Zigup Plc (ZIG.L) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

July 13, 2023

London Stock Exchange GB Industrials Ground Transportation earnings 53 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

operator
#1

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Redde Northgate plc investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] I'd now like to hand you over to Ross Hawley, Head of Investor Relations. Good afternoon.

Ross Hawley

executive
#2

Thank you very much, Paul, and good afternoon. As you said, my name is Ross Hawley. I'm Head of Investor Relations here at Redde Northgate. I'm very pleased to be sitting here in our office in Darlington with Martin Ward, our Chief Executive; and you also have on another screen, Philip Vincent, our Chief Financial Officer, also on the line. So the format we've got for our first investor meet is kind of a mix of a short presentation and introduction to the group, which covers also some of our recent results by Martin and Philip and then we'll then open it up for questions. We've had a number of pre-submitted questions and topics which we'll cover, but also in this format, if you'd like to ask questions, we'll then try and address those when we can. So over to you, Martin, for some comments, and I think we've got some slides just coming up on screen.

Martin Ward

executive
#3

Thank you, Ross. Thank you, and good afternoon, everybody. First of all, I thought I'd start with what do we do? So that everyone's got the same understanding. So we're here to keep customers mobile. So you can see this on our website, but here's a sort of a breakdown of some of the services. First of all, we've got rental provision. So the size of our fleet across the U.K., Spain and Ireland is 130,000 vehicles. It's a mixture of cars, vans, it's a broad range of vehicles, and customers can rent these vehicles on flexible terms, either over short periods or longer periods like 3 to 4 years. We provide fleet support. So you think of all these are very large fleets, corporate fleets out in the market. We're there to keep the customers, the users of those vehicles mobile. So we provide services like cameras, telematics, data management, servicing downtime and all the things that you think that could happen with the vehicle. The Redde business, which will come on to talk into detail, we provide claims support and accident management. So if you think about your insurance policies in the U.K., it's a mandatory thing. When you have an accident, whether it's your fault or not, you might go through your insurance company. We sit behind those insurance companies who refer their policyholders to us, and we provide services to get their policyholders back up and mobile. Those services are typically a replacement car either on a like-for-like basis, a courtesy car from one of our body shops or maybe a direct hire, which the insurer pays for it, is covered under the policy. We also sought out the body shop side of things on the repair. So we have our own network of body shops in the U.K. and Spain, where we undertake the full accident repairs ourselves. And then we also have end-of-life vehicle disposal. We have our brands in the U.K. called Van Monster and in Spain, La Coccinelle, which we dispose of our vehicles, both car and van. That's a simple snapshot. If I turn to the next slide, what we describe is that we have a platform. So we provide our services and this platform in very simple terms. If a vehicle is on the road and something happens that is an accident or an incident; tires, glass, service, maintenance repair, breakdown, whatever it is, we can provide that service on our platform. Whether we own that service ourselves or whether we work in partnership or with an independent network to do it, we can triage all the services in a single, single stop service. Some of the brands that you'll see in the market, we've put them on here just to -- these might be things that you might come across. Northgate is a very well-known brand, been in existence over 40 years in the U.K. and Spain for the van rental. ChargedEV, a business that we acquired just 2 years ago that installs charging points, both for commercial and domestic customers. Auxillis is our brand that delivers the accident management services, mainly working with very large insurance companies, dealership and automotive groups. And then FMG and FMGRS is our brands for providing fleet management and the accident services. More recently, we acquired FridgeXpress and Blakedale, which are specialty companies, Blakedale traffic management specialists, workforce protection units and FridgeXpress temperature controlled vehicles. We've got 600 vehicles that we acquired in May this year. So as I said, across the platform, whether it's a product or a service, that is our proposition, keeping people mobile and providing these services. Okay. So that's roughly what we do. If we just then turn to this page just to have a look at the overview of our results. So the businesses came together, Redde and Northgate came together in a merger in 2020. And 3 weeks later, we had COVID and all the lockdowns. So this is our sort of first full year set of results, I can think, that are not tainted by that. And what we can see here is that we have delivered substantial top line growth which has sped through to a near 10% increase in our PBT to GBP 166 million this year. One of the key indicators for an asset-backed business is ROCE. It's not the only measure. But year-on-year, that has been improving. And again, we've had another increase there to over 14%. And then if we look at sort of how that all plays out in terms of returns to our shareholders, Board is very confident on the business. We've seen very strong trading in this set of results and strong trading as we started the new year, and we increased our dividend to 24% for the full year. And then looking at our debt headroom, it's very topical at the minute with interest rates and everything else. We have a strong balance sheet and substantial debt headroom of GBP 290 million, of which we can sort of deploy to support growth in the business. Okay. And then just looking at our achievements for this year. What are the growth drivers for that revenue? Well, firstly, we have talked about a challenging environment for acquiring vehicles. And notwithstanding that, we grew our fleet by over 4,000 vehicles this year, as I said, to over 130,000. We're mainly seeing that growth in Spain, where there's been normalized supply. And in the Redde business, where traffic volumes have gone back to near normal levels, we'll cover that later in the U.K. We've also had new contracts that we announced following the merger. We had GBP 300 million of revenue synergy contracts that were transacted. We said that was Tesco, Saga, that was Admiral, where we would be undertaking those services for a number of years. So we've got a portion of those contracts, which are now all live coming through these numbers. It's around 40% that has come through so far, but they're all live up and running and running to our predicted rate. And also this year, it hasn't started yet, but in autumn, we have signed a contract with one of the U.K.'s largest leasing companies. It's a very large fleet in the U.K., and we're providing a range of services across our platform to that customer. And we talked about margin. We've broadly maintained our margins. Some bits are up, some bits are down. But inflation has been a challenge for most businesses in the U.K., and we've managed that very, very carefully. We've made sure any self-help that we can do through efficiencies in our own operating businesses as well as careful pricing actions with customers where we needed to move that on. We have been successful, as I said, at maintaining our margins, and we have introduced additional services as well. So where we have the cross-sells for our accident management services into Northgate, which is a 50% uplift. And the business I mentioned earlier, ChargedEV, installs charging points. Since our acquisition, we've done 12,000 installations and just under 7,000 in the last 12 months. And then if we look at our strategic progress and how we're delivering on those goals, we had a framework of focus, drive broaden. And then for broaden, we said acquisitions would play an important part in developing our capabilities. Blakedale was a business that we bought just over 12 months ago. And since we bought that business, we've been able to grow the fleet by 30% and grow the customer base by 28%. and then FridgeXpress, as I said, in May this year, with 600 vehicles adding into our capabilities. And when we look at sustainability, it is important. It's an integral part of our strategic goals. We have now targeted our Scope 1 and 2 measures. We've got short-term and long-term targets. And that's something that we're looking forward to deliver. And in terms of our sort of services, what have we added that is new. Well, the example we can give here is that in Spain, we have something called open workshops. So we've been able to service non-Redde and Northgate customers that can bring their vehicles into our workshops where we've got capacity and provide a service, maintenance and repair product to them. We've also seen new relationships form in Spain so we're able to introduce from the U.K., a new insurer relationship to Spain where they would undertake repairs for that insurer that operates in Spain, plus they want a direct contract in Spain from an insurer to undertake repair work as well. And also, our EV products have been progressing. We've partnered with Iberdrola in Spain to come up with a charging point solution, green energy supply and an EV vehicle, all in a monthly cost. And also in the U.K. and Spain, we are consulting with our customers by running open days on EV product so they can get up close and familiar with what products are available and in a non-pressurized environment, work out how an EV fleet would work for them. We've carried out over 1,800 vehicle experiences, and we can map what the customers do with our fleet and how they use the vehicles with exactly how a transition plan for EV would work. So we're pleased with the progress that we've seen to date. Okay. I'm going to hand you over to Philip, who is going to cover some of the financial results in detail.

