compared to the comparative period. As with so much of our portfolio, our ability to manufacture in a variety of locations gives us a competitive advantage in the ever-changing tariff landscape. And finally, turning to Off-Highway, where we've delivered really strong organic growth of 20% in the first half. This included a project for specialist military vehicles in Europe that doesn't repeat in the second half of the year. This was a project that we were able to win because of our ability to move quickly and respond to customer demand. Our success in this market is down to supporting specialist vehicle manufacturers in areas such as construction, agriculture and large passenger vehicles who have demanding requirements across a significant variety of products. Our ability to leverage our advanced manufacturing platforms to deliver efficient and repeatable solutions despite variable lot sizes is a differentiator in this market. We're making excellent progress in North America, where we've expanded capacity, and we have highly skilled engineers and sales colleagues who are securing new project wins. This comes at a time when U.S.-based manufacturers are looking for regional production to manage their supply chain objectives. So let me step you through what we've achieved in margins during the period. As usual, we're blending together various operating margins across our entities and then adding an investment in capacity growth and capability expansion. These investments include adding additional manufacturing space or additional salespeople. On a year-on-year basis, we've improved our first half margins to 9.8%, which is towards the top end of our 5-year plan margin range of 9% to 10%. In achieving this, we have identified cost optimization improvements worth 0.7%, which broadly offsets with the impact of inflation during the period. The optimization includes further benefits from rolling out automation as well as productivity actions highlighted as part of the integration of Murat Ticaret. We also achieved savings through site rationalization of 0.5%. We have a mix benefit, which reflects lower consumer power cord sales and higher revenues from our data center customers. There is a small adverse impact from the weakening of the U.S. dollar, which is our main sales currency. 9.8% is a strong first half result, particularly given the amount of investment that has gone into our business recently. Now that will come back to the theme of investment shortly. So now moving on to cash flow. As in previous years, there are some factors in the first half that tend to result in lower cash generation in H1 compared to the second half of the year. EBITDA was up to $73.6 million, a 20% increase over the comparative period. Capital expenditure was lower at $21.3 million, which is approximately 3.6% of revenue and well within the 3% to 4% range that we have guided to. Once again, we had an increase in working capital and higher inventory was a big driver in this. About half of the increase in inventory is coming from data centers, where we hold stock in hub locations to support timely fulfillment of demand. The remaining increase in inventory is across our other go-to-market sectors and reflects the impact of increased demand as well as building buffer stocks to support relocation activity. Part of this expansion includes an increase in defense projects where we hold a greater level of raw materials for operational reasons. Interest and tax is similar to the comparative period, which reflects the timing of tax payments and current debt interest costs in our growing business. The repayment of leases shown below free cash flow includes the exercise of an option to secure the freehold of 2 existing sites at a significant discount to market value, providing greater security and control. Our covenant net debt ratio, which is our preferred way of looking at leverage and excludes operating lease commitments, improved from 1.3x to 1.1x, giving us balance sheet strength and flexibility. Our capital allocation priorities are unchanged from prior years. Our primary focus is on organic investments. In addition, we continue to explore acquisition opportunities in a disciplined way. I will now hand back to Nat to update on our strategy.

