Luceco plc

Hello and good morning, everybody. And thank you very much for attending the LUSICO interim results presentation for 2022. These results are in line with the update we issued in July with revenue of 106 million and operating profit of 11.5. These results, although they are disappointing against last year, reflect some normalisation following the extraordinary result that we had. There's been a slowdown in the DIY demand after lockdown, when, as we know now, there was a significant pull forward of demand. And there is also significant but a temporary headwind from our major distributors who overstopped themselves during this period. But the results remain well ahead of the pre-pandemic levels. Our revenue is up almost 30% against 2019 and our operating profit is up over 60%. onto the following slide. And we are well positioned for the macroeconomic uncertainty that lies ahead. So last year, cost inflation was a major issue, but we have basically managed to pass all of that into the market and our gross margin in the second half of this year will be considerably better than in the first half. We made a successful entry to the EV charging market, which we think is a huge opportunity for the future. And the acquisition of that SYNC EV business is going extremely well. We also bought an excellent lighting company called DW Windsor, which I will speak more about later. And our low carbon footprint on which we've been doing a huge amount of work is an increasingly important factor in our market. We also have a healthy balance sheet. The outlook for the rest of this year, well, since the first half, our trading has been in line with our expectations. However, the market is continuing to slow, particularly in the DOI and hybrid sectors. However, the professional contractor market has remained strong and is broadly stable. Therefore, we expect our full year earnings to be in line with market expectations. And as you can see from our performance against 2019, we are emerging from the pandemic as a stronger business with our significant longer term growth and prospects intact. With that, I will hand over to Matt.

Okay. Thank you, John. Morning to everyone on the call and on the webcast. Just before I take you through the detail of the financial performance, I just wanted to pull out some of the key highlights within our numbers, which is on slide six. So for those of you that have followed the Lusiko story, you will know that the last year obviously was an outstanding year for the group. And within those outstanding 2021 results, we flagged that the first half was particularly strong. We enjoyed buoyant sales at healthy margins. The buoyant sales were obviously held by the pandemic. In the first half of 2021, the furlough and vaccine programs combined to give consumers the confidence to spend, but sporadic lockdowns diverted that spending disproportionately towards home improvement, which obviously benefited us. And our margins at that stage were also healthy, as they had not yet been meaningfully impacted by the wave of input cost inflation created by the global increase in demand for goods. In the current half year, we have perhaps inevitably fallen short of that record per year performance as home improvement activity has begun to normalize post-COVID. And normalization of both demand and supply this year has prompted some of our larger distributor customers to reduce their own inventory of our products in their supply chains. This left our first half sales temporarily lower, widening the gap to last year. And I will talk more about this in a moment. In terms of the numbers themselves, what you can see on the page here is that revenue came in, as John has said, at just over 106 million, which was within 2% of last year's level. and with a reduction in like-for-like sales broadly offset by new sales contributed by acquisitions. Adjusted operating profit came in at £11.5 million, which was 40% lower than last year, reflecting that reduction in like-for-like sales. And the reduction in EPS broadly mirrored that of adjusted operating profit. So whilst it is obviously naturally quite disappointing to fall short of last year's numbers, we do need to put this in some context. As our markets normalize, it is useful to also compare our results to the last set we published before COVID, namely the first half of 2019. We have made this comparison on the slide, as you can see. And as can be seen, the broader context of these results is that our performance remains well ahead of pre-pandemic levels, underlining the good strategic progress that we have made over recent years, which John will talk more about later. Okay, so moving on to slide seven, this provides a bit more color behind the profit performance. Once again, we provide on this slide an H1 2019 pre-COVID comparison. As I mentioned a moment ago, revenue came in at £106.4 million, and that was the product of two factors. So firstly, a circa 17% like-for-like sales decline. And secondly, revenue added via the acquisition of DW Windsor last year and Sync EV this year. One factor largely offset the other, leaving group revenue only 1.7% lower than last year. but revenue does remain nearly 29% higher than H1 2019, meaning we have undoubtedly gained share during the pandemic. Gross margin of 34% was lower than last year's record first half performance of 