Philip Vincent

executive
#4

Thank you, Martin, and good afternoon, everyone. Now I'm going to start by sharing our headline KPIs for the year which just ended, and then I'm going to talk a little bit about how we funded our debt position and how we return cash to our shareholders. So let me start with those headlines. So as Martin said, we had an excellent set of results for the year just ended, with good performance across the businesses. So our underlying revenues, and we define that as revenues that exclude the sales of our vehicles at the end of life. That was GBP 1.3 billion. That was 22% higher than the prior year with growth across the business. And our Redde business grew revenues by GBP 196 million and 40% of this growth came from new contract wins since the merger. Now our headline PBT, one of our core KPIs, was GBP 165.9 million, and that increased GBP 9.7 million year-on-year. Our underlying earnings per share increased 9.5% to 55.6p and our steady state cash generation was strong at GBP 191.5 million and this reflects the cash that we generate before we invest in growth for the business. Our net leverage, which excludes IFRS 16, was 1.5x, and that's right in the middle of our operating range of 1 to 2x. And our return on capital employed increased 20 basis points to 14.1%, and that's benefiting from the underlying profitability within the business and also some disposal profits and we sell vehicles at the end of life. Then if I turn to this slide, the business is very well financed with a strong balance sheet to fund growth. At the year-end, we have GBP 290 million of headroom on our committed facilities. And in the year, we extended our core bank facility by 12 months to 2026. At year-end, 62% of our debt was fixed and the majority of that is at 1.3%, so we are well insulated from the current rate environment. Our average borrowing cost at the year-end was 3.1%. The chart at the bottom, this bridges our net debt as of April last year to April 23 this year. And we generated steady state cash of GBP 256 million, excluding the lease payments. And this is the cash we've generated after having maintained a constant fleet size and before we invest for growth. And after paying tax, interest and the lease payments approximately GBP 130 million of cash, and we returned GBP 105.2 million back to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buyback. And we then invested GBP 122.6 million to grow the fleet in Spain in Redde where we've had very strong demand, and we spent GBP 10 million on acquisitions in the year. So to make these investments, we've increased our borrowings by GBP 112 million. Now on the top right hand of this slide, you can see a chart that shows since the merger, we have now returned GBP 121 million in dividends to shareholders. We've invested GBP 41.5 million acquisitions, thus extending the products and services of our mobility solutions platform, and we've returned a further GBP 60 million to shareholders through the share buyback. We've now completed 6 acquisitions since the merger. During the year, we acquired Blakedale. And just after the year-end, we completed the acquisition of FridgeXpress which extends the range of products and services that we offer and broadens the sectors in which we operate. And finally, our funding enables us to continue to invest in our fleet and execute on acquisitions as they arise in line with our disciplined approach to capital allocation. So now I'm going to hand you back over to Martin.

