Volution Group plc

Okay, brilliant, okay. Well, reassuring everybody found it to the right location. We were a little bit concerned this morning as we moved it. But look, welcome. Great to have you all here today. Quite an interesting... sort of set of results. This is 10 years, 10 full years listed. So a little bit of the theme for our presentation today will be about our sort of 10-year performance. But look, we're really great to be here today. It's probably not going to come as a surprise to you. We're going to do the usual sort of overview. I'll do that very quickly. Andy gets to do the interesting part on the financial review. But it is really an interesting part. There's so many sort of highlights to pick out. I'll come back on the business review, three geographic areas, and then at the end we'll talk about summary and outlook. But as I say, it's 10 years since we listed, I remember it, June 2014. It's scary how we've had 10 full financial years. But look, it's for us continuing to deliver strong compounding growth, and I'll come back to that in a little bit more detail. And there's absolutely no doubt that the wider market backdrop isn't particularly helpful. So we're particularly pleased about our results in that context. Our revenue growth in the year was 8% on a constant currency basis. Our adjusted operating profit up by nearly 12%, 11.7%. And adjusted earnings per share up by 8.5%. And look, our asset light but not under invested business model continues to deliver excellent cash generation, 107% cash generation in FY24, a 10 year average of 97%. And that's obviously hugely important for our strategy and our ongoing desire to further consolidate the market and make acquisitions. Coming on to that, we acquired only one small transaction in the year. That was DBS Proven Systems on the 4th of August, 2023. So actually, that was all that we did in the year. But of course, Andy and I and the rest of the team were in the knowledge of Fantech. And we signed that deal shortly after the year end. I'll come back to it in a little bit more detail. But look, really delighted about the fact that the strong cash generation from the business has helped us or will help us complete that transaction from just cash and debt. facilities alone. And on the sustainability side, product, planet and people, I'll talk about what we're doing there, but really very excited about how we have further made steps and improvements in the year. But look, it's another year of strong performance, demonstrating the strength and resilience of our business model. And this slide I think it's particularly pleasing. I mean, if we can sort of make an exception for the COVID year and certainly by the year after COVID, we'd more than recovered to keep that trend going. But this makes me very proud. Revenue growth, 11.2% compounding over 10 years. Adjusted cash flow, 14.2%, particularly strong, of course, last year. but still believe that we can continue with our adjusted cash flow on that sort of level. Adjusted earnings per share, 12.3% compounding. Adjusted operating profit, 11.4%. And if you look at the top box on the right-hand side, the group in 2014, 120 million in revenue. I've been CEO now for nearly 13 years, 10 years listed. When I first started, it was about 90 million in revenue, 120 million when we listed. 30% of revenue from, or less than 30% of revenue from non-UK customers, and now close to $350 million of revenue doesn't include Fantech that comes later. Less than... 60% of our revenue from non-UK customers, just under 60%. In 17 countries, 22 brands and just under 2,000 employees. So I think when you see that slide there, and I know a lot of the questions that we get around the resilience and ongoing performance of the business, but I don't know how long you have to go before it becomes a track record, but certainly we've got 10 years under our belt now, so we're feeling reasonably confident there. I'm not going to go into this slide in a lot of detail, but it's just worth a reminder about our sort of compelling value creation delivered through a clear and consistent strategy and differentiated business model. Quite a mouthful there. But we haven't materially changed the strategy in the 10 years that we've been listed. We had a strategy review, funnily enough, in July with the wider board, and we are not about to change. make any wild changes to our strategy going forwards. We're in a market with structural growth drivers underpinning long-term growth, structural undersupply of new homes. I won't go through all of these in detail, but maybe when I come back to the business review, you'll see how regulations are helping support what is probably a counterintuitive performance. How does Volution grow in residential new build construction in the last 12 months? it's because of regulatory underpinning. And I'm not saying this regulatory underpinning happens in all markets all of the time, but when it does have an impact, and I'll come back to it in the UK later on, it can be quite profound. And, of course, the direction of travel for regulations and sustainability more generally, you can debate the... steepness of the trend trajectory but the direction is very clear we're only going one way when it comes to regulations a differentiated business case as we can talk about their leading product and technology offering strong brands you know we're accumulating brands and we value those brands and it's very important and our strategic pillars you know growing well organically value adding acquisitions operational excellence to improve them and sustainability at our core And if we just have a look there, over time, revenue growth plus 10% per annum. Go back to the previous slide, we've exceeded that. Organic growth between the 3% and 5% range. Operating profit margins over 20%. We increased to 22.5% last year. Earnings per share plus 10%. We've talked about compounding growth rate of 12%. Adjusted operating cash conversion of more than 90%. We've set a 10-year average of 97%. And a return on invested capital of over 20%. We actually slightly improved it in the year, although, of course, Fantech will come up next and Andy can cover that. So, as I say, just a very quick summary, more about our 10-year history. Andy will come back now. in a little bit more detail and talk specifically about the year that we've just completed.