38.5%. This was largely due to the decline in like-for-like sales. Last year, we saw particularly strong demand for wiring accessories, which you may know is our highest margin product category and one that we also make in-house. This means that our manufacturing overhead within the business was spread over very high production output last year, and that benefited gross margin. This year, of course, we have seen the opposite effect, holding back margins. Now, some of the reduction in wiring accessory volume this year has come from the impact of customer destocking that I referenced earlier, and that is certainly temporary in nature. So that does mean that production utilization and therefore margin should begin to benefit once customers have rebalanced their own imagery levels. We are also seeing margins benefit from the evolution of cost inflation. So we saw the selling price increases put in place to combat inflation come through in full effect during the half. And the input cost inflation itself now seems to be reversing in areas that most impacts us. So commodity prices, sea freight, et cetera. Although clearly this environment is quite fluid. Collectively, this means that we exited the half at a gross margin of 36.5%, which was higher than what we achieved on average for the half as a whole. And obviously that's quite encouraging momentum for the second half. Turning to overheads, we kept these under tight control. Acquisitions added nearly 3.7 million pounds to our half yearly overhead bill, but total overheads only increased by 2.2, meaning we lowered overheads across the rest of the group. This was thanks to lower variable pay and controlled discretionary spending. The net result of all of this was adjusted operating profit of £11.5 million, 40% lower than a truly exceptional H1 2021 performance, but still 60% ahead of where we were pre-COVID. Now we were able to make some good progress on the tax tax lines, so our adjusted effective tax rate has dropped steadily over recent years, and we have, as we have managed our tax matters better and this year was no exception so. We achieved an effective tax rate of 14.3% for H1 and should be able to be able to maintain a rate of circa 15% for the year as a whole. Okay, slide eight provides a bit more detail on the revenue drivers. I mentioned earlier that our performance was impacted by customer stock movements. This drove the majority of the like for like revenue decline shown at the top of the slide. Let me explain this in a bit more detail. So the construction products industry has experienced strong market conditions since the second half of 2020, particularly in the home improvement sector. However, production and supply chain capacity in the market has not always been sufficient to fully meet this demand, having been reduced in the early days of COVID. In H1 2021, distributors serving the industry, i.e. our customers, responded to tight supply chain conditions by stocking up to maintain service levels and meet expected future demand increases. In short, they bought more of our products than they sold. And that obviously boosted our sales. In H1 2022, normality has begun to return to both demand and supply, allowing our distributor customers to reduce their stock levels, buying less from us than they have sold. We know this because with help from our customers, we have been able to compare their sales of our products to end users with our sales of our products to them. Any difference between the two is a stock movement. We believe the net effect of these stock movements was a circa 15 million pound reduction in revenue relative to the first half of 2021, which is obviously significant. Customer stock changes therefore drove the majority of the reduction in like-for-like sales that you see at the top of the page. And absent these actions by our customers, our like-for-like sales would have declined by approximately 2.5%, not 16.5%. I'm sure this was happening across the industry, but the impact on us is large because A, we have large customers serving the hottest construction market, namely home improvement. And B, these customers buy directly from us in China, i.e. on an FOB basis. And that involves a long lead time. And long lead times mean that they have to hold a lot of inventory. In 2021, we were not fully aware that this was happening. Manufacturers like us generally don't have good visibility of the stock of their products that are held elsewhere in their supply chain. But we have worked hard over the last few months to get and keep the visibility that we need. This destocking phase will continue into the second half of this year and early 2023, but there is some good news within this. Firstly, this destocking phase is fundamentally temporary and most unusual in terms of its size and duration. It is very much a function of the unprecedented circumstances created by the pandemic. And secondly, end user demand for our products is clearly better than our revenue line currently suggests. Okay, so moving on to slide nine, there's no question that temporary customer destocking meant that our sales underperformed the wider market in the period. But the key question is how did we perform versus the market absent destocking? This is relevant since this is the performance we will see when destocking inevitably comes to an end. In short, we believe our