Martin Ward

executive
#5

Thank you, Philip. And then I just want to cover the current environment, so we know what we're sort of looking into. So from a market perspective, what we are seeing is that we've had strong demand and are still seeing strong demand in our geographies. We've seen growing interest in the value-added services that we offer. So we've had more take-up on telematics as an example, and our camera services that we inboard into vehicles. We've also seen that the traffic activity, particularly in the U.K., following the sort of lockdown. There's a new norm. And we look at the Department of Transport for those statistics, and it's indicated between 90% and 95% of traffic volumes back on the road. Our view is it's not going to get back to 100%, certainly not in the short to medium term. Hybrid working, people working from home and returning to offices, that will keep that subdued a bit. So that's what we're working on. That's what we're forecasting. Repair capacity has been scarce, getting trained technicians to get parts being able to undertake rapid sort of key to key time to get vehicles prepared has been problematic. And although the sort of the current trend is that is improving, it is still higher than it was previously. If we then look at sort of fleet supply, we've talked about this extensively. So in the U.K., if we split it between cars and LCV or bands, as you might know it, we've got better visibility on the sort of forward position as we currently sit here today. Cars are not a problem. We can supply cars to meet the demand, but there's not an issue in the U.K. Vans, as I said, has been more problematic. So getting visibility is getting better, short-term supply is still patchy. So that's a bit of a headwind in terms of that sort of sourcing vehicles. In Spain, it is different. Normality sort of returned maybe 6, 7 months ago. So we've been able to get the supply both of cars and vans in Spain. And that has fed, that demand that we've got has been fed. So we've grown the fleet, you'll see in our details. We've grown the fleet in Spain and that demand has continued. We do see pockets of supply, by the way, that come up from time to time. So we might get spot orders on a batch of vans 200, 300 vans that sort of pop up, which makes a little bit sort of trying to plan for these things. That's why it makes it a little bit difficult. We are the biggest buyer of vans in the U.K. and Spain. So when these deals become available, we are a first protocol for many manufacturers. And undersupply has supported residual values. Our view of life was that residual values have peaked and you would expect them to soften both on car and van. You'll see that more in car because there's more supply of car, but on van, they are still -- residual values are still high compared to historical data, although they are softening. The undersupply that occurred in the U.K. from the registrations, you can see that to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. So 200,000 vans that would have sort of -- that was the delta of undersupply. Our view about 18 months ago is that it would take about 4 to 5 years for that undersupply to sort of catch up. And that prediction seems about right. And then on customers, we've got a detailed section in the presentation pack that breaks down the customer profile. But we have a broad range of customers from government, local authorities, blue chip, SME, large corporate fleets. So it's quite a diverse customer base, which is the strength of the business. And that's -- they're similar with the U.K. and Spain. There's more smaller customers in Spain, although the big part of our sector in Spain is the large blue chip companies. We don't have any single sector exposure because of that sort of broad nature of the base. And what we've been able to do is just manage the sectors that we want to supply into. So where there's high-margin sectors, we've been able to rotate our fleet when there are returns into those sectors. There's no slack in the fleet, utilization is running around sort of 92%. That means any vehicles that come back or back out on rent very, very quickly, such is the demand. Okay. And then just sort of finally on an outlook. I've said that we've seen a very robust demand at the start of the new financial year, so we've got 2 months of trading. It has been very, very good. We've seen no let up, lots of investors, lots shareholders ask us, are you seeing any signs because I mean the Northgate business used to be a bellwether. We haven't seen anything. I sort of want to say that there's signs of weakness, and that may be a recession is coming. [indiscernible] is going to happen, maybe it will. But we're not seeing it. We're not seeing it in either -- in any of our businesses. So we've got a healthy pipeline as well in terms of what new prospects we've got. And they are quite substantial as well. If you think about sort of where we deploy our [indiscernible] and where we've seen the growth in these numbers. It's mainly come out of the Redde business, the insurance business because typically, these are large multiyear service contracts, and that's where we're focusing our capital on to growing in that business. We continue to make very good strategic progress. I've seen that in the sort of achievements. We haven't sat still. We've done 6 acquisitions since the merger since 2020. And we're delivering probably more than we said when we brought the businesses together. So the momentum is with us. And I think all of that leads to very sort of strong confidence in terms of what we're seeing and how we're performing. Okay. So that's going to be finished on that.

Operator

operator
#6

That's fantastic. Thank you very much, Martin and Philip, indeed for your presentation. [Operator Instructions] Ross, as you can see, if I can hand back to you, we have had a number of questions that have come through, both presubmit and throughout today's presentation. If I may just ask you to read out the question where appropriate to do so, give your response and I'll pick up from the team at the end.