Thank you very much, Jon. I wanted to return to the key pillars of our strategy and outline how this contributed to our first half performance. So first and foremost, we are in the right markets where we are winning new business. And I'm particularly pleased with the progress we've been making in Off-Highway in North America. Our team is getting a huge amount of traction with customers who are looking for a high-quality and cost-effective solution. It's an opportune time for Dave Webster to join our organization. And later this month, Dave and I will be on the road meeting with our customers and visiting a brand-new site we are opening this month in Central Mexico. The substantial growth we have delivered in the last 2 years reflects our ongoing investment program. For example, our product development strategy in EV is delivering growth. Our global capacity investments have given us capability in the right locations to support our customers' tariff mitigation strategies. This is particularly the case in Mexico, where we have an abundant pipeline of opportunities, many of them new just in the last 6 months. We are a critical manufacturing partner for our customers who depend on our engineering capabilities, our attention to detail and our ability to meet challenging specifications. We build deep relationships by exceeding their expectations. Moving complex production from a competitor or between sites is a big decision. In the last 12 months, we've relocated multiple programs for our customers without any major surprises, and they have confidence in our ability to deliver. Our people are central to our performance. We trust our teams to deliver. We put our skilled managers at the heart of customer relationships. With the demand into our facilities in North America, we've been augmenting our team in the region, and we are seeing the benefits of this. And finally, acquisitions have been a significant element of our growth story, although it's just over 2 years since our last deal. In the first half of the year, we looked at a handful of varied opportunities, but nothing met our strict criteria. With a huge amount of organic growth and new customer programs to deliver, we are looking for well-run businesses with strong management teams that can slot into our organization. We are continuing to pursue some very interesting opportunities, but we won't compromise on our acquisition criteria. Every deal we do has to be the right deal for Volex. This investment approach is an important part of how we drive consistent growth and how we position ourselves to win incremental programs with new and existing customers. The qualification process we go through for major new programs is understandably stringent given our critical role. We build capacity ahead of demand based on market knowledge, so we can dedicate space to customers during the qualification process. This has been very successful. Take Batam, Indonesia, where we now have almost filled the additional space we opened last year and also Tijuana, Mexico, where we are experiencing strong demand for tariff-free manufacturing, having doubled the size of the facility last year. And this month, as I mentioned just a moment ago, we are opening a further purpose-built site in Central Mexico, doubling our capacity in this area. However, footprint is only part of the story. We need to have the right capabilities in our facilities to support evolving requirements and to enhance efficiency. An increasing number of our new programs are built to be highly automated from day 1. And in addition, we are retrofitting automation technology to existing lines, reducing operating costs and enhancing throughputs and yields. Our vertical integration is at the core of our competitiveness, and this differentiates from many of our competitors. And we are currently rolling out additional specialist wire products that we extrude ourselves as well as making complex plastic components and connectors in-house. Our investment in product development focuses on both power products to meet evolving demands in the EV space as well as the next generation of data center cables. And we continue our strong focus on cash payback. With the majority of capital programs achieving cash payback within 2 years and often much quicker. This market-leading approach to investment, it helps us secure benefits quickly and gives us confidence to continue investing in our business. So it seems like yesterday, but we are 3.5 years through our 5-year plan. And our first half revenues of $584 million is a significant demonstration that our strategy is working. It's also proof that we are rapidly closing in on our target of achieving $1.2 billion of revenue. We've been comfortably maintaining our operating margins towards the upper end of the 9% to 10% range. We are achieving this even after significant investments in growth. And this gives us a high degree of confidence that we will achieve the 5-year plan. So now is the time to summarize our performance and take you through the outlook for the second half. These are once again excellent results, a real achievement against a backdrop of tariff-related uncertainty and difficult macroeconomic conditions. And our growth is proof that the strategy is working, powered by our investments in incremental capacity and capability. And in addition, as we scale up the business, we continue to achieve healthy margins at the top end of our target range as our operating leverage increases. We have confidence to invest and to pursue acquisitions because we have a strong balance sheet and very significant financial flexibility. And looking forward, we are off to a very good start for the second half of the year. We are mindful of the challenges from short-term uncertainty, particularly arising due to tariffs. However, this is a diversified business with deep long-term customer relationships. Those customers have supported our ability to grow despite these tough conditions, and we expect second half revenues to be broadly in line with the first half. In fact, we see the changing global trade environment as an opportunity for Volex with our geographic capabilities and ability to support customers moving manufacturing between countries, we are well placed to secure further growth. And given our sustained focus on long term, value creation and our tremendous progress against our current 5-year plan, we have started working on a new 5-year plan. And this new plan will reflect the strong and scalable business we have created and set our ambitions for both revenue growth and margin improvement for the next stage in our journey. We will share this plan with investors in due course. And now we would be happy to take your questions. Please?

Congratulations on the great results. Firstly, on the data center growth, you've talked about 16% market growth in the back of the presentation. Maybe if you could just talk to us a little bit about the growth that you expect for your own business and how you're managing to maintain that momentum when you're competing against much larger players.

Yes. Do you want me to go first, Nat?

You go first, and I'll make some comments at the end.

Yes. Thanks, Vanessa. Good question. Clearly, we're very pleased with the strong growth that we've achieved in data centers. And it's because we have a very compelling product set, and it's evidence of where we've invested in research and development that the benefit we get from that by having cutting-edge products, which are in high demand from customers. I think the future demand in data centers from here is difficult to predict, and you'll know yourself that there's a range of views in the market about what underlying data center capacity growth looks like. For us, it is just one part of our diversified business. We've got the ability to scale and grow it to meet growing customer demand, which we hope is what will happen in the future. But equally, we are not betting the farm on continued growth in data centers. So I think as usual, you've got to know us a bit now. We're making a sensible conservative approach around what data center growth looks like going forward.

And then you talked about the excellent progress in North America Off-Highway, obviously, a very relevant topic. Is it fair to say that you're gaining share against your key competitors there? And how do you expect that to develop?

Can I answer one more question about data science before we -- I think the other point which I may continue, which is an important one is we compete against Amphenol, Molex, TE. These are massive companies with much bigger overheads than we do. Often, they don't have the low-cost manufacturing that we have. So when we walk into a customer, we can be very, very competitive. We have a fantastic brand name, and we are nimble. We are incredibly nimble. And that is the -- I think, is the reason why we've been so successful. And the growth shows that. I mean it's no mean feat to do what my team has done in the data center space. I think on Off-Highway, and I'll just start on that. We have invested more in North American Off-Highway really than anywhere else in terms of our investment in people. And we -- that's because we believe there's an opportunity there. You can really count on one hand the number of competitors who can produce complex wire harnesses for the likes of kind of John Deere and AGCO and some of the big agriculture and construction manufacturers. There is a much greater investment in Off-Highway upfront for precision tooling and capabilities take longer, but the customers are there. Our pricing is good. So we think it will come through over the next 2 to 3 years.