Thanks, Ronnie. Morning, everybody. So we've just done the 10-year slide. At risk of being fractionally repetitive, this is now a five-year view of it, which unsurprisingly shows you broadly the same trends. We always start with this slide. I think it's hopefully a helpful way of... referencing both the current year performance, but also importantly, putting into that context of consistency of delivery and really, really pleasing across all of the metrics. I won't go through them all, but if I was going to pull out a couple of them, the strength of the margins, I think that is something that we prize absolutely highly. And I think a further uptick of 120 basis points in the operating margin from 21.3 to 22.5 in the year and then actually be quite nice in 12 months time I can drop the 2020 bar and hopefully as long as 2025 shows a good number you know you'll then have a pretty consistent track down that line there. Strong operating profit growth of just under 12% in the year, but really pleasing for me, for all of us, that that comes through and a little bit more at a cash level. So 13.5% growth in operating cash flow during the year. That brought our leverage down at 31st of July to just 0.4 times. Now, clearly, we've got pretty good use for this cash already earmarked coming up in a few months' time. But I think the fact that we are about to go into, subject to the completion, about to go into our biggest acquisition by some considerable distance and that we can finance it through... the group's cash and the new facility which we've recently announced and not having to raise any equity and indeed for the 20 plus transactions that preceded it, it's the same story. I think that's just a really, really critical part of the business model. A little bit more detail here on the in-year numbers. The comments to the right, hopefully trying to answer ahead of time some of the questions that you guys might normally have. So on the revenue side of things, so 6% revenue growth, 8% constant currency, of which 1.5% was organic. To our best estimate, price benefit in the year was about 2%. That number at the half year was more like 2.5%. Twelve months ago, it was just a little bit above 3%. So what I've been saying, and this is true now, is that we are now back into a much more normalised pricing environment moving forward. I've already alluded to the operating margin uptick of 120 basis points. Those of you that have gone deeper into the announcement will see that actually at a gross margin level, we grew 290 basis points in the year. So really, really strong gross margin gains. And that's been delivered through obviously some price, but it's predominantly down to product cost initiatives due to really good operational performance. There is some mixed benefit, and I'll come on to a little bit of that when we come into the regional breakdown. Finance costs obviously were a little bit of a headwind in the year, well, a substantial headwind in the year just gone because of the movement in base rates and interest rates across our patch, which is why the 11.5% just above operating profit growth translates to an 8.5%, still very, very good, but it is slightly diluted at the EPS level. And the bottom bullet point there, so the proposed dividend, which obviously will be approved in December at the AGM, would bring us to nine pence per share for the year, which is 12.5% up on the dividend from the previous year. I won't say too much on this slide because I think the interesting dynamic will be the regional dividend. breakdown which Ronnie will come on to later. Quite a lot of moving pieces, some very strong performance areas, some slightly tougher performance areas, but good that actually we had a nice organic growth in the UK and in the other two regions where we had some slightly more mixed market conditions we were still able to maintain our position organically. This slide then on margin. So just a couple of things I'll sort of draw out. And on the previous one, you'll have seen £4.9 million organic revenue growth. Here where we then split down the operating profit growth between the same bucket, so organic, inorganic and FX. Organic coming through at £6 million. So £4.9 million revenue, £6 million operating profit. This again is just a reminder of the margin performance. When we go down to the bottom right there on the regions, so we had nice, well, very, very strong margin growth in the UK. I think there's a number of pieces inside it, but clearly it is our focus on product cost initiatives, whether that's procurement or value engineering. There