Ross Hawley

executive
#7

Fantastic. Thank you. So thank you for those questions already submitted. I think really just kicking off in terms of the competitive landscape and how you sort of describe the differentiation of Redde Northgate, do you want to give color around how you see that?

Martin Ward

executive
#8

Yes. So look, I mean, the way that services were procured in the markets that we serve for rental, repair, replacement and so forth. They've always been done in verticals. So if you're, for example, a large insurance company, you would go out to the market and you procure best-in-class repair, best-in-class mobility and so on. When we brought the businesses together, we brought a platform together where we said we can put all these services on a platform. We can integrate them. We can give a single source service to the customer because these things don't happen in isolation. They tend to go hand in hand. So what we've seen is we've moved away from competing for single source type business, single vertical type business, where we are very differentiated and very unique in having this platform that can offer all of those services that I've talked about in one go. That is the differentiator. That is unrivaled in terms of what we're doing with that presently, and it does create a lot of leverage. If you think about that platform and if you're a customer going through that journey, there's less handoffs, less touch points, it's more joined up. But for our partners, there's less leakage to get more conversion on the services that you're providing, which is obviously providing a benefit. And you've got less frictional costs because by doing everything on that one platform, it reduces friction across and you're creating a competitive margin. It's creating something that you can share back in value. However, that gets shared back. So when we're out in the market, there are examples where we're just having bilateral discussions with customers or prospects that are coming to us and saying, "we recognize what you have. We like what you have. We'd like to test it. We'd like to product and poke it and make sure that all the things that you say are there," but then having that bilateral discussion rather than sort of playing the game of procuring across all the services. It's not going to be the same for everybody, but that's what we're seeing, and that's creating an advantage for us. And that's fueling some of this top line growth and bottom line growth that we're reporting.

Ross Hawley

executive
#9

And obviously, in your -- in the presentation, we talked about that recent contract win. Do you sort of see that as sort of a typical odd guidance to the kind of pipeline which we have? Are those customers seeing that overall integrated services being a core attraction?

Martin Ward

executive
#10

It is -- I mean it's across all businesses that we're seeing that. I mean clearly, the larger you are, the larger picture you are or if you're a large insurer or a dealership and you've got a lot of volume, the platform makes more sense for you because of all the transactions that you would undertake. And we're seeing, yes, there are some very large prospects that we've got in discussion presently. And I think for the very large ones. For them, it's about, "okay, am I prepared to put all my eggs in one basket and work with a single provider." [indiscernible] very transparent, strong balance sheet, you can control things through SLAs. You can do all of that. So my answer back to the market is, yes, you can. You can manage that. And we've got some large fleets as well. Typically, we like to see a fleet over 2,000 vehicles because that sort of feeds the sort of transaction. All these services that we provide work on that basis. And that's -- the prospect pipeline is made up of a variety of the separate customers.

Ross Hawley

executive
#11

Thank you. And thank you, David, you wanted just to follow up on this and these contracts. Are these typically ones which are tendered out to the whole market or the ones which you have sort of one-to-one conversations with.

Martin Ward

executive
#12

I would say more often than not, you have to go to tender or the customer will go to tender. The one I just described as a bilateral arrangement, which was just great. It has grown up discussion about no one else can provide these services in the same way. But typically, the very large procurers might say, "okay, well, we'd want to go to tender because we want to test commercially. We want to test operationally, we want to test across all these pieces." And then they have a decision to make, do they then go into the verticals and silo all the services that they want or do they put it on one platform? And [indiscernible] sort of take it, we don't have to take it off. We live in a world where if a customer says or a prospect says, "You know what, I'll take 3 or 4 of the services that you've got, but maybe I'll leave these with incumbents or I'm going to test it." That's fine. I mean, we want to see more services because that creates the real competitive sort of position for us and the real sort of service points for the customers.

Ross Hawley

executive
#13

So we've got a couple of questions on acquisitions. But before we go there, just about that organic growth, am I right in thinking that actually people will then take more services over time? So once we've got a relationship with something and they see the benefit with one, they're likely to add more or grow the proposition?

Martin Ward

executive
#14

Yes. No, actually, it's a good point, actually, yes. I mean, from our existing customers from when we came together, we didn't have all of those services with them. They have them out in their verticals. And what we have seen is we've seen that sort of rotation as those contracts have become available been rotating into our platform because they say it makes sense to join up this service. I give an example just to bring you to life. If you have an accident at the side of the road, your typical recovery policy doesn't cover you for recovering an accident damaged vehicle. So we would deploy our sort of network to go and make the recovery of that vehicle. But instead of taking that vehicle, that damaged vehicle to what I call a dark site or a salvage yard or a place where it will just be stored, you can take it directly to one of our body shops where we're preauthorized then to delegate authorities to our engineers to be able to make the repair on the vehicle and provide a replacement vehicle in conjunction with whatever the policyholders are entitled to. So you can see why that's a natural flow and it fits with why you would want to put more into service. So that's going to be a building position organically.

Ross Hawley

executive
#15

And moving on to a question in terms of the acquisitions, we've announced 6 since the merger. Are there any sort of highlights or ones which you'd like to do and then start to think about are there any gaps or are there other verticals where we're interested in? But maybe first, yes, what you've done today?