And then just finally, on the margin, I don't want to ask you for your 5-year plan. But is it fair to say that sustaining that margin at the top end or improving it will be driven by product mix over the next couple of years rather than any kind of cost-saving measures?

Well, it's a combination of things as we've put a lot of investment into this business into capacity into capability, and we're seeing the benefits of that coming through in growth. We've also strengthened the back office and the support functions we have so that we can scale the business at this pace, and we're growing quickly. There is an opportunity as we move forward that we don't need to increase the operating cost, the fixed costs in the business at the same rate that the business will grow, and that will give us operating leverage. So it's not just around product mix. Product mix is helpful -- it's also to do with our move to what we call centers of excellence. So these are larger facilities where we can do more for the customer. And that's really compelling from a customer perspective because you can have better engineers, better managers, a better range of infrastructure, so you can deliver more to those customers. But also, it's great for us because you get those bigger sites, they're more efficient, and it gives us then an opportunity to improve the capacity footprint. And at the same time, we can consolidate some of the smaller sites. So there is a cost benefit that comes from that as well. So all of those things, again, as we usually do, we've got improvements coming through in the business. We've got investments to deliver the growth and then that blends to a margin, and that's behind the 9.8% we've done in the first half, and we're really pleased with that.

Just a couple of questions. Can I start by asking at the full year results a few months ago, you talked about a significant opportunity with a large Chinese EV customer. Is that still a live situation? Can you sort of give us an update on that?

Very much a live situation. Yes. And we are still talking to them, going through the process of onboarding. And I do expect that we will become a supplier to them in the future.

Okay. And then maybe just going back on the data center piece, where you talked about the significant growth there. Just to help me understand the practicalities of how you deal with an 80% increase in revenues in the first half. Like is that you putting more throughput through existing facilities? Or are you also adding capacity as well at the same time? And what would happen if worst-case scenario, there is a sudden drop-off in data center investment how quickly can you readjust that footprint?

So it's both. We're adding capacity. We're also adding automation. So it's an important part of what -- of the customer experience. They want to see more automation into the business. We've increased the number of sites that we are able to mass produce these cables. And look, I'm a realist in the sense that I don't believe that sort of trees grow to the sky. But when I wake up and see that AI -- OpenAI has made a $36 billion buy with AWS, that obviously makes me feel very confident about the near-term outlook. I can't tell you what it's going to be like in 5 years' time, but I certainly think we're very well placed in the next 12 to 18 months. Do you want to add to that?

No, I'd agree with that. In terms of the process for scaling up the production, the thing that's very helpful for us from a manufacturing perspective is, as you know, we make some really big harnesses for things like tractors and coaches, and they take a lot of space in the facility. The products that we make in data centers, they're generally less than 2.5 meters long, and we can fit in a lot of high-value production in a relatively small physical footprint within the factory. So that gives us flexibility to expand quite quickly. And we're very good at this. We've been doing it for a long period of time. This is not new for us. We know how to make it work. We know how to get the yields up. And as Nat said, we're automating the processes so that we can improve the throughput. And this has been a buildup over a period of time. The second half of FY '25 was very strong for data centers as was the first half of FY '26 and it's been really good for us.

And just maybe one more, Jon, quickly. Could you just maybe just give us a bit of a steer on where you think debt is going to end for the year? Presumably some of that working capital reverse out in the second half. So anything you can say either on what you expect a leverage ratio or net debt numbers?

Yes. I'd say that we'd expect debt to be similar, slightly better in dollar terms, net debt at the end of the period and probably an improvement around the turns from 1.1 to maybe 1.0.

It's Henry Carver from Singer Capital Markets. Just slightly labor in the data center point again, I'm afraid. And just a point of clarity, the sort of upgrade from 100 gigabyte to 800, how much of that is driving this current sort of growth that you're seeing this half? And sort of how long is that replacement cycle? Or is it mainly just winning new customers, building completely new data centers with presumably 800 gig cables?

Well, we're selling a variety of cables that 200 and 400 gigabit per second are the highest volume that we have at the moment. And customers use a variety of the cables for different applications within data center setting. So it's not necessarily related to the speed of the cable. It's about coming up with a product which suits the individual customers' use case and one of the things that we've been effective at is customizing products to meet exactly what the customer requirement is. And that's very compelling from a customer perspective because they need these things to be plug and play and no hassles when they go to install the equipment. So the growth has really been coming from the growth in demand for data center capacity with certain very big players in the market.

Okay. I think in which case, we can move on to questions from the virtual audience. We have one question thus far. So before I ask that question, a very brief reminder for those in the virtual audience to submit their questions. The question we have is from [indiscernible] from [ Samson Rock ], who asks that Cicor has made an offer on TT Electronics, which you attempted to acquire at the same time last year. Do you still own your 2.5% stake? And if yes, what are your plans in the context of their offer?

So I think everyone knows that we sold pretty damn quickly after we walked away. So I think that's the answer.

Thank you. And that ends all the questions from the virtual audience.

Great. Well, look, thank you all for your support and for showing up here today. And as I say, it's been 10 years. I doubt I'll be here in another 10 years, but I'll certainly be here for quite a lot longer.