is a bit of a mixed benefit in the UK because the lowest margin piece of our UK portfolio is our OEM business, which, as Ronnie will come on to later, is clearly an area that was That was very difficult last year, whereas the really, really strong area in residential tends to be our highest margin piece of the UK estate. Continental Europe, nice to see margins go up 110 basis points there. Again, there's a little bit of a mixed benefit. So probably our strongest performer in Continental Europe last year was Klimerad, which is one of our highest margin estates. hearts of the group. But actually, I was doing a little look at it earlier today. Every single country, the margin of that individual country was either consistent with the year before or slightly ahead. So good underlying performance across the patch and then a little bit of mixed benefit as well. Australasia, the reduction there is the mixed impact going the other way. So we brought in DVS at the start of the financial year. DVS is approximately 15% of our of last year's Australasian revenue. It'll be, hopefully, a much smaller number next year, not because of their performance, but because of what we're bringing in. But it was about 15% of our 2024 Australasian revenue at a margin that is 10%, 12% lower than our legacy businesses in that part of the world. So 15% on 12%. You can see the math there. Hence, 1.2% margin reduction. Actually, organically, there was probably a slight improvement. Really pleasing slide for me. I think it largely speaks for itself, but strong earnings performance in the year, a nice helpful inflow from working capital, mainly inventory and our focus on inventory. What we said, those of you who've been here with us for a number of years, Was it two, three years ago that we put in a significant investment in inventory as part of our post-COVID and dealing with supply chain difficulties? And what we said was we believed that we were not going to bring that right back down, but we did believe that there was opportunities to progressively enhance and optimise that. And this is what we've carried on doing during the year. Just sort of in terms of organisation, the slide that was useful just to show our three capital allocation priorities, clear, unchanged, you know, capex to invest in the business organically. And we always say sort of seven to eight million pounds is roughly what we need to spend absent anything exceptional. 7.1 this year, last year, I think it was 7.9. And then, you know, acquisitions and dividend. And all of that brings you back to the 31.5 million net debt, which is substantially the lowest that we've been in our history. Yes, that will change next year, hopefully. Then this slide here, returns on invested capital, which we've been obviously running for the last couple of years. So continuing to show really, really strong returns here, substantially ahead of our weighted average cost of capital. The 40 basis points increase in the year would essentially be two things. In the upward direction, we've got the continuing strength of margin and margin performance. And then there's a slight offsetting from the acquisition effect of the three acquisitions that came in in late financial year 2023 and financial year 2024. And just to sort of give a little bit of a trailer, I thought it was helpful. Again, you guys could probably have got to the number anyway, but helpful just to say that, you know, Fantech, simply by its size and scale, we think this will be, once it's completed, a very, very attractive acquisition at a very good price, but very clearly it is still successful. substantially dilutive to the return on invested capital. We estimate an annualised effect, so not necessarily 2025, because that'll be part year, but if you were to do an annualised effect of Fantech, it's about 4% dilution on your returns there, but you're still... you know, nicely north of 20%. And as we said in the strapline there, you know, we remain confident in maintaining these returns above 20% whilst continuing to invest and grow the business. I think we've covered most of these through the couple of slides so far. But again, just a reminder, you know, these are our key targets that remain unchanged. I think the financial year 2024 performance, you know, we were really pleased with how those performances line up against all of those targets. we've got the five-year averages or in the case of the returns, the three-year average. And again, you know, that sort of consistency of delivery is really, really key for us. So with that, I'll pass back to Ronnie.