Martin Ward

executive
#16

No, absolutely. Look, I think Blakedale, I gave that example. That's a good example of a very good business, very well run. We bought it from a family who looked after that business, had a good customer base and a good, unique product as well, which extended our capabilities. Within 12 months, the management team have done a fantastic job in the business there, growing the customer base, growing the fleet, good pollination between the Northgate businesses, the Redde businesses. And I'm really, really encouraged because I think that's how acquisitions should work. You can bring value to the table. So that will grow on strength to strength. FridgeXpress relatively new, but a good prospect pipeline with blue chip companies and pharmaceutical and food and we've got the capabilities and the balance sheet to further strengthen that. Not all acquisitions will go day 1 earnings enhancing, those acquisitions. Sometimes we do buy things where we need to invest. ChargedEV was a good example of that. The momentum to get charging points in for electric vehicles needs to grow, needs to do more in the U.K. and in Spain. But having a business with our capability, tying it in with a package of services then that we offer was key to our strategic progress. And as I said, we've installed 12,000 charging points since we've owned the business. But we've had to invest in that business. We've had to put more money in to get the right national network of installers, invest to get the operational structure match fit for the size of the business that we intend that to be. So for me, that we've invested in the business. It doesn't -- as I said, it doesn't mean EBITDA enhanced in day 1, but that's sort of a good business to have and a growing trend and having that capability very worthwhile.

Ross Hawley

executive
#17

Yes. And FMGRS obviously was bought out of administration, has been sometimes to sort of described as a bit of the glue, which has connected some of the services together. How do you see that business at the moment?

Martin Ward

executive
#18

Absolutely. I think FMGRS or Nationwide, it was called when it was a listed business before it was listed as private equity. Yes, got into difficulty during COVID and went into administration, and we were able to bring 2,300 people across into the business, over 70 body shops at the time. And when we acquired that business, we've invested heavily in that business in terms of tooling in the body shops, the sites themselves where we can improve it or rotate into some newer premises, investing in the team, scales. We have our own accredited training academy, where we can train our technicians on the latest techniques as well as trading people and our technicians through how to work on EV vehicles. So yes, I do describe it as the glue because if you think again, all those things that happen, repairing vehicles is an important part of that whole process of keeping people mobile and owning that capacity, have been able to control that capacity and therefore, control the flow, is a really good asset to have. Bear in mind as well, the volume of work that we have far exceeds what we can digest with our own body shop network. So we do have an independent body shop network as well, where we place that work in there, making a combination of work from our portfolio. So -- but that has been a fantastic acquisition for us in terms of having that capability.

Ross Hawley

executive
#19

Okay. And just so [ Colin ] was saying, are there other verticals which around internationally? Is it U.K.-focused or are there opportunities elsewhere that we might look at?

Martin Ward

executive
#20

I think there's opportunities across our geographies that we work on and beyond. So when we look at Spain, for example, they've had a fantastic year this year in terms of their growth. Spain has got the capability to go further. They have the open workshops, which is growing in revenues. As I said, you can -- non-Redde customer, you can book your vehicle and you can schedule out. We've got a B2C proposition in Spain, which is all digital. So again, if there's any capacity in the fleet for people who need sort of rental over 3, 6 months, we can provide that as well. And also Spain, Mainland Europe, I don't need to do a geography lesson, but there are opportunities to develop beyond the boundaries there. And if our return on capital is good, we can see those opportunities further progressing. And in the U.K., we see a lot of things across our desk. I mean smaller operators might have found it difficult to operate in rental markets, for example, where getting a hold of fleet is going be problematic for them. So we have seen things across our desk. We're very selective about what we want to do. It's not just scale for scale's sake. We like new capability that adds in because we can cross-sell, and there might be other things that we do. We're not going to be all things to all people. I don't think. Windscreen is a good example. Autoglass do a very good job with Windscreen. It's a small part of what we do, we can partner where we want to partner and that sort of works well.

Ross Hawley

executive
#21

So just moving over to Philip to just carry on this part of the conversation. I can see there's some interest in margins as well. But just in terms of how you think about making those investment decisions, whether it's M&A or otherwise, maybe just want to talk to that and some of the capital allocation priorities, which...

Philip Vincent

executive
#22

Yes. I mean, Ross, we operate a capital allocation model, which we apply rigidly actually when we're looking at investment opportunities. So the first step we go through is we want to invest organically in the business, and that means we want to maintain the business and where it is before we're trying to grow it. So replacing vehicles when we need to replace them maintaining our branches and our sites. Secondly, we want to make sure we are paying a growing and sustainable dividend to our shareholders under a dividend policy, where we aim to pay at around 2x cover. And then we look to say, okay, where can we invest and we can invest in growth in terms of CapEx, in terms of our vehicles to grow our fleet to meet demand and growing our products and services in our customer base. We also do mergers and acquisitions, of which we've done the sixth since the merger back in 2020. And then once we've gone through all of that, we'll then say, "Okay, there are other ways we could provide cash back to the shareholders and we have more cash to do so." An example of that would have been the share buyback. But whenever we're looking at investment opportunities, we're making sure that each of them is generating an adequate return. And we define an adequate return as a return that's above our weighted average cost of capital. So we're creating value for the long term for our shareholders.