addressable market slowed by 2% in the period. Admittedly, that's a 2% decline that is net of a very big price increase driven by cost inflation across the industry. Given our selling prices are on average 12% higher than last year, and we believe that we have broadly followed the market on price, this says market volumes are about 14% lower than a year ago, and clearly that's a fairly significant slowdown. The majority of that volume slowdown came within the DIY market as consumers rediscovered old ways to spend their money, e.g. travel and entertainment. Whereas the professional residential RMI market was, by contrast, fairly flat. We believe this held up better since electricians continue to complete residential renovation work that was won last year. Non-residential and infrastructure sectors were more active than last year, which is encouraging. And we saw the benefits of this in our LED project installed businesses. As I mentioned earlier, we estimate that our like-for-like sales decline absent customer destocking, in other words, the decline in end-user demand for our products, was about 2.5%. And this means end-user demand for our products has broadly evolved in line with the wider market over the last 12 months. Taking a longer term perspective, we believe we have increased our share of the market during COVID, i.e. since the first half of 2019 for two reasons. Firstly, we have added revenue and gained share by recommencing our M&A strategy. And secondly, on the previous page, you may have noticed that our sales have grown by 12.8% on a like for like basis since 2019. And this is despite a strong temporary headwind from customer destocking right now. Were it not for that, we believe we would have grown by 21% over the same time period, which we believe was stronger than the market. Okay, moving on to slide 10. This slide mirrors the analysis provided earlier for revenue. In the top chart, you can see we experienced a 6.1 billion pound like for like reduction in operating profit We believe all of this was attributable to customer stock changes. Indeed, we estimate that if our demand had mirrored end user demand, i.e. without disturbance from customer stock changes, our profits would have actually grown slightly year on year. And this is thanks to the progressive recovery of input cost inflation, which I will talk more about in a moment. Customer stock changes had a significant impact on both revenue and profit. This is because they largely involve the same high margin wiring accessory product category that I referenced earlier. And as you can see in the bottom chart, the group has delivered significant light for light profit growth during the pandemic. And again, this is despite the temporary headwind we are facing right now from customer destocking. Profit will therefore benefit when destocking inevitably comes to an end. Okay, slide 11 provides an update on an old favorite, namely input cost inflation. My last update on this was back in March. At that time, I said input cost inflation and currency movements combined, and those that arose during the pandemic, were on course to add 25 million pounds to our annual cost base. The good news is that inflation is now moving in our favor overall. but clearly the situation is quite fast moving. My latest estimate is that inflation will now add 21.5 billion to our annual cost base, 3.5 million pounds less than before. And to be clear, this is due to reductions in price, not volume. Our rate of spend has obviously slowed this year as the business has slowed, but this is not a factor in this analysis. For this purpose, I have kept activity levels constant throughout. Up until this year, the impacts of cost inflation had largely been confined to the cost of product. But we are about to see it expand into the cost of labor and services, i.e. overheads. It's very difficult to say at this stage what the cost of this will be. In my latest inflation estimate that you can see at the top of the page there, I have shown what I think is a fairly conservative view, namely a 3.2 million pound or 7% increase in our overhead base, excluding depreciation. We will obviously do all we can to minimize that whilst retaining the talent we need in the business. The good news here is that we have the selling prices in the market that can accommodate this amount of inflation in aggregate as the bottom charts attempt to show. So looking at the bottom right-hand chart, the selling price increases we have in place will generate approximately 22.5 million pounds of extra annual income. These prices are in the market today with only a small annualization benefit to come in 2023. Comparing to the left-hand chart, 22.5 million pounds of extra income is one million pounds more than the total annual inflationary bill that we expect providing some room for manoeuvre as inflation evolves. While selling price increases and cost inflation are therefore fairly well balanced in total, the bottom charts also show the lag we have seen between experiencing the cost inflation and passing it through. To expand on that, up until the end of 2021, our annual cost base had increased by £16.5 million, as you can see in the dark green. £7 billion of this had been offset by selling price increases, meaning that cost inflation had reduced our annual profit by just under £10 million up until that point. This