Thank you. So just looking at the sort of complexion of the group and how it's changed, and actually I'd probably rather refer to this slide. We've talked about our geographic diversity and how I think that really does help us. And so if you look at it, as I said, you know, back in 2012, the business was completely UK-centric, focusing on Europe. residential ventilation and over time we've moved to a more international business with continental Europe growing there you can see the green bar as it expands both organically and through acquisition and then the blue piece on the end and then of course if you pro forma fan tech then actually come up quite elegantly with three bars that are plus minus of a similar size and you know that's That's our focus. We think that geographic diversity has been hugely helpful for us. You know, I'd love as the chief executive to be able to tell you that all of our markets were all going up at the same time. But life isn't quite as simple and straightforward as that. But look, what we've had over recent years is a maybe stronger continental European performance up until more recently. Now we're seeing a stronger UK residential performance. And in Australasia, I think we're seeing a mixed performance with Australia, much stronger performance. But this geographic diversity is, I think, what gives us that dependency, that consistency of results delivery over time. Our performance isn't predicated on one individual area. And we're very pleased about how this has materially changed over time. So we'll go into the individual detail now and just have a look. And so some of the pies that we're showing there. So this is UK revenue, 46% of the group, although the export revenue is, of course, non-UK. So if you take that out, that's why you end up with 60% of the group's revenue not being dependent on UK activity. In the UK, where it's quite easy, it's sort of two-thirds residential, one-third commercial. It's about two-thirds RMI and one-third new build. But we had a good performance overall, 3.1% at constant currency, but up 17% in residential. And of course, on the other side, we had very weak OEM and commercial. But look, there is absolutely no doubt that that there is a hugely heightened awareness around mould and condensation, indoor air quality. We could talk now about the private rental bill that's going to mirror the public rental bill. We're seeing strong demand in social housing refurbishment. We think that's only set to continue. And we're seeing the regulatory impact that we talked about. We sat here in 2022 talking about part F and L. And the question, of course, was, well, when do we see the benefit of that? I think we've materially seen the benefit of it in our last financial year. But we've also done very well with gaining share. And this is sort of where you piece it together. an understanding of where the regs are going, an innovation around some certain product groups, and then capturing share, which has really helped us underpin a strong residential revenue growth. As I say, that 17% is probably strongest in residential new build, also strong in UK social housing, but also some private refurbishment as well. In commercial, we're personally disappointed about commercial. 6% decline, I think it would be quite easy to blame the market. The commercial markets are tough, but we expect to do more in this arena over time. We've made quite a lot of investment in the year in terms of new products. We've certainly strengthened the senior leadership team. We're adding to that team at the moment, and we believe that we should do better over time in the UK commercial market. And, of course, the polarisation now... Residential versus commercial is quite stark, but certainly an opportunity for us to do better in the future. And then in export, small growth in export in the year, strong performance in Ireland, slight decline in other areas. But if we look at the Irish new build market, which actually is underpinned quite well, the regulatory drivers in Ireland have actually gone more quickly. And so we have more systems demand pro rata to the volume of build than we do in the UK market currently, but I think that's a really good indicator of where the UK market gets to over time. And then OEM, we trailed this all the way through the year. It was very weak, particularly in export to customers, to quite large customers in the Netherlands having a really tough time with new build exposure. And we did quite a bit of work in terms of the OEM activities during the course of the year, consolidated two factories into one, made quite a step improvement in terms of the gross margin and the indirect cost. And we think the outlook will be slightly better this year coming off the back of a very weak performance. In 2024. But look, overall, it's quite amusing for me. UK operating profit margin now 25 percent, actually the highest of three areas. And for those that have followed us over time, we always talked about why was the UK lagging the rest of the group? And of course, now the conversation Andy and I have with the rest of the group is why is it lagging? But look, 25% operating profit margin, certainly some operating leverage as the revenue drops through, but some margin expansion, particularly with some of those new innovations that we've brought to market. And I just think Andy made an interesting point earlier about how each of our operating areas, even the ones that are experiencing a more difficult, challenging end market, still manage to hold or improve their margin significantly. For me, this is absolutely part of our DNA. This is how we work in terms of initiatives. There's never really one big initiative that transforms the landscape. It's just an accumulation of lots and lots of small operational excellence initiatives. And you can see the benefit there in the UK performance. So that was without doubt the sort of major highlight for us. Continental Europe is difficult. If