Ross Hawley

executive
#23

And in terms of thinking about the debt, we've got a question, [ Kevin ], just in terms of sort of that headroom and is it there because we might get a -- I think it's a lumpy offer of vans. One of our attractions, I think, is we've got that financial firepower for it. How do you think about debt and the use of that for vehicle acquisition?

Philip Vincent

executive
#24

Yes, obviously, we follow that allocation model. But yes, I mean, we've got GBP 290 million of headroom on our committed facility. So we have other facilities as well through things like contractor, which aren't committed. But committed is GBP 290 million. How do I think about that. Well, we don't want to be going back on refinancing in the market every single year. The last refinancing we did was back about 18 months ago when we raised about GBP 330 million of private placement, borrowings. It's actually in euros, about GBP 330 million equivalent in sterling. And that goes -- and that was for 10 years or between 6, 8 and 10 years. So the first one of those doesn't roll over until November '27. So we don't have a waterfall moment. We've laid it out over several years. And we're paying an average rate of 1.3% on that. So we're looking at when is the best time to refinance making sure we're not up against it with the banks with a short time when we have to refinance, we have plenty of time to do so. And then separately, we have an RCF facility of GBP 475 million. And we just extended that by another year. So that will roll over again in November '26. So we're constantly looking when is the right time to refinance and not trying to do it all in one go.

Ross Hawley

executive
#25

Okay. Tim asked a question there just in terms of about economic circumstances and deleveraging the fleet. I think it's something which we talk about quite a lot in terms of that COVID experience and actually throwing off cash. Philip, I don't know if you want to?

Philip Vincent

executive
#26

Yes. I mean I'm happy to step in there and Martin can add if he wishes to. Yes. I mean, so the question is, is there an interest rate level or a set of economic circumstances where we may deleverage the fleet, I think, is the question. I think from an interest rate point of view, we're quite well insulated from that because we've got 62% of that debt fixed at 1.3%. So interest rates are not an immediate concern for us. That will impact us but not materially. And the way we look at it is when we're pricing a vehicle, now we're making sure we're covering our operating costs and the cost of the vehicle itself. We clearly need to take into account the financing of the vehicle as well and our borrowing costs. So if the market could take higher interest rates and we could price them through, then that wouldn't be a problem for us. If at any point in the market said actually we can't take any more price and we were outside our insulated environment say 5, 6 or 8 years' time, interest rates were a lot higher, then we'd have to look at how do we allocate our capital and then we look through our capital allocation model. I think the only time that we've seen where we've actually had to -- well, not defleet but stop growing a bit because what was in COVID, where we just didn't know what was going to happen. So what we actually did was we just stopped buying vehicles. So we didn't defleet. We just stopped buying vehicles because we didn't know what was going to happen in the coming months. But what we actually saw that actually across the fleet, we only ever had 6% of our vehicles returned to us. So quite a low number, much lower than perhaps we may have expected, having -- we've never been through COVID before. But what we actually saw was we actually generated a huge amount of cash in that period. Because if we're not buying vehicles, we're just generating cash and we're not reinvesting it. So we grew up of GBP 80 million of cash in 6 months just from the rental side of the business.

Ross Hawley

executive
#27

I'm going to move back into thinking about the businesses, and there was a presubmitted question just in terms of our U.K. margin on that. And another question here about the high demand for vehicles at the moment. Could you just talk about the margins in the business?

Martin Ward

executive
#28

Yes. Okay, Ross. So look, I mean, we gave sort of -- we said that medium-term guidance of our margins across Spain and the U.K. was around 15%. So that was a number that we thought was sustainable. What we're seeing is, certainly, in Spain, the margins are significantly above that. And you might argue that there are some tailwinds of the scarcity of supply. But what we're seeing is that the demand for fleet is definitely there. Customers and businesses need that fleet, so they will pay what they need to pay to get that. The triggers that would take margin down would be excess competition. And the way I look at it is this, rental is a feature of excess manufacturing, manufacturers produce more vehicles than they can sell, goes into the rental channels, then the companies then sort of do what they do. And it was easy pre-COVID. Certainly it was easy for anybody with a checkbook to go off and buy some vehicles, vans, cars, whatever else to set up a rental business, the barriers were low. I'm not talking about all the services that we have, but just pure rental. I can't see that returning because I think the scarcity of vehicles, even when they return, I don't think it's going to come back in the same way that we saw previously. So I think the big players should be able to get the fleets that they need. I think they should be able to sustain that position. So the triggers get margin down, as I said, is competition. And whilst I think there's still a lot of competition in the market, for rental. It's across all the services that we have. So everything that feeds into our margin is coming from that rental platform that's supporting that. So my view is that whilst we're not targeting to lower margins, I can't see the sort of natural triggers that are going to pull it back. So whilst we're operating above this, certainly in Spain, close to it in the U.K., stick by the 15%. But as I said, they'd have to have those triggers that really sort of drove something down.