is a big number, which reflects quite how unusually sharp and widespread the inflationary wave was. The good news is that the sales prices have now broadly caught up with inflation, as we said that they would. In 2022, we will have reversed the 10 million pound profit headwind and therefore insulated our gross profit from inflationary forces. This catch up in the recovery of input cost inflation has helped with our underlying profit progression in the period. It's difficult to say what happens next if aggregate inflation impacting us continues to reverse we are likely to see the same lag effects in reverse, i.e. with cost deflation leading selling price deflation, perhaps giving us a temporary profit boost in the future. Okay, finishing up on the numbers, slide 12 summarizes our working capital cashflow and debt performance. As you can see in the top left, supply delivery lead times in the first half were actually longer than they were on average in 2021. but not actually any worse than they were at the very end of last year. In fact, if anything, we have seen lead time shorten as 2022 has progressed. Port and container congestion is much less of a problem. We did keep inventory cover high in early 2022, but supply chain normalisation now gives us the opportunity to bring it down, and we are targeting a £10 million reduction in inventory over the second half. The chart in the bottom left shows our historic free cash flow generation by half. Cash generation is naturally weighted towards H2 in this business. So H1 is never really a high point. But H1 2022 was obviously not our best, to be honest, due to keeping imagery high. But this should turn around as we get into the second half. And our borrowing and debt leverage increased in the half. We did make fairly large tax and dividend payments against strong prior year earnings in the period. Plus, of course, we completed the acquisition of SyncEV. I have every confidence that net debt will reduce in H2 as imagery reduces and cash flows benefit from our improved gross margins. But overall, we have a healthy balance sheet with ample committed facility headroom and leverage in the middle of our targeted range of one to two times EBITDA. So we are prepared for any macro headwinds that may come our way. And with that, I'll hand you back to John to talk through our strategy, business review and outlook.

Thank you, Matt, very much. As Matt has said, we don't take a great deal of pleasure in the results of last year, but last year was an exceptional period. And we do need to keep our eye on the bigger picture. We continue to make excellent progress in many areas of the business, which I will explain now. And it is testament that this improvement has also come through in the financial performance against the period before the pandemic. We are confident that we have the right business model and the strategy to improve our performance once the macroeconomic environment becomes easier. Slide 15, looking at some of the longer term drivers of our markets and why they continue to grow faster than the overall market. Every two years, there are new wiring accessory regulations. And the regulatory change has driven more demanding products which have higher sales prices and is an ongoing upgrade of the systems in people's houses. Investment in new technology is an area where Additionally, we have been at the forefront of innovation. There's an example we give here of a plastic socket that we used to sell for about £1 and now a USB socket that we sell for about £8. As we sell a huge amount of sockets, this obviously makes a big difference. But year on year, our customers are expecting more sophisticated products with higher selling prices. And in overall investment in the housing stock, over the last 20 odd years, UK residential RMI spending has been north of 4%. There are over 4 million homes in the UK, which require significant further investment. We have an ageing housing stock, which means that ongoing investment will help our business. And finally, the climate emergency. Sync EV is an excellent acquisition for us. But it is just one area where electrification of transport and heating is going to drive more innovation in the home. And we as market leaders in residential electrical products are extremely well-placed to take advantage of this. On to slide 16. We have made, as we said, excellent progress against the period before the pandemic. We have consistently outgrown the market. We have grown by possibly 29% and the market has only grown by about 15%. We've won significant new business and we've also acquired some excellent new opportunities. I have spoken about the SyncEV acquisition and I'll speak more about it later, but we believe that over time, this should become a huge opportunity for us and a major driver of our growth. But we've also become a much more diversified business. As you can see from the percentages in the table in the top right hand side, our retail and consumer exposure has reduced and our exposure to the professional contractor channel has increased. This we have done through M&A, but we've also been targeting that within our business channels. We've also exited underperforming startup businesses in France and Germany. which has allowed us to deploy more capital and resources into those businesses of ours which are performing well. This