we look at the performance overall in the year, yes, we had some growth, but that was mainly acquisition-led. We've added some nice companies to the group over the last couple of years in Slovenia, in France, and it has been a more challenging market. But nevertheless, we still improved our operating profit by 13.9% without a huge benefit from the organic play. There's quite a bit of mix going on there. If I call out that the Nordics was probably a little bit better in half two than half one. We've had a tough time in the Nordics over the last few years. But I think that that's probably behind us. And I think our outlook's a little bit more positive there, but not getting over enthusiastic about what's happening. We've had an exceptionally strong performance in the Netherlands with Klimerad, a company that we acquired in December 2020. That's continued to perform very well. in quite a niche in terms of refurbishment, and the proposition there has been very strong. The revenue growth's been strong, and the order, we track both the revenue, as you can see it here, but also the project order intake, the order bank has grown nicely in the year. And, look, quite small, didn't participate particularly well last year, but the acquisition we made in France, we were into Klima last week exhibiting. We've got a whole raft of new group products that we've introduced to the portfolio. This was a distribution play. We wanted the coverage of the French market. It's a big market. We have a very small share. And only this morning I was looking at some information about how our new products are starting to get traction there. And we'll grow more quickly in France now because we have an insignificant share of a very attractive market. So, look, overall, continental Europe had been sort of the star performer in the group, if you like, in the first five, six, seven years after listing. And I would say against the backdrop of a weak continental European market, we're very, very happy with the performance there. and potentially if market commentators are correct and we do see a recovery coming over the next 12 months, then obviously we're very well placed to benefit from that. Australasia, strong performance in Australia. It's the bigger market, more challenging market conditions in New Zealand, although pleased to see there was a 50 basis points cut in local interest rates a couple of days ago, so that will certainly help us. But look, in that market we grew... We grew 17.5%, but that's, again, assisted by the DVS acquisition that we made in New Zealand. But there is, you know, there is... And there's also the currency headwind as well. We sometimes underestimate that, but actually it's been impacting us over the last couple of years there as you've had weak local currencies and that translation impact in... has been quite profound on an accumulated basis. But look, Australia performed very well. Ventair, ceiling fans moving to low-carbon solutions has gone very well. New Zealand has been weaker. But overall, we had a margin reduction of 120 basis points, which is almost exclusively aligned to DVS. What we're doing in DVS at the moment is introducing some initiatives to reduce product costs that will have a more material impact in FY25 rather than in 24. But look, I think the most exciting part about what's happening in the region for us now and next is the agreement to acquire Fantech that we signed more recently. And maybe we should come on to that. I was really pleased that we kept this acquisition secret. That was very important. I think the confidentiality was key. This is a process that was bilateral. I think the owner did discuss it with a couple of others from a sort of price discovery perspective. But the important thing to understand here is this is an acquisition that I believe is only Volution and maybe only a few others could have got to an agreement stage, and that's really important for us. Quite often people talk about publicly played out processes, and there was one that Andy and I talked about more recently in Spain that we were disappointed not to be successful with, but it was a full process and quite a fruity multiple in the end. But look, paying... 8.5 times trailing EBITDA for a market leader in Australia and New Zealand, I think is pretty impressive. If this had been a full auction process, then you'd have probably seen two or three turns on the multiple. So why didn't the seller, why didn't the owner run a full auction process? I think at the point, at a certain point, The price was sufficient, and it was absolutely about, and the due diligence in Fantech was about us as the new owner. And I saw that firsthand. I was joking with some others about, am I over my jet lag? And I think I was, but probably at the weekend, but I popped out for... three or four days, sat with the owner as he addressed the workforce and listened to what he said about us, and it was hugely complimentary. You know, Volution is a pure play ventilation company that protects brands, has a track record of enhancing acquisitions that have been made, keeps the management, and that was absolutely important to the seller. And I think that's why we were able to consummate an acquisition here that others, certainly a financial sponsor, a financial buyer wouldn't have been on the table, and I think other strategics would have struggled to convince the seller in the way that we've been able to do so. So, look, it's hugely compelling. There is an antitrust issue that we're going through. That's underway. That's quite nicely underway. We're not nervous about that process, and that's because of the complementarity of the asset. This is a leader in commercial ventilation, where in Australia we have no revenue. So the overlaps are quite small. We're going through that process now. And I think the view is that this is probably an end of calendar year completion for us. So hopefully by the 31st of December. I think linked to this