Ross Hawley

executive
#29

And then Philip, do you want to just talk about the historic margin and how the margin progression, there was 1 of the questions in the Northgate business?

Philip Vincent

executive
#30

Yes. I mean certainly the Northgate business, you were to roll back pre my time or just before I joined, Northgate margins in the U.K. were around 7% and 8%. Spain was a little higher, but none of the levels we're seeing today. And so a lot of things have happened since we merged the 2 businesses. It doesn't operate in the same way as we used to, but much more efficient in the way we operate not only because we've taken costs out but we've changed the way we look at the business. So fundamentally now a fleet director is responsible for a vehicle through its entire life cycle. It's responsible for buying the vehicle at the beginning of life, getting the best price, buying the right mix of vehicles for the demand, which we see. They're responsible for servicing and maintaining that in an optimal way. Martin mentioned, we're operating at 92% utilization, which we do think is optimal. We go much above that. You start to have to turn down customer requests for vehicles because you can't meet them. And then we also decide at which point is it defleeted and then sold through our disposal platforms, both in Spain and the U.K. I think historically, those different elements of operations were split up under different people, and therefore, there wasn't this aligned thinking of how are you maximizing the use of that vehicle through its life, minimizing your cost, maximizing the return on capital employed. By bringing them under sort of one leadership, you've really got a much better control of that asset. So we've extracted a lot more value out of the assets we've been buying, and you can see that in the increased margin. So we're now at or above our sustainable margins, which Martin mentioned, we believe, is around 15%.

Ross Hawley

executive
#31

And Martin, looking at that, do customers still want shiny and new? Or is the market dictating something different?

Martin Ward

executive
#32

I think again, the market's changed. I think what COVID towards everybody is actually don't need a new vehicle every 2 years. and actually getting vehicles back off customers has been difficult because they want to hold on to them. What we say is that there is a standard. There's a rental standard by which we would rent vehicles to and that's sort of an industry standard. So providing you meet that and the customers want them, absolutely fine. If they drop below that standard, and we would defleet. So we defleet the vehicle, we would sell the vehicle. So that's the way that you use to rotate in that instance. So no customers are -- I think it's definitely changed in terms of being able to have a vehicle for a longer period of time. And I think, again, that's with us for maybe the short to medium term. It feels like that. That's the sort of feedback we get from our commercial teams.

Ross Hawley

executive
#33

Okay. I can see some questions in terms of strategy. And I think it's very clear that groups made considerable progress since the merger. And how do you sort of see the strategy developing from here?

Martin Ward

executive
#34

Well, I think in terms of strategy, I mean, we want to utilize our platform that we've built. We want to take market share and we want to sort of grow our earnings. I mean, that is the ambition. We're going to do that by taking more services from our existing partners and growing that within new contracts in our strong pipeline, so feeding growth, broadening our reach in terms of sort of the branches and the service centers and the things that we can do and also strengthening our market position through M&A. So I think all of those aspects, we talk to growth. Our strategy is to use our platform and leverage it for growth. We've got a unique position, and we want to build on that. Our positioning is very broad in terms of what we can do, keeping customers mobile and providing services on that platform. And if you think about all the things that happen and the things that we touched on, there is more still that we can do in that space. And we're seeing that. We've seen it in the results. We've seen it in our growth. And we're in a very big addressable market. So there's a lot more still to go for, both in the U.K. but Spain and in new geographies. So I think there's a lot ahead for us.

Ross Hawley

executive
#35

And just going on that, not quite blue sky, but a question about how we're thinking about deploying technologies, whether that's cross-selling we'll come on to EV a little bit more in a moment. But just if you kind of throw it out that 3 to 5 years, what's your vision in terms of how technology, digitization, et cetera, might actually help drive the business?

Martin Ward

executive
#36

Yes, and that's a good question actually because I mean we're starting from a relatively low point from the merger. But we've got a vision. We've got a vision in terms of what we want to do with technology. So we have a lot of people in our contact centers. Technology has moved on with AI and virtual assistance and robotics. So we're using quite a bit of robotics already in terms of the business in terms of what we do. But across the brands and across the platform, we talk about an integrated mobility service. And if we can digitize that rather than making it manual because we -- what we can present and how we can present it to the customers and deliver it is absolutely all joined up. In the background, our systems are not connected. So currently, we've got the project underway, which is connecting all of our systems and getting all the data consenting and all the contracts that you can share the data across the platform. And therefore, when you access the platform, no matter what part of the service you're accessing, you can see -- we can see what services have been purchased, what can be deployed, and then we can deploy those services and make it very easy for the customer digitally. That means then that all the platform we've got, we've got leverage on that platform. We've got efficiency leverage to be gained on our platform in terms of we can get our trained people. We can get them sort of redeployed to do other things as we grow in. And then if I took out a contact center operator, for example, if it's a one-on-one now, it could be a one-on-three with the live chat with the virtual assistant, with the robotics in terms of getting through the processes in terms of what we're going to do. And more customers are quite happy to self-serve as well, whether that's through portals, web services, through their phones. They're happy to deploy the services themselves. So we're going to lean into that and we've got a plan to do that. And I think in the next 3 to 5 years, it would be a much stronger proposition digitally as well.