has improved our overall operating margin considerably. On to slide 17. Some examples here of our customer focused innovation. We are constantly investing in our product range. We have always led the market in terms of innovation. And we are also now doing that in the businesses which we have acquired. So Kingfisher Lighting that we bought in 2017, we have invested a lot in the product range and the business this year has grown its turnover by approximately 40%. We will do the same with the DW Windsor business that we have acquired. And we are confident that that will prove to be a very successful acquisition for us. But our most exciting new category is EV charging, which we entered earlier this year. We have launched lots of new products and have a very strong pipeline of new launches for the rest of this year and into next year. So other areas of progress, we have invested a lot in the training, Lucy Academy, where we are trying to get our brands to be more accepted by the new generation of Christians who are coming through. We have invested a lot of time and resource in understanding our impact on the climate. We are now operationally carbon neutral and we have the lowest carbon in intensity in our sector as you can see from the graph in the top right hand side we have showing the science and based on targets initiative so there'll be much more about this in our future annual reports We've also been investing a lot in our employees. We have a 91% employee satisfaction in a recent survey, and we've invested a huge amount of time and effort in ongoing training of our workforce. I'll now just speak a little bit about the two acquisitions that we made in the period. So on slide 19, DW Windsor is a legacy lighting outdoor specialist that we acquired in October last year. It has a 14% market share of a 300 million pound market. It's highly complimentary with our Kingfisher business. We paid about seven times EBITDA for the business, which we felt was excellent value. The performance this year has been slightly weaker than we would hoped, mainly because of some of the longer term contracts have affected their gross margin. However, as we have been integrating the business with the group and making use of the group's resources and other manufacturing operations, we are confident that the business will have an excellent future. It's an extremely high quality legacy brand and has an excellent team within it. We have restructured the leadership, and as I say, along with integrating it into the group's overall sourcing structure. We believe that this business has significant long-term potential. So over to the next slide, SyncEV, a business that we acquired a 20% stake last August, and then we completed the 80% acquisition earlier on this year in March. It designs and manufactures EV charge points. And at the time that we purchased it had approximately a 2% market share of 150 million pound market, but a market which is growing extremely quickly, we believe up to 500 million by 2025. We paid approximately 10 million pounds for this business. Last year it had revenues of approximately 3 million and operating profit of approximately 10%. However, this year, we believe it will have sales of approximately 7 million, and we would hope to have sales in excess of 15 million next year. In August, we turned over 800,000. So as you can see, the business is growing extremely quickly and has been well integrated into the overall group. I'll now speak about the outlook, but on slide 23, I'll firstly look at some of the market trends that are affecting our business. Residential DIY, which is approximately 30% of the group, as we know, was extremely strong in the pandemic. There was a pull forward of demand as people working from home invested more in the housing stock. And this is the area which we are now seeing the most weakness. Housing transactions are beginning to fall and the Barclaycard consumer spend report that we look at is showing a significant reduction in spending versus six months ago. On the residential RMI side, through the professional channel, this is weakening, but it is still well ahead of 2019, but this may be an area where we see further weakness in future. However, on the non-residential side, the indicators are actually quite strong. The overall construction output before the pandemic is up more than 50%. And this is a sector of the market where we have an increasing presence. So the outlook for the rest of this year, as we have said, is in line with the market expectations. Trading in the second half so far has been also in line as we were expecting some slowdown in the DIY market. However, as I say, the professional activity has remained strong. Our gross margin will be significantly higher in the second half than it was in the first half. and an increasing contribution from the EV charger business which has a very high operating margin will mean the overall group performance is considerably ahead of 2019. We therefore expect our full year earnings to be in line with current market expectations. We believe that this shows that we have a strong business with significant long-term growth prospects. And the fact that we are performing weaker than an extraordinary performance last year does not mean that our long-term growth story is in any way impacted. And with that, I will hand over to any questions.