is our people and our bench strength, and we talk about it. And I've given this, along with the wider team and the board, a lot of thought over the last couple of years because we think about where we're going. It's not about where we are today. It's about having the bench and the people, capacity and alignment for where we're going three, five, ten years down the line. And we carried out our first employee engagement survey. This was group-wide. The score was 74. It's sort of 74 out of 100, but it was 74. But look, there's some quotes along the bottom there. We picked these out. I don't need to read them. You can read them for yourself. But I was really very excited. I was particularly excited about the participation in the survey. We had a very high level of participation. People were keen to get involved. And that actually we carried out October last year. And there's been a whole raft of follow-ups but we have been attracting and developing in the management team new group technical director martin goodfellow's been with us for six months making great progress about having a more holistic innovation team that leverages our capability and and of course knowing that fantech hopefully comes into the group in the next couple of months and how do we integrate that well and have a have an outstanding technical competence that is far in excess of what anyone else would have locally. And I think that's an important ingredient in terms of how we run the business. Management Development Programme is coming to an end. Management Development Programme 4 comes to an end on the 24th of October. Really pleased about that. And we've already flagged that we'll have Management Development Programme 5 to follow. New Australasian Managing Director, Jeff Nicol, that we hired back at the beginning of the year with the likelihood, the expectation that Fantech would come into the group. Ian Ball, he's been with us since we acquired Fantech. Cymex in 2018, but will retire by the end of next year. There's a really nice handover. It'll be gradual. It's going on now. No dramas. It's important that we don't drop the ball as we move along. But look, the bench strength, I actually did an interview for one of the journals this morning, and I said, actually, my sense is running Volution today, believe it or not, more complex, more geographically dispersed, is actually easier today than it was when I first took over 13 years ago. And that's a credit to the wider bench and the strength of the people that we've got running the business day to day. And just to finish here, one of the important issues for us around people is that people should come to work and go home. at the end of the day, and keeping our people safe is really important to us. And we had a big step improvement in our accident frequency rate in the year, so really pleased about that. Dropped by a third, down to 0.2. So that was really very pleasing. Sustainability at our core, healthy air sustainably. Again, not to go through each of these individually, but our total revenue from low-carbon products grew a little bit in the year. Actually, our heat recovery total revenue percentage declined, and that's partly to do with the declines that we had in Germany in particular that had a more profound impact. But this is heat recovery rather than low carbon, so... Our low-carbon products were growing, but not necessarily the ones with heat recovery, if you can follow that through. Recycled plastics, we said the 90% target would be a stretch, and it is a stretch. We haven't given up on it, and that's why we've shown you some exit rates at the end of the year there. So you can see that the group exit rate was at 83%. And credit to our Reading facility, there's a little bit of detail in the wider statement, but our Reading facility is now over 90%, which is outstanding. And we've got to bring our Nordic colleagues and some other smaller areas of the group along. So I think we can hit our 90% recycled content target, but it may just be a couple of years later than we originally expected. And look, so a few statistics there around carbon intensity and total absolute carbon emissions here. And finally, but not least, is SBTI. So you can see the programme that we're on there. We're actually at the technical verification stage. That was in August, and we expect that target to be approved by the end of the year. So we're really pleased, and we said last year this is what we would be doing about SBTI. So what does all of that mean? This is just recapping on what's happened, but look, the outlook, and... Notwithstanding the markets are difficult, but we've had a good start to the new year. The first couple of months have gone well. We are growing organically. We can only grow by organic means. We have no acquisition tailwind at the moment from the prior year. And our operating profit is ahead of the same period prior year. And we're really pleased about that. We think the market, the end markets are difficult. We obviously have access to the peer group information as reported. And to be still growing organically and moving forward is, a great pleasure for us. And we think we've got really good momentum in the business locally. And of course, exciting post-year-end development. We're really very excited about that. Pleased that we can talk about it more publicly now. Of course, we were working on that transaction, I think, intimately for about 12 months. Always makes it a little bit difficult when people talk about is there anything in the pipeline and is it going to be harder to consummate deals and so forth? And, of course, we're itching to tell you that actually we've got the biggest one to date on the block, but, of course, for obvious reasons, we weren't able to do so. So, look, we, as the board, are confident of another year of progress across the group. So, with that, I'd be very happy to hand over to questions. OK, we've got a mic for you, although... Ainsley, thank you.