Ross Hawley

executive
#37

Okay. And I think for the next 3 to 5 years is also quite an important time frame when we think about electric vehicles and EVs and new technologies. Do you want to give us sort of share some thoughts about what you see up ahead? Or do you view this as being a risk to this or actually whether there's quite a lot more opportunity for us?

Martin Ward

executive
#38

It's a lot of opportunity. We've got 130,000 fleet. And the way that we view it is we don't speculate on EV or hydrogen anything like that, we match the car park. We've matched the demand. So on the car fleet, it's much easier because people have made that decision when they have a car and they want a replacement car, they've got an EV or a hybrid, we give them a replacement EV or hybrids, we match the car park and the demand for the customers. So on cars, relatively straightforward, and we will continue that as the car park grows with EV and hybrid, our fleet will continue to grow with EV and hybrid. And as I said, we've got our own training academy, so we're training our technicians to be able to work on these vehicles as well. On vans, it's -- I think there's sort of a gap here in terms of timetable with sort of that 2030 provision and then just beyond. The van product has not been developed with something that has the range and the load capacity necessary to replace the workhorses that you have on combustion engine. The take-up is a lot smaller, it is lower because customers can't transition if you haven't got a product fit the purpose. Now we've got 16 models in the U.K. -- EV and hybrid models in U.K. and 12 in Spain or the other way around. I think it's the other way around but thanks for correcting. But as I said, they're not workhorse products that can do what customers want. So look, we've been running open days, customer experiences so they can come to our open days. People can get up and close, touch the product, feel it, ask the silly questions without sales or pressure of the sales team and sort of understand how this is going to work for them. So where we can support the transition, we can do that through the customer experiences. And there's been over 1,800 driver experiences where we're doing that with customers. So great opportunity for us to move into that space and support the customers and as I say, come up with a plan to have the transition.

Ross Hawley

executive
#39

And just Philip, back to you. On a related topic, but about our own ESG targets, I can see on that. Do you want to just talk a little bit about what we put in place for that because that's fairly new this year?

Philip Vincent

executive
#40

Yes, we've been doing a lot on ESG this year within the company. First of all, recruited a Head of ESG to meet the program for us. We've also set up our ESG committee. So we've got various ESG committees looking at our real estate, how we improve and reduce the emissions coming from these estates. We've got ones looking at mobility and our fleet, how do we are measuring the emissions from our fleet and how do we reduce that, looking at new technologies in the way we use vehicles. And then another group that's looking at people and the social side of our business, how do we maximize the experience for employees working in our business and also understand how we work within our communities that we operate much better as well. And then we've also been working on issuing our own targets as well. We said we wanted to be net zero by 2050, but we've now been setting some more midterm targets on Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. We've done a lot of work on collecting data for Scope 1 and 2, but also in starting to assess the level of Scope 3 emissions as well. And we know that actually our Scope 1 and 2 emissions probably account for less than 1% of our total emissions. So most of our emissions will come from the life cycle of the vehicle in Scope 3. On Scope 1 and 2, what we said is by FY '27, so in 5 years' time, using FY '22 as the base year, we're going to reduce our Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 10% in absolute terms. And at the same time, we're also going to be making sure all of our electricity that we procure is green electricity by FY '27 as well.

Ross Hawley

executive
#41

Fantastic. So I think I've actually having looked at our pre-submitted and the questions. Hopefully, we have addressed all the questions which people have. So I think I should probably at this time, hand back to the Investor Meet team just to see whether they want to encourage any more questions. And if not, then we'll give it a moment. And then maybe, Martin, you want to just perhaps wrap up with some final thoughts.

Operator

operator
#42

Okay. Thank you very much indeed. I think you and the team have covered off every question that we've had through. So perhaps, Martin, if I could just hand back to you just for some closing comments, and I'll pick up from the end.

Martin Ward

executive
#43

Okay, Paul, thank you. Yes. So look, from me, I would say the ambition of the management team is to grow sustainable returns. Redde Northgate is a strong asset-backed business with a broad customer base. The earnings quality is good with many of the services that I've talked about contracted over multiple years. We generate strong levels of cash, which we can decide how we want to invest in line with a very well-defined capital allocation structure that Philip took you through. We have a very strong balance sheet at over GBP 1 billion of assets, the majority of these being relatively liquid in the form of vehicles. And at the heart of what we do is mobility. And what we saw doing COVID is that people need that mobility for businesses to continue for people to move around. So I think we play a very strong integral part of what sort of society needs through our platform. And I think all of that sort of combines to make a very, very strong proposition.

Ross Hawley

executive
#44

Fantastic. Well, thank you, everybody, and back to the investor team.

Operator

operator
#45

That's great. Ross, Martin, Philip, thank you very much indeed for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close the session to be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the team can better understand your views and expectations. This is going to take a few moments to complete and that would be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team, Redde Northgate plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session. Thank you, and good afternoon to you all.

Martin Ward

executive
#46

Thank you.

Philip Vincent

executive
